Jan Völker - Badiou and The German Tradition of Philosophy-Bloomsbury Academic (2019)

Badiou and the German
Tradition of Philosophy
Also available from Bloomsbury
Badiou and His Interlocutors, Alain Badiou, edited by A. J. Bartlett and
Justin Clemens
Badiou and Indifferent Being, William Watkin
Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory, Burhanuddin Baki
Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Christopher Norris
Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nick Hewlett

Badiou and the German
Tradition of Philosophy
Edited by
Jan Völker
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
List of Contributors vii
Introduction – The Transmission and Its Moment Jan Völker 1

1 Beyond Negative Dialectics Alain Badiou 9
2 Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject Rado Riha 19
3 Lack and Concept: On Hegelian Motives in Badiou Dominik Finkelde 35
4 Hegel’s Immanence of Truths Frank Ruda 51
5 The Torsion of Idealism Jan Völker 69
6 Marx, an ‘Antiphilosopher’? Or Badiou’s Philosophical Politics of
Demarcation Svenja Bromberg 89
7 The Question Concerning Technology: Badiou versus
Heidegger Justin Clemens 113
8 Can a Philosopher Have Dirty Hands? What Adorno Has to Say
about Badiou Alexander García Düttmann 131
9 Yes and No, Adorno or Badiou: The Negativity of the
Subject Christoph Menke 147
10 Badiou and Adorno on Philosophy and Music Jelica Sumic 171
11 Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in Adorno and Badiou Rok Benčin 197
Index 217
Acknowledgements
It all started with a conference, one of the classical constellations of a

philosophical moment, held at the Berlin University of the Arts in January
2016. This book itself forms another constellation of a different philosophical
moment, since it is by no means a mere collection of papers delivered at this
conference, each text having been fundamentally changed in the interim.
Further authors have also joined. Philosophy is marked by the span between
a discussion and a book, neither one being reducible to the other, a span that
unfolds a real time of philosophy itself.
I thank all the contributors for their patience, their strength and their
willingness to work on this project up to this intermediary result for what cannot
but be a debate to be continued. Special thanks go to Alain Badiou, our generous
interlocutor, who was supportive and encouraging from the moment of the first
vague plans onwards.
I also thank Bloomsbury, especially Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace, for
their willingness to publish this book and for their backing throughout the work.
The Institute of Art History, Art Theory and Aesthetics at the Berlin University
of the Arts also strongly supported the project, for which I am grateful. Finally,
I thank Steven Corcoran for his ever-reliable editorial assistance.
Contributors
Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, mathematician and political

activist. He is the author most notably of Theory of the Subject (2009), Being and
Event (2006), Being and Event II: Logics of Worlds (2009) and L’Immanence des
vérités (2018).
Rok Benčin is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre

of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). He is the author
of the book Monadless Windows: Aesthetics from Heidegger to Rancière (in
Slovenian, 2015) and several articles, including ‘Proustian Developments: The
World and Object of Photography’, SubStance, vol. 3 (2017).
Svenja Bromberg is Lecturer in social theory and Marxism in the Department

of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University London. Her publications include Euro
Trash (2016, ed. with Birthe Mühlhoff and Danilo Scholz) and several articles,
including ‘Badiou’s Recommencement of the Young-Hegelian Purification
of Politics: A Response to Ishay Landa’, International Critical Thought, vol. 4
(2014): 367–83.
Justin Clemens is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. His

recent publications include Badiou and His Interlocutors (2018) and What Is
Education? (2017), both co-edited with A. J. Bartlett.
Alexander García Düttmann teaches philosophy at the University of the

Arts (UdK) in Berlin. His latest publications focus on contemporary art and
the question of ideology (Was ist Gegenwartskunst? Zur politischen Ideologie,
2017) and on the origin of the work of art (Love machine: Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerks, 2018).
Dominik Finkelde SJ is professor of contemporary philosophy and epistemology

at the Munich School of Philosophy. He is the author of Excessive Subjectivity:
Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Foundations of Ethics (2017) and the editor of Badiou
and the State (2017).
Christoph Menke is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Goethe

Universität Frankfurt am Main. Book publications in English include The
viii Contributors
Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity after Adorno and Derrida (1998) and Law
and Violence: Christoph Menke in Dialogue (2018).
Rado Riha is a senior research fellow and currently head of the Institute of
Philosophy, Centre for Scientific Research at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts. His publications include The Second Copernican Turn in Kant’s
Philosophy (2012) and Kant in Lacanscher Absicht: Die kopernikanische Wende
und das Reale (forthcoming).
Frank Ruda is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Dundee,

Scotland. His recent publications include The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute
Knowing (with Rebecca Comay, 2018) and Reading Marx (with Slavoj Žižek and
Agon Hamza, 2018).
Jelica Sumic is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research

Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She has published a
number of philosophical works, including Eternity and Change: Philosophy in
the Worldless Times (2012). Currently she is working on a forthcoming volume
entitled Volonté et Désir.
Jan Völker is a research associate at the Institute of Fine Arts and Aesthetics
at the Berlin University of the Arts and visiting lecturer at the Institute of
Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Ljubljana and at
Bard College Berlin. Recent publications include (as editor) Alain Badiou and
Jean-Luc Nancy’s German Philosophy: A Dialogue (2018) and an international
issue of Filozofski vestnik, edited with Rado Riha and Jelica Sumic, ‘The Issue
with Kant’ (2015).
Introduction – The Transmission and
Its Moment
Jan Völker
Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy – the title is an indication of

a problem. We often speak of ‘German’ or ‘French’ philosophy as if we were
talking about something German or something French within philosophy.
What we are actually referring to are, of course, certain moments in the history
of philosophy, and if we unfold our understanding of ‘German’ or ‘French’
philosophy, we receive a list, a web of names. Not only will some disputes arise
about whether certain names belong to the canon or not, but the names will
also reveal themselves to be not only ‘German’ or ‘French’ but rather to traverse
national identities. The question of the canon is therefore a controversial matter,
and adding to it the question of tradition seems to only fuel the debate.
The word ‘tradition’ refers back to the Latin tradere, to pass on. Of course
there is a whole ‘tradition’ of complications linked to the concept of ‘tradition’,
but here I would like to emphasize one thing: something is being passed on in
philosophy; philosophy cannot exist if not something is being passed on. Let
us enumerate three different, though connected, problems that arise from this
point. First, it needs to be specified what it is that is being passed on. Then it is
necessary to establish how it is being passed on, and finally we have the question
of how it is received. One remarks immediately that to answer such questions
a philosophical understanding of philosophy is unavoidable. The apparent line
that seems to be indicated within the word ‘tradition’ is itself full of philosophical
presuppositions, so to debate a question of tradition in philosophy is itself a
philosophical problem.
First of all, it is an essential problem to philosophy to describe what it is about.
If there is something that is able to continue from one philosophy to another,
then this something will not be easy to grasp, perhaps it is not even describable
2 Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy
in terms of an object. The specific method, then, that might be used to transfer
something from an older philosophy into a current one can also only be dubious.
Does it not turn anything it grasps into a moment of the philosophy of which
it is a part itself? Thus, one might finally doubt whether not anything that is
allegedly being transferred actually reveals to be rather a new construction. One
might doubt, this is to say, whether a philosophy is actually able to continue
moments of other philosophies, or whether it does not rather rewrite them on
its own purpose.
‘Tradition’ is here to be understood as a title for these three closely interrelated
problems. It is a title that nevertheless is built on the hypothesis that a sort of
transmission is at work, and that it would be too easy to read any reference or
debate as being only a moment in a new construction. If the hypothesis is that
something is being transmitted, then the working question is to examine how
different forms of transmission work and how the result can be grasped in its
specificity. What are the objects of the transmission? What are the directions?
What is the temporality? What is the materiality of that which is transmitted?
Besides the problems of transmission, the notion of tradition implies a
second aspect, as it indicates that processes of transmission transgress the
individual level. There is a peculiar materiality of thought to be recognized here,
one connecting different philosophies by lines of continuation, contradiction,
junction. Badiou himself has described such a process of inscription in ‘French
philosophy’. In the introduction to his The Adventure of French Philosophy, he
speaks of the taking place of a ‘French philosophical moment’ in the ‘second half
of the twentieth century’,1 and he discerns four ‘intellectual operations common
to all [the] thinkers’2 of this moment.
The first move is a German one – or rather, a French move upon German
philosophers. All contemporary French philosophy is also, in reality, a
discussion of the German heritage. Its formative moments include Kojève’s
seminars on Hegel, attended by Lacan and also influential upon Lévi-Strauss,
and the discovery of phenomenology in the 1930s and 40s, through the works
of Husserl and Heidegger.3
There is a slight shift to be recognized in this quote: the German move is rather

a French move upon German philosophers. This slight shift entails a large part
1 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso,
2012), li.
2 Ibid., liv.
3 Ibid.
Introduction 3
of the problem that is classically referred to as a problem of influences and

reception. As aforementioned, this problem itself demands a philosophical
approach and divides itself into a series of serious philosophical questions. But
Badiou’s discussion of the ‘German move’ does indicate a further complication,
for the established context is situated on a conceptual level that surpasses
individual relations.
French philosophers went seeking something in Germany, then, through the

work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. What was it that they sought?
In a phrase: a new relation between concept and existence. Behind the many
names this search adopted – deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics – lies
a common goal: that of transforming, or displacing, this relation. The existential
transformation of thought, the relation of thought to its living subsoil, was
of compelling interest for French thinkers grappling with this central issue
of their own heritage. This, then, is the ‘German move’, the search for new
ways of handling the relation of concept to existence by recourse to German
philosophical traditions. In the process of its translation onto the battleground
of French philosophy, moreover, German philosophy was transformed into
something completely new. This first operation, then, is effectively a French
appropriation of German philosophy.4
If we take this as a starting point for this book – Badiou’s move upon ‘German
philosophy’ – then two different but interlinked problems arise: the question of
transmission – what is being transmitted, how it occurs and what it results in; and
the question that we might call that of the ‘moment’ – a question that implies a
notion of the actuality of philosophical constructions beyond individual works.
Now, turning to Badiou, neither aspect is fully evident on the first view.
At the level of textual evidence, something is clearly being passed on, but it
might be wondered how important the role of German philosophy in Badiou’s
works actually is. He has written texts and chapters on Kant and Hegel,5 has
given a seminar and written a small book on Heidegger,6 a chapter on Adorno,7
4 lbid., v.
5 Let’s refer only to some examples: the chapter on Kant (‘Kant’s Subtractive Ontology’) in Alain
Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 133–41; then the text on Hegel in Alain
Badiou, Joël Bellassen and Louis Mossot, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, trans.
Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: re.press, 2011).
6 A. Badiou and B. Cassin, Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy, intro. K. Reinhard, trans. S. Spitzer
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, L’être 3 –
Figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015).
Alain Badiou, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectics’. In Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Susan Spitzer (London/
7
New York: Verso, 2010), 27–54.
a small book on Wittgenstein8 and a seminar and texts on Nietzsche.9 While

the latter two are given the label ‘antiphilosophers’, on none of the rest do we
find any big studies of them as particular philosophers. Badiou’s works function
differently: on the one hand, Badiou pours a lot of labour into the seminars (a
steady stream of which have been published over the last few years), then, on
the other, the results, positions and highly condensed arguments of this labour
are implemented in the main works. It is clear that, in terms of a discussion of
the inscription of German philosophy into Badiou’s work, the immanence of the
references makes things still more complicated. Not only is a certain amount of
reconstruction necessary, but this reconstruction also runs the risk of establishing
fictitious relations, as if there were a real Kant or a real Hegel beyond Badiou’s
interpretations. But any Hegel, Kant, Heidegger or Adorno is both Badiou’s own
version and at the same time is irreducible to such a version. Hegel or Kant and
all the others are Badiou’s, but in turn they also retain something of their own in
Badiou. A specific materiality of these philosophies persists, and this materiality
is of course linked to the kernel of their thought.10
Incorporated philosophies change and remain the same, but they also get
actualized in this process. They might refer to something new to which they
haven’t referred before. This novelty is not simply a fictitious construction by
the incorporating philosophy, but rather a retroactive continuation of the true
Hegel or Kant. A duality of directions is involved in the process of transmission,
which brings us to the second aspect mentioned, that of the ‘moment’. If the first
starting point was the question of Badiou’s move upon ‘German philosophy’,
the inverse question is German philosophy’s move upon ‘Badiou’. This has to
be considered in a broad sense, as it is at this junction of both moves that an
actuality of philosophy takes shape. To establish the to-and-fro between Badiou’s
philosophy and German philosophy as an actuality of philosophy – such is the
aim to which the texts in this book contribute.
The different contributions in this book tackle Badiou’s relations to Kant and
Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and finally Adorno. They do not cover the full range of
Badiou’s relations to German philosophy, nor do all the texts in this book claim to
be an exhaustive examination of these particular relations. The book can only be
8 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso, 2011).

9 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Nietzsche. L’ Antiphilosophie I (Paris: Fayard, 2015); and Alain Badiou,
‘Who Is Nietzsche’, Pli, vol. 11 (2001): 1–11.
10 On the question of Badiou’s relation to German philosophy, see also the discussion between Badiou
and Jean-Luc Nancy that took place during the same conference that provided the occasion for
this book. Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, German Philosophy: A Dialogue, ed. Jan Völker
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
Introduction 5
a starting point for the continuation of the discussion of philosophical junctions,

continuations and rejections in Badiou’s works and their relation to the German
and other philosophical traditions. All the particular philosophical names that
appear in this book actually open the demand for a further examination of
their role and their topicality in Badiou’s oeuvre: there is still more that needs
to be said on Kant and Hegel in Badiou in a variety of aspects; Heidegger’s role
is important and has been underestimated, as Justin Clemens remarks in his
contribution. Marx opens the vast problem of the brink between philosophy
and antiphilosophy as well as between philosophy and politics, and Adorno is a
difficult case in his surprising proximity and blunt contrast.
However, the actual beginning begins with Badiou’s own account of
his relationship with German philosophy. He unfolds it in the form of an
autobiographical narrative: starting with his early appreciation of Sartre and
Husserl, he continues with his reading of Heidegger against Kant and finally
of Cantor against Heidegger. The complete path of these relations is crossed by
his uninterrupted work on Plato and is also punctuated by the development of
specific concepts in the domains of science, art, love and politics. In a nutshell,
this text proposes a very personal elaboration of the reality of philosophical
thought; it unfolds how a life is structured by establishing the consequences
of encounters with philosophical works. That the encounters in this case are
encounters with philosophies makes for a very special case of the question of
consequences, for we are not dealing with events in the precise sense.
A key question that arises here, then, concerns precisely the relation between
encounters with philosophical thoughts and the development of concepts in the
four realms of science, politics, art and love. Badiou presents a constellation in
which the eventual structures are juxtaposed by the differences of the particular
encounters and the continuity in the work on Plato. A different notion of the
autobiographical account becomes necessary here: while concepts – think
of political concepts, for e xample – are created in relation to a real (political)
situation (which then also might be understood as unfolding its truth through
different epochs), the examination of philosophical thought and its abilities to
transmit moments of the real from one condition to the other is ongoing. This
examination itself is split into moments of difference: lines of conflict, on the one
hand, and lines of continuity, on the other. It is possible to live in the orientation
by ideas, although this does not prescribe the idea to the individual life.
The relation of the notion of the idea to the differences of real developments,
this persisting structure found one of its peaks in modern philosophy in
German Idealism, so it is hardly surprising that, after Plato and Descartes,
Hegel plays a crucial role in Badiou’s oeuvre. But Kant is there, too, although
the first thinker of German Idealism remains an ambivalent figure in Badiou’s
work. Often rejected as a thinker of the finite, Badiou nevertheless constantly
refers to him throughout his work. Kant is the focus in Rado Riha’s contribution,
which follows Badiou’s text. Riha’s article develops an implicit figure of Badiou
in Kant, as it can be found when the question of the subject in Kant is read in the
light of Badiou. Riha examines each of the three critiques to outline what might
be called a Badiouan notion of the Kantian subject. This subject is one that is
created in a phenomenal world in which something is constitutively present as
lacking, the thing-in-itself or the real, and which is finally constructed in Kant’s
third critique on the Power of Judgment.
Afterwards, Dominik Finkelde turns the focus to Hegel, who – in contrast
with Kant – is treated with more sympathy in Badiou’s works, but nevertheless
also rejected as a thinker of the One. In his contribution, Finkelde argues that
Hegel might, however, be closer to Badiou than Badiou is willing to admit.
Finkelde follows the structure of the excess in which both Hegel and Badiou
find the chance for universality to appear. A concrete figure of the possibility of a
new subject to arise is then given in the example of Jesus of Nazareth, by cutting
across the theories of Hegel, Badiou and Lacan.
Frank Ruda then develops the immanence of Hegel to Badiou: after Badiou’s
intervention into the history of philosophy, it becomes possible to reread Hegel
anew and differently. We find the description of the encounter of an event in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, namely as the complete subtraction of all that is,
which leads to the impossible form of absolute knowing. Hegel’s Logic can then
be understood as unfolding the practical consequences of the affirmation of an
event, as creating the form of a new subject that previously seemed impossible.
My own contribution then creates a relation between the beginning of
philosophy in Badiou’s work and the conception of the beginning of philosophy
in Kant and Hegel. The figure of the beginning poses the twofold problem of a
distinction between philosophy and something that is not philosophy, on the one
hand, and a temporal distinction that allows to think a time before philosophy,
on the other. While Kant and Hegel dissimulate the necessary moment of
intervention that characterizes the beginning of philosophy, Badiou reiterates
and emphasizes this beginning by turning it into an act and by situating this act
prior to the possibility of ontology.
Leaving German Idealism, we turn to one of its harshest critics, Marx,
who famously called for philosophy to be overcome in favour of real political
movement. Svenja Bromberg’s contribution analyses whether Badiou’s category
Introduction 7
of antiphilosophy – as a specific philosophical strategy – can be applied to

Marx. Developing the ambivalent position of Marx in Badiou, Bromberg
argues that Marx conceives of philosophy as critique; while he is not afraid of
losing philosophy altogether, neither does he aim at its destruction. Combining
philosophy and politics, Marx finally presents us with a different notion of
philosophy, one that reveals a limit-point within Badiou’s philosophy.
On a completely different terrain, namely in the relation to Heidegger, such
a limit-point is then argued for in Justin Clemens’s paper. Heidegger appears
fairly absent from much of Badiou’s work, but, Clemens argues, he nonetheless
needs to be understood as one of the most essential philosophers for Badiou, at
least from Being and Event on. Badiou’s later work is fundamentally polarized
by Heidegger’s philosophy: he takes up the question of ontology, but situates it
as external to philosophy; he then proposes an understanding of mathematics
that is completely different from Heidegger’s. At the same time, Badiou remains
rather silent on the question of technology, although it is omnipresent in the
current reception and uses of Heidegger’s philosophy.
The volume then continues with an examination of the last large major
division, namely the relation between Badiou and Adorno. The chapters in
this last part show that there is by far more to say on this relation than seemed
possible at first sight, especially given that Badiou’s main debate with Adorno
is to be found in a single chapter of his book on Wagner. But in contrast with
Heidegger, the rejection of Adorno seems unambiguous, such that certain
proximities come as a surprise.
The first text on the relation to Adorno is Alexander García Düttmann’s
contribution, in which he explores the question of whether a philosopher can
or must have ‘bloody hands’. Starting from Sartre’s play and continuing via
Heidegger, Düttmann then opposes Badiou’s theory of points and Adorno’s
critique of decision making. While in Badiou the question of truth orients the
necessity of a decision to take on a point of inexistence in the phenomenal world,
for Adorno, then, thought itself reveals to be an always problematic practice, an
ambiguous form of practice, an undecidable point of mediation that exceeds the
duality of a choice.
While the problem of the ‘bloody hands’ indicates the difficulty of praxis
in thought, the theoretical problem of negation is discussed as a moment of
dialectics in Christoph Menke’s contribution. Menke starts from the notion
of freedom and the question of its relation to negativity and affirmation.
Comparing Badiou’s and Adorno’s discussion of Hegel, he aligns both on
their critique of Hegel’s account of the subject’s self-determination. But going
beyond self-determination, Badiou insists on the necessity of affirmation,

while for Adorno affirmation is not possible without a relation to negativity.
This difference leads finally to a distinction of the different types of intervention
the subject is ascribed to in Badiou and Adorno, allowing Badiou to bypass the
notion of freedom, which, he concedes, is linked to negativity.
The last two texts then focus on the question of aesthetics. First, Jelica Sumic’s
contribution addresses the topic of music in Adorno and Badiou, framing it in
the general relation of music and philosophy. While Adorno takes music to
be a sibling of philosophy, for Badiou art forms are one of the conditions of
philosophy. But music marks a fairly peculiar point in Badiou’s work, as Sumic
argues through examining the role of Schoenberg and Wagner in Badiou. Wagner,
especially, is transcribed into a philosophical name for music, an opening for
a future of music as a condition of philosophy. This retroactive gesture, as an
intervention into existing music, contrasts with Adorno’s intervention for une
musique informelle, which also seeks to create a place for music in philosophy.
Finally, Rok Benčin focuses on aspects of artistic truth in Badiou and Adorno.
Both philosophers insist on the necessity of form as a condition for truth to
arise within art, as form has the capacity to be transformed. While, in Adorno,
the violent relation of form to its material conditions the artistic truth, Badiou’s
focus is on the productive aspect of the process of form. Benčin then argues that
it is possible to describe a self-affection of form in both philosophies, and he
brings in a Freudian couple of concepts to define a moment of melancholia in
Adorno’s forms of art and a moment of mania in Badiou’s forms of art.
At this point, our debate finds its preliminary end, but has hopefully already
sparked several forms of continuation.
1
Beyond Negative Dialectics

Alain Badiou
My goal today is to inscribe some German references – Heidegger, Adorno

and some others – through a long detour, which is the long detour of my
personal relationship not only to Heidegger and Adorno, not only to Kant,
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche or Husserl, but to the German world as an intellectual,
scientific, artistic, political and philosophical world. So we will have some
names, Heidegger, Adorno and others, and the conceptual framework will be
dialectics. Dialectics as the name for Germany. Maybe, more precisely, it will be
the difficult question of the dialecticité of dialectics, that is, of the contradiction
in any dialectical process between affirmation and negation, the question of the
exact relationship between the two.
In my book Logics of Worlds, I call my philosophy a materialist dialectics. I do
not speak of a dialectical materialism but of a materialist dialectics, which means
that dialectics is the more important word of the two. A materialist I am, because
I affirm that what exists is composed of bodies and languages and of nothing
else. A dialectician I am, too, because we must add: all that exists is composed of
bodies and languages – except that some truths also exist.
These technical questions lie in a very complex context. As a symptom we
can observe that in my work Adorno is a reference and is criticized only in
relationship to Wagner. And it is so the musical dimension of Germany which
is here a piece of my philosophical argumentation. In my words, in my jargon,
in my not-Heideggerian jargon, we could say that finally I read Adorno inside
the action of the artistic condition of philosophy. There is no big difference
between the critics of Adorno in my book Wagner’s Case and, for example, the
use of Schoenberg, Berg or Webern in a strategic passage of Logics of Worlds: the
scholium titled a ‘Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject’. It is true that
in this scholium Germany is really a canonical example. I quote: ‘Let us choose
as a world German music’, that is, at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth. So you see, Adorno himself inscribed German music
as a world.
At a more general level, my whole 1992 seminar devoted to Nietzsche
ultimately concerns artistic creation as a condition of philosophy. This seminar
is a commentary of Nietzschean texts of 1888, I quote: ‘Art! Nothing else! Only
art creates the possibility of life. Art is the only antagonistic strength against all
forms of negation of life.’ I know that negativity is not at all the important point
for Nietzsche. Negativity is on the side of life’s negation. For Nietzsche the point
is the affirmative strength of art over and against the negation of life. This will
be the first point of our discussion of today concerning affirmative and negative
dialectics.
To say something which seems paradoxical: the history of philosophy and
all the magnificent texts of our philosophical tradition, and especially of the
German philosophical tradition, all that, is not in themselves a condition for
philosophy, because philosophy is an act and not only and not in the first place a
text. The idea that the history of philosophy, for example, the German succession
Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, is by itself a condition for philosophy
is in fact the reduction of philosophy to its pure existence, to what Lacan names
the discourse of the university. And, from the beginning, the discourse of the
university has always been a terrible enemy of living philosophy. So we must
examine not only the evident effects of some great German philosophers on
some other philosophers – maybe on some French philosophers – for instance,
the couples Leibniz/Deleuze, Husserl/Sartre, Nietzsche/Foucault, Heidegger/
Derrida, Marx/Althusser, Hegel/Lacan and so on, all of which are magnificent
French–German couples. But we must determine in what sort of context, in
what complex of real conditions for philosophy, this sort of relationship between
philosophers is really an active one.
That is why I shall begin today by saying that my relationship with Nietzsche
became active in the end only in the context of German music, of German music
as a world, and also of the German language as a poetical place. That is why my
lecture will be autobiographical in nature. It will be something like a novel about
a part of my life. In what sort of real circumstances, and by the mediation of what
conditions of philosophy, have I met German philosophy at the very source?
That is the question. My first access to German philosophy took place via Sartre,
very long ago, alas, when I was seventeen years old. The true victor, the true
successful winner of my passionate reading of Being and Nothingness – Sartre’s big
book – in 1954/55 was most certainly neither Heidegger nor Hegel, but Husserl.
Beyond Negative Dialectics 11
And the question is finally why a young man like me in 1954, reading Being
and Nothingness chose Husserl. As Sartre speaks at length about Heidegger, and
about Hegel, why do I choose Husserl, who is not a very exciting figure, one that
is, like most of the German thinkers, simultaneously long, difficult and obscure.
This is the real question of the introduction of my thinking in German territory.
And the explanation is: because Sartre for me was not only a philosopher, he
was part of a very precise context: the end of the Vietnam war, the total defeat
of French colonial troops in Vietnam and the beginning of the Algerian war.
The potency of the communist party was also a very important determination
in my situation in France. In this context, Sartre for me represented the way of
freedom. He was absolutely opposed to the colonial wars – so, in my eyes, on the
side of the good negativity – he was close to the French communist party and
so on the side of revolt against the state, but he was not inside the party. He was
thus, for me, also on the side of the good affirmative position, dialectically linked
to negativity and in some sense very conscious. All that fixed my orientation in
my reading of Sartre. The central concept was conscience, consciousness, in the
real form, in the Husserlian form of intentionality. Intentionality represents an
immediate relationship to being as such, inside a form of ontological realism,
but this realism is an active operation. Intentionality is not only an immediate
link to being as such in the form of experience, but intentionality is also the gift
of the meaning of the pure indifference of being. It is the gift of a signification.
So, finally, in my reading of Sartre, I found a general ontological context,
indifferent to human existence, absurde, says Sartre, and an intentional relation
to this indifference, which is the possible construction of a world. Here we have
a sort of a paradoxical relationship between donation, the gift of a meaning –
an active operation – and, on the other side, a complete stupidity of being.
The relationship between the gift of the meaning and this stupidity was very
appealing to me. At another level, Hegel represented the Sartrean theory of
the other. Sartre describes the pessimistic movement of the subject, between
masochism and sadism, for him the two only possibilities of the relationship to
others – at least for the Sartre of that time. Either I am a pure, passive thing for
the other or the other is a passive thing for me. You find this vision underlying
the famous conclusion of the play Huis clos (No Exit): ‘L’ enfer, c’est les autres.’
(Hell is other people.) Sartre’s conclusion is a pessimistic one concerning the
dialectics between a subject and others. But this terrible affirmation was finally
only a dark and romantic translation of the famous Hegelian master–slave
dialectic. Hegel explains why the first encounter, the first meeting between two
consciousnesses, takes the form of an absolute fight. The master is defined by the
fact that he or she does not fear the risk of death, while the slave does. But after
that Hegel explains that the slave, who works, and creates, becomes the master
of the master – is the new kingdom of culture. Husserl represented for me the
idea of a free relationship to the indifference of being. The free gift of a meaning
against the massive stupidity of being, the Hegelian dialectics of the other was
the drama of the dissymmetry of power. All that composed finally with the
mixture, the German mixture of Hegel and Husserl, a very romantic vision. The
proposition of a life as a tragic theatre. And a political one with the drama of the
Algerian war, and also an amorous one with the ontological impossibility of pure
reciprocity between two subjects.
All that represented the tragedy of existence and I began my life as teenager in
this context. I saw myself as a dramatic character of life, as playing the dangerous
fight against the colonial war, engaging in impossible loves, in the stupidity of
being . . . all that under the sensual potency of Wagnerian music. In fact, all that
was really my German part. The beginning of my life was under the signifier
of the German part. To complete this part, I read Thomas Mann, Musil, and
Hermann Broch night and day. I progressively became something like a French-
German young man. But my German romantic part did not reign over the totality
of the young Badiou. This domination of my spirit by Germany lasted many
years – but never reigned completely. First, in those same years, I had to prepare
to take the very difficult exam to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure; I was, for
instance, obliged to learn ancient Greek. Certainly, as a sort of a French-German
individual, I was prepared for a magnificent revelation. The Greek revelation
through the revelation of the German word. Being sort of German, I was able to
think that I was also sort of Greek. The reading of Heidegger was the horizon of
this spectacular metamorphosis of a provincial Frenchman into a Greek person,
in the modern form of a German. Once more, theatre was the most intense
mediation (and not directly Heidegger) thanks to my reading of Aeschylus and
Sophocles. And, as a synthesis, I discovered the frenetic use of Greek theatre
in German music, notably with the parodist opera of Richard Strauss, Elektra,
which was a passion of my young days. Elektra was for me a good mixture: Greek
tragedy, post-Wagnerian music, a Germanistic vision, the Sartrean impossibility
of reciprocity, solitude in the construction of meaning and ontological stupidity
of all that, reflected by the violent and sometimes very vulgar music of Strauss.
But beyond this romantic feeling I also started my reading of Plato. From
1956 to today, I have read Plato uninterruptedly. And this reading has been
something essential, naturally, but it was also something secret, for quite a while.
It was something indifferent to the other components of my singularity. For a
long time, Plato has been a sort of secret (bad) part of my existence. Plato was
something like my immanent exception. And probably the profound origin of this
long reading of Plato has created a most important conviction of mine: universal
truths exist. Certainly, being is indifferent. Politics is often a desperate resistance.
The others are obscure. Freedom is without any rule. History is a tale told by
an idiot. And the sensual nihilism of Wagner is the only musical pleasure. And
theatre is the law of the world. All that was certainly the final description of my
romanticism – but here Plato was like a sort of super-ego for me, which is to
say: we can have access to something universal. And behind Plato I discovered
the magic existence of mathematics. During the last part of the fifties, between
1955 and 1960, I constructed the third part of myself. At a purely scientific level,
I introduced myself into the labyrinth of set theory, of mathematical logics,
of the fundamental concepts of topology and of the clear and very beautiful
structure of modern algebra. This was also a French–German journey. Riemann
and Galois, Cantor and Bourbaki, Emmy Noether and Lebesgue, Hilbert and
Poincaré . . . It is possible that mathematics, more so than philosophy, has been a
French–German paradise for the last two centuries. And through the mediation
of mathematics I entered the structuralism of the 1960s. Finally, it is another
example of my access to philosophy not directly, but by its conditions. Music,
theatre, love – in romanticism – and now science. I discovered Lévi-Strauss,
Althusser, Lacan, but in some sense also Bourdieu and even Marx, under the law
of pure mathematics.
As you see, at the beginning of the glorious sixties I was not at all unified;
I was made of four different pieces. First, a romantic interpretation of German
phenomenology. Second, a mathematical interpretation of French structuralism.
Third, a Marxist engagement into the political fight against colonial worlds.
And fourth, Plato, as a super-ego, as a guarantee for the existence of universal
truths. I can declare before you, for the first time – this is a confession – that my
philosophical work has been to construct a conceptual place for my unification.
At the level of the thinking of being, at the ontological level, I propose a very
German story. First, in some sense – we discussed it yesterday with Jean-Luc
Nancy – first Heidegger against Kant. Let’s say: Heidegger, as I understand
Heidegger against Kant, as I understand Kant. Heidegger against Kant in the
sense that we can construct a thinking of being as such and that there is no limit
in this direction. To have access to this thinking we must, against all religious
forms, separate being and the one. And this double separation, of being from
the one and then of the infinite from the one, represents for me very important
steps. In the big book on Nietzsche, Heidegger is very clear about the necessity
to free the thinking of being from the dictatorship of the one. First, Heidegger
against Kant. My second separation concerns Cantor against Heidegger. This is
a German story: a story of Cantor against Heidegger written by a Frenchman.
This is the question of being as a complete and clear answer in mathematics.
Mathematics as the science of all possible forms of multiplicity. I agree with
Heidegger in saying that we must free being from the form of the one.
First, I affirm that the true form of being is pure multiplicity and, against
Heidegger, that the science of being as such is of a mathematical nature. So, in
the end I came up with this sentence: ontology is mathematics.
Second, at the level of existence, of singularity, I maintain that for a multiplicity
to exist means only to be localized in a world. Existence is being-there. Existence
is Sein as Dasein. Heidegger once more, but reduced to topology. Localization
of all forms of multiplicities is precisely the form of existence of the multiplicity,
the Dasein beyond the pure Sein.
Third, at the level of truths I propose to say that the truth is the process inside
a definite world of an immanent exception. That is, under the condition of a local
rupture of the laws of the world – which I name an event – a truth is a process of
construction of a multiplicity, which is not determined inside the world by the
law of this world. A truth is a generic multiplicity – which is also a mathematical
name, one proposed by Paul Cohen. A generic multiplicity is a multiplicity that
cannot be thought from the unique point of view of its particular situation. It
is a multiplicity that is in some sense inside a definite world, but in another
sense cannot be thought or reduced to the laws of this particular world. So, a
truth is a universal, immanent exception to its particular context. It is a synthesis
between the necessity to observe the construction of a truth in a world – a truth
is not something in another world or in the sky or in the paradise. A truth is a
construction in a world, but this construction as a universal exception inside the
world cannot be reduced to its context and can have a value in another context
or in a completely different world.
Four, at the level of the general laws of the process of a truth, of a subjective
creation, I must fight against Adorno. Why? I agree with Adorno – and it has been
explained with great clarity before me – when he says that dialectics, Hegelian
dialectics, for example, must escape the risk of totalization. True dialectical
thinking cannot be imprisoned in a figure of totality or of absolute and final
knowledge. But dialectics for me is always affirmative dialectics and not at all
negative dialectics. I must explain why. The question for me is that the beginning
of a truth, that is the beginning of the productive subjectivity, always occurs in
the form of an event. At the beginning of a universality, of a truth, something like
a local rupture occurs with the laws of the world. Without this rupture, nothing
can be created which can be an immanent exception. We have a deterministic
vision of the world. So we must have an event. I will not insist here on the details
of the theory of the event, but we can say that an event is always something that
happens, something that is not in the situation, but that happens to the situation
and something that precisely is not reducible to, or calculable by, the laws of the
situation itself. That is the condition of possibility of the new process of a truth,
the condition of the possibility of something new. But, naturally, an event will
be a condition of something new, if there are some effects of the event inside
the situation. The event as such is not the creation of a new reality. The event as
such is only the creation of a new possibility inside the world. This point is really
very important. We have with an event, the creation, the apparition, somewhere
in the world, of a new possibility and the consequences of the event inside the
situation come to constitute the process of a truth.
This is what I call a truth procedure. So, the beginning of subjectivation, that
is the beginning of the transformation of individuals in general into subjects,
consists in saying ‘yes’ to the event. That is the point. The first gesture for a truth
is to say ‘yes’, not to say ‘no’. In fact, this is something everyone knows because
everyone has had some experience of love. And in love the event is a very small
and clear thing. You meet somebody somewhere in the world. You know very
well that the decisive moment of the transformation of this pure meeting into
love is the moment when somebody says ‘yes’, in the classical form of ‘I love
you’. What is ‘I love you’? ‘I love you’ is only a way of saying ‘yes’. You cannot
begin a love by saying ‘no’. You will have many occasions to say ‘no’ afterwards.
Negativity comes afterwards, alas. To be faithful, faithful in an ontological
sense, is not a simple question of sexuality. To be faithful to love means to have
the possibility to repeat the fundamental ‘yes’ that is at the beginning, and the
difficulty, as Nietzsche says, is to fight against negation. It is the same in all forms
of universal truths. The difficulty always lies in the fight against negation, not in
the fight against affirmation. It is much more difficult truly to say ‘yes’ than to say
‘no’. The experience of love is a matrix on this point, as everyone is able to have
this sort of experience. In love, the difficulty always bears on repeating the ‘yes’,
and on being suspicious as regards all forms of negativity. We can have some
different forms of ‘yes’ in the same direction in science or in artistic creation.
For example, artistic creation is always to say ‘yes’ to a new displacement of the
limit between what is informal and form. It always consists in accepting the
new form. It is a way to say yes to the new form. That is the potency of art. Art
is by no means a negative action; it is an action where you must say ‘yes’. And
we know perfectly that conservative, academic visions always say ‘no’ or ‘that is
not art’ or ‘that is non-art’ . . . The same goes for politics. When you simply say
‘no’, you do not do anything. It explains why the idea of resistance is such a weak
vision of politics. Because the true determination of a political gesture is that
after the negation comes a fundamental ‘yes’ to a new vision of the collectivity, a
new vision of the relationship between men. In the field of affirmative dialectics,
a truth is a positive immanent exception and the negative part of its dialectical
nature is reduced to what I can name a subtraction. The truth is an affirmative
creation, not reducible to the laws of its situation. It is not a negation of the laws
of its situation; it is the impossibility to reduce the truth process to the laws of the
situation and that is why I name that form of a negative existence a subtraction.
The truth, finally, the very essence of a truth, is to affirm the possibility of a
positive existence inside a subtraction to the common laws. It can be a new
love, the discovery of a very strange mathematical structure, the invention of a
completely new form of political organization, the strong displacement in arts of
admitted limits between form and inform.
With all that I can assume today, to be French, German and Greek. I can
propose to the Germans a new Plato’s Republic in French, one directly coming
from the Greek language. This is a new alliance, a new figure. Generally, to have
access to Greece, we must take the mediation of German. I have written a book,
the Republic, and it is very difficult to say who is its real author. Perhaps Plato is,
perhaps I am, perhaps someone else is, I don’t know. But this book is a French
creation of a Greek nature that has been translated into German. And that is a
victory of the new form of relationship between Germany and France, under the
law, the final common law of a Greek universe.
I can also, in this new context, like Socrates, try to corrupt the youth. As you
know it has been the most important accusation against Socrates, the corruption
of the youth. To measure up to Socrates we must corrupt the youth as much as
possible. What does it mean to say ‘corrupt the youth’ from a philosophical point
of view, a simultaneously French, German and Greek one? We must say that in
English, there are not many attempts to corrupt the youth. It is paradoxical to
formulate that in English. Maybe it is a corruption of the corruption. To corrupt
the youth is to say – this is not of a directly philosophical nature – ‘With your
experience, your new experiences of love, art, science, politics, go to the true
life. Search in your situation, which is not always my situation, seek the way, be
attentive to the event, to small events. Accept to say “yes”. And you shall open an
access to the true life.’ To corrupt the youth is to become a part of an immanent
exception. The judges of Socrates were absolutely of the same opinion, because
for them Socrates was somebody who said to the youth something like: ‘The
old formulation, the old laws, maybe the old Gods, examine them, maybe you
must say “yes” to something else, to something different.’ We can also say to the
youth: do not worry too much about laws, necessities, the market, good places,
money and so on. Set up your life under the universal power of some new truths.
When you are in the process of a truth, you have, in some sense, access to all the
possible worlds, because of the universality of the truth. And your particular
world is reduced to nothing really important, because you become an inhabitant
of the world, the total world, every country, every world, now and in the future.
Sometimes, with a new ‘yes’, you really do become a citizen of the world. A very
strong and profound love is something everybody understands in the world, and
when we are really in the profound love, we become a citizen of the world. It is
the same thing if you create a picture, a new movie, if you enter in the labyrinth
of mathematics.
There is a sentence of Samuel Beckett, in the small book on love, the title of
which is Enough. Samuel Beckett writes something like that: ‘Love is when we
can say that we have the sky, and that the sky has nothing.’ So, my last sentence
will be: take the sky! If you are faithful to your project, the sky will be without
any possibility to act against you. Thank you.
2
Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject

Rado Riha
Kant is certainly not one of Badiou’s key philosophers, in the manner of Plato,
Descartes or Hegel, that is, those philosophers whose problematics he would,
directly or indirectly, affirmatively or critically, appropriate, rephrase and further
develop in his own philosophy. At the same time, Kant does not represent one
more or less obligatory yet less crucial scholarly reference. For the most part, one
could say, Kant is in fact the object of an independent and quite detailed critical
analysis.1 The aim of this essay, however, is not to present in detail Badiou’s
rather complex, tense and sometimes quite ambiguous relation to Kant. Besides,
this relation has already been quite exhaustively presented elsewhere.2 What
I propose to do instead is to extract and elaborate in some detail a figure of Kant’s
philosophy, such as can be viewed precisely from the perspective of Badiou’s
rather singular reception of Kant, despite the fact that Badiou himself never took
on such an endeavour. In his fascinating book Kant et la fin de la métaphysique,
Gérard Lebrun advances a thought-provoking thesis according to which Kant,
or, to be even more precise, his Critique of the Power of Judgement, ‘teaches us to
think differently’.3 In the context of the present essay, his claim can be rephrased
as follows: Badiou’s reading of Kant presents and ‘teaches us to think’ a different
Kant than the one that Badiou’s rather critical comments present. In this respect,
it could be said that this figure of a different Kant is closer to Badiou than he is
willing to admit.
It is this figure of a different Kant – which is to be extracted from Badiou’s
various readings and comments on Kant – that I propose to present in more
1 Here I can only note Badiou’s seminar in 1983–4: L’Un. Descartes, Platon, Kant (Paris: Fayard, 2016).
2 See, e.g., the ‘Kant’ entry by Christopher Norris in The Badiou Dictionary, ed. Steven Corcoran
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
3 Gérard Lebrun, Kant et la fin de la Métaphysique: essai sur la critique de la faculté de juger
(Paris: Armand Colin, 1970), 13.
detail below. In particular, I will attempt to expound on it in the context of the

Kantian concept of the subject. I will therefore draw on, inter alia, Badiou’s
seminar on Kant from 1984, already mentioned above, the chapter titled ‘Kant’s
Subtractive Ontology’ in A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology4 and, finally, on
one of Badiou’s early texts Can Politics Be Thought?5
I have taken as a point of departure three remarks by Badiou that refer to the
status of the subject in Kant’s philosophy. We can find the first relevant remark
in Badiou’s early booklet Can Politics Be Thought? The other two are from the
above-mentioned seminar on Kant from 1984. Let me quote the first remark:
An evacuation of the thing-in-itself in fact equals a dissolution of the subjective

constitution of experience, and not, as Hegel believed, its passage to the
limit. This is because experience is the Subject only by virtue of being linked
(topologically) to a real [un réel] which it lacks.6
Two reasons have determined the choice of this quotation as my point of

departure. The first reason is that in this passage Badiou establishes a link
between the notion of the subject and the moment of the real. The second,
on the other hand, is that in these two short sentences Badiou succeeds in
succinctly presenting the kernel of Kant’s philosophical project, that is to say
Kant’s controversial ‘ontological difference’ between appearance and the thing-
in-itself, that is, between phenomenon and noumenon.
In order to unravel this kernel it should be noted that, according to Kant, the
only objective reality to which the human being as a finite rational being has
access is phenomenal reality, the reality of appearances, a reality constituted by
means of the joined activity of the two powers of cognition: understanding and
sensibility. And yet Kant stubbornly insists that our phenomenal world is not the
world as it is in itself. True, the constituted phenomenal world is the only world
we have and, as such, it is all we have, but it is never all there is since it always
already contains something that does not belong to it, or better still, it is always
already supplemented by something that is not-constituted, das Ding an sich, the
thing-in-itself, which I propose to call the instance of the real. Put differently,
the excess of the present absence of the thing-in-itself is inseparable from the
phenomenal world.
4 Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans., ed. and
introduction by Norman Madarasz (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006; hereinafter
Briefings).
Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985; hereinafter Politique).
5
6 Ibid., 80 (my translation).

Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject 21
So we have to be quite precise about this point: our phenomenal world is not

only marked by a negative reference to the absent World. It is also marked by
this negative reference in its affirmative form. In other words, it is marked by
the present absence of the thing-in-itself. It is the present absence of the World-
in-itself that confers consistency on the phenomenal world. In this way, it also
ensures that our world is not merely, to borrow Kant’s words, ‘a blind play of
representations, i.e., less than a dream’,7 but something that exists independently
of cognition.
Badiou’s remaining two remarks concerning Kant are more concise. The
first reads:
Kant presents us with a genuine doctrine of the real.
And the second:
With respect to the subject, the transcendental subject is a point of the real.8
The real referred to in these two remarks is to be taken in the sense elaborated
by Lacanian psychoanalysis. To put it succinctly, the real is what belongs to the
symbolic as that which remains external to it, more precisely, as a moment of
externality within the symbolic itself.
Taking a cue from these two quotations from Badiou, I can announce more
precisely the aim of the present essay. It could be rephrased in terms of the
following question: which figure of the subject is suitable for an understanding
of the phenomenal world in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, an understanding
of a world in which something that does not belong to it, since it is absent from
it, but is nevertheless present in it, namely, the thing-in-itself or the real? Or,
better phrased, perhaps: which figure of the subject, in Kant’s philosophy, befits
the connectedness between the subject and the point of the real? And to the
extent that Kant is, as is well known, a thinker of the system, this question must
therefore be tackled from the perspective of the systematicity of Kant’s three
Critiques. To be sure, setting out from systematicity in Kant’s philosophy, the
figure of the subject can only be brought into play retroactively, that is, from the
point of view of the closed, finalized system, which is to say, from the point of
view of the third Critique. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the Critique
of Judgement stands for the point of the system’s closure simply because Kant
7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 112, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; hereinafter CpR).
8 Badiou, L’Un. Descartes, Platon, Kant, 184, 185.
did not write another, say, ‘Fourth Critique’. It is the final Critique because Kant
himself claimed that in it his critical project was completed. This claim could
therefore be read as stating that his critical philosophy approached as near as
possible to the idea of the system.
It should be noted, however, that the retroactive construction of the figure
of the subject does not imply that a kind of a germinal form of the figure of
the subject of Kant’s philosophy can already be found in the first Critique. The
retroactive reading of the subject only signifies that the closure of the system
allows us to see and to grasp that question of the subject to which each figure
of the subject elaborated in Kant’s three Critiques provides an always singular
answer. This is the question of knowing how and by means of which logical
operation it is possible, in and for the phenomenal world, to articulate that which
is its inherent exception, the presence in it of the absence of the thing-in-itself.
In brief: its impossible-real. Namely, that thing which – through its materially
present inherent exception – provides the world with its consistency. One way of
determining the subject as such a logical operation would be to rephrase one of
the clauses from Badiou’s Saint Paul by stating that, considered from the point of
view of such a logical operation, ‘the subject is subjectivation’.9
Let us now have a brief look at the figure of the subject in Kant’s three Critiques.
I will start with the first one. As noted by Badiou in A Short Treatise on Transitory
Ontology (2006), there are two moments at which the first Critique approaches
the void as the point of Being. In one case, this happens via the concept of the
transcendental subject. Kant regards it as the site, empty in itself, of the original
unity of the inconsistent multiplicity; or, in Badiou’s terminology, as the non-
existing operation of the count-as-one of the inconsistent multiplicity. In the
second case, Kant approaches the void via the concept of the transcendental
object, that is, the concept of the objectivity of the phenomenal object.10 Kant’s
transcendental object is ‘something in general = x’, but that ‘something’ remains
absolutely undetermined, empty, the ‘x’ itself never presented. Yet in the first
Critique, both cases of void are subordinated to the representable structure
of the object. To quote Badiou: Kant ‘forces the power of the count-as-one to
have representable objects as a result’.11 In the first Critique, Kant thinks the
9 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 81.
10 Badiou, Briefings, 139.
11 Ibid.
void of the transcendental subject and the void of the transcendental object as
a symmetrical relationship of two voids, as their correlation; what he does not
succeed in is counting these two voids as one and the same.
Having summed up Badiou’s remarks on the matter, I would like to follow
up with a hypothesis of my own: counting the two voids as one would bring us
to the figure of the subject that is sketched out in my opening quotation from
Badiou. It would bring us, to alter the quotation slightly, to a figure of the subject
that is linked (topologically) to a real that it lacks. But if Badiou is correct in his
analysis of Kant’s subtractive ontology, and I think he is, then it has to be at least
possible to ferret out, in the first Critique – obviously if read within the system of
the three Critiques – at least a trace of that figure of the subject that corresponds
to the conceptual radicalism of Kant when he recognized the crucial meaning of
the void for both the transcendental subject and the transcendental object. Thus,
claims Badiou, Kant was the first ‘to shed light on the avenues of a subtractive
ontology, far from any negative theology’.12
Let me try briefly to demonstrate the trace of the figure of the subject that can
be found in the first Critique. My starting point will be the well-known remark
in the section ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’.13 The proposition ‘I think’, which
opens Kant’s rebuttal of Descartes’s attempt to directly infer existence from the
cogito, is an empirical proposition. It already contains an existence, the existence
of me as a thinking being and this existence is identical with the proposition
itself. Yet, as Kant goes on to argue, this existence is not my empirical existence,
it is not the empirical representation of the I. ‘For it is to be noted that if I have
called the proposition “I think” an empirical proposition, I would not say by this
that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely
intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general.’14
As soon as the empirical I exists at the point of the ‘I think’ of the transcendental
subject, its existence is no longer the existence of an empirically existing, thinking
being. The empirical existence of the I, inseparable from the point ‘I think’, is an
empiricity of a very particular kind. The particularity of this empirical existence
lies in that it is, as Kant would say, ‘a transcendental predicate’.15 The empiricity
of the empirical I associated with the ‘I think’ of the transcendental subject is not
simply an external feature of the transcendental order, but a moment internal to
it. It is, so to speak, the paradoxical empirical condition of the possibility of its
12 Ibid.
13 Kant, CpR, B 422–3.
14 Ibid., B 423.
15 Ibid., B 401/A 343.
own transcendental condition of possibility. At least this is my understanding

of the claim Kant made in my quotation – the claim that my existence which
is already contained in the proposition ‘I think’ is not a categorial existence,
but merely ‘an indeterminate perception’, which ‘signifies only something real,
which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance,
and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in
fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition “I think” ’.16
The moment of the empirical, which is interior to the transcendental, can
be elucidated using the example of Kant’s notion of the two I’s. These are ‘the
I that I think’ and ‘the I that intuits itself ’, or in other words, ‘the I as intelligence
and thinking subject’ and I myself insofar as I am a ‘thought object’,17 that is, an
I that is an object of inner sense. It is true that Kant managed to show, in his
theory of inner sense, that the I as a thinking being is subject to the conditions
of the possibility of knowledge prescribed by the Transcendental Aesthetic and
the Transcendental Analytic – just like everything else that exists in the world.
I know myself as I appear to myself and not as I am in myself. However, Kant
seems to leave open a vital question. What is given to me in my inner sense is my
subjectivity as object and not my subjectivity as an I, as subject. What, in fact, is
the being of the I as object, of the I that is no more than an object? How can the
I – and precisely as the I – be an object? In short: How are we to understand this
complete objectivation of the I?
The answer to this question is contained in the aspect of Kant’s philosophy
that I referred to above in reference to Badiou. I will call it the precedence of
the object. It manifests in the fact that, despite Kant’s announcement that he
would be turning his attention to the subject, the only thing present in the
field of knowledge is a massive theory of the object, in which the subject is
relegated to the role of supporting the order of objectivity. Yet I think that the
precedence of the object is less a sign of a failure of Kant’s revolution in thinking
than an indication of a weakness in Kant’s objectivistic transcendentalism. In
my opinion, the figure of the empirical I as a bare object can be understood as
the precedence of the object brought to its extreme limit. The extreme limit of
this precedence is the point where that which appears as a perfect objectivation
of the empirical I, its mere empiricity, directly corresponds to the complete
voiding of the transcendental subject. In a way, this point is a mistake in Kant’s
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., B 155.
transcendentalism because it is where an empirical externality is reinvaded by

an empty transcendental subject.
At the same time as the external world is admitted to inner sense, inner sense
is externalized, the extreme point of this externalization being the I as an object
among objects. Nothing of what belongs to inner sense truly belongs to the order
of the internal; in inner sense, even the ‘subject’ is given through the receptivity
of the power of knowledge as a bare object. In other words, inner sense becomes
‘inner’ only when it is filled with ‘externality’. It is a place of internality, entirely
made up of externality. It is literally the place of the internal externality of the
transcendental subject, the place of its inner exile.
While the transcendental subject has no being, the voidness of the
transcendental subject does not mean that the transcendental subject itself is
nothing. On the contrary, it is Nothing that came to appear in the transcendental
subject, Nothing appearing as Something. In the context of Kant’s transcendental
philosophy, appearing as Something necessarily means that it is something
empirical, since that which does not exist empirically is nothing. But the
empirical givenness associated with the transcendental subject is not the
empirical of some objectively existent thing. The empirical existence that always
already accompanies the transcendental subject in the form of the empirical I is
an empirical that does not belong to the empirical world of the objective despite
being contained in it. It is contained, however, as the internal surplus of the
transcendental subject.
The precedence of the object as an aspect of the Kantian transcendental is
complete when the transcendental subject is associated with a moment of some
transcendental empirical that belongs to the transcendental subject but is not
subject to its constituting power. This is an empirical that is the unabolishable
inner opposite (Dawider) of the transcendental subject. It is an empirical that is
both something more and something other than the usual, categorially ordered
empirical – without being actually, that is, categorially, something other and
something more. It can be designated as a moment of the trans-empirical.
This is where I will stop treating this point. As I will attempt to show in
the last part of my article, the third Critique will elevate what I call the trans-
empirical to the status of a concept; and this will happen via the notion of a
case of reflective aesthetic judgement. Up to this point, my aim has been simply
to see whether I can find, in the first Critique, a trace of a figure of the subject
that is not merely the subject of an object. I think I have found such a trace in
the figure of the transcendental subject that I have outlined: the transcendental
subject that is void in itself, yet its very voidness appears in the form of a surplus
of the trans-empirical empirical. Furthermore, this is the figure of the subject

wherein the two voids are counted as one; the figure of the subject that is linked
(topologically) with the real that it lacks.
I will now move on to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.18 At the core of Kant’s
practical philosophy is the idea that will is determined through pure reason;
this determination forms the basis of a specific mode of man’s practical action.
Positively, even if purely formally for now, this mode of practical action can
be defined as an act or process of subjectivation. Subjectivation is a two-sided
process. On the one hand, it involves the subjectivation of the empirical
individual by entering the process of the constitution of a practical subject.
On the other hand, it is only in this process that the elements necessary for the
practical subject, that is, the rationally determined will to acquire his existence
are brought together. The two sides of one and the same process of subjectivation
can be expressed with the formula ‘the subject is subjectivation’.19 This act of
subjectivation in practical philosophy is the first step towards an articulation of
that trans-empiricity that accompanies the transcendental subject; this will be
my central thesis in what follows.
I will take as my starting point the passage from the Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals20 in which Kant gives a brief summary of the difference
between the hypothetical and the categorical imperative. The hypothetical
imperative, according to Kant, states that I ought to do something ‘because
I wish for something else’. In contrast, the categorical imperative states: ‘I ought
to do so and so, even though I should not wish for anything else.’
For Kant’s practical philosophy, acting even if I do not wish for anything else
means that my action, guided by my will, is not determined by any object that
the will tried to attain – and yet not only do I wish to act, but I really do act in
accordance with this volition. The question here, of course, is: how can I act based
on the complete dissolution of any object of action? How can I act when ‘I do not
wish for anything else’; when, strictly speaking, I wish for Nothing itself, that is,
when I wish for that Nothing as if it were Something? It is in the form of precisely
such a volition that the principle of autonomy of will is actualized; it is the only
18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015; hereinafter CprR).
19 Badiou, Saint Paul, 84.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge
20
University Press, 2003; hereinafter GMM).

law ‘which the will of every rational being imposes on itself, without needing to
assume any spring or interest as a foundation’.21 Autonomy, as we know, refers to
the ‘capability of the maxims of every good will to make themselves a universal
law’.22
But as the individual discovers his autonomous will, he not only discovers
that submitting to his self-imposed law makes him free, but he also discovers
that in his freedom he is already subject to a law which holds for him only insofar
as it can hold for all rational beings as a categorical, unconditional imperative.
This is an imperative that demands that everyone consider himself with perfect
disinterest, as a Same among the Same. The problem this poses is the problem of
how to justify the reality of freedom, or in other words, it is the problem of the
categorical imperative as a synthetic a priori proposition.
On the level of an individual’s practical action, this problem manifests in a
simple question: Why would I wish for freedom at all, why would I wish for the
autonomy of my will, which demands that my maxims have universal validity?
Alternatively, we can reformulate the question as follows: how can I recognize
(my proper) ‘volition’ in the ‘ought’, in the ‘enforcing’ of the categorical imperative
on my will?23
An answer to this question can be found in the second Critique, where Kant
invented the concept of the factum of reason. Thereafter, Kant presented moral
law and awareness thereof as a fact, whereas for us pure reason manifests as
practical reason; it is, as Kant emphasized, an unempirical fact of reason – in
fact, the sole fact of reason. The question how I can act based on ‘not wishing for
anything else’, that is, based on wishing for the ‘nothing else’ itself, is answered by
the command of reason that demands and permits exclusively its own causeless
givenness: the ‘Nothing as Something’, which is the only thing I can wish for
when I act morally and which is the determining cause of the free, autonomous
will – that Nothing is reason in the form of its own factuality.
In brief, the basic achievement of Kant’s concept of the factum of reason
is this: it turns the incomprehensibility of moral law, the closing idea of his
Groundwork, into its fundamental causelessness. It is precisely for being causeless
that it allows the process of the subjectivation of the empirical individual
to begin. To explain this in more detail, the categorical imperative is always
accompanied by a moment of the not-known. And in the factum of reason,
21 Ibid., BA 96.
22 Ibid., BA 95
23 Ibid., BA 102.
this not-known is transformed from a lack, a negativity, into a positive, framing

condition for the possibility of practical action. I say ‘framing condition’
because the not-known is excluded from practical action, this exclusion being
precisely what forms a framework for practical action. Practical action is based,
on the one hand, on absolute certainty that I have to act in this and no other
way, that I unconditionally have to actualize a certain idea. On the other hand,
this factual certainty is not based on any positive, objective norm of action.
The only justification for action is the demand of the agent that the causeless
factuality of his subjective maxim of action must, after all, contain something
real, something meaningful; and it must contain that to the extent that it can
be shown, in each individual case, that the maxim holds for none if it does not
unconditionally hold for all. And no predicative determination can enclose this
‘all’ into a segregated, sealed-off All. Thus, the causelessness of the factum of
reason functions as an endless repetition of the irreducibly subjective act that
ceaselessly excludes the question: ‘why should I want that which I desire?’ This
question is replaced by action which constitutes its own meaning. However,
constituting such a meaning depends on the action endlessly inventing a mode
of unconditional, non-exclusionary addressing of all. The endless repetition of
an irreducibly subjective act is the One of a multiplicity that is endlessly diverse
in itself. Hence, it exists as a One that is missing.
To conclude: the subject of a practical act, that is to say, Kant’s rationally
determined will, is not given in advance; it can only be in the process of
becoming, which occurs in the course of the subjectivation of an empirical
individual. However, in the context of Kant’s practical philosophy we can only
talk about the process of subjectivation when the empirical individual is ready
to recognize his ‘proper self ’,24 in other words, to recognize himself as a practical
subject in the factum of moral law. That is to say, where there is nothing that
is recognizable, at a point where there is no individual and where there are no
others, at the site of a radical interruption of the given situational order. What
I have called ‘recognition’ is simply the irreducibly subjective maxim of action,
which is, first, causeless and aimless from the point of view of empirical reality,
which is, furthermore, constituted exclusively by the not-known with regard to
its final justification and, finally, which only exists in the form of the demand that
it holds as something real for no one if it does not, as such, hold unconditionally
for all. This mode of action also serves to introduce a minimal distance between
the empirical individual and the meaningless point of the factum of reason,
24 Ibid., BA 119.
where he exists as a ‘proper self ’, that is, as a practical subject, as a rationally

determined will. This minimal distance can also be formulated as follows: the
empirical subject subjectivates himself so that he actually desires that which he
wishes as a practical subject. The subject of Kant’s philosophy is a practical act
wherein the empirical individual establishes a minimal distance to that point at
which he himself exists as a subject – as I will attempt to demonstrate below, this
act of the subject is structured as a reflecting judgement.
Now on to the Critique of the Power of Judgement.25 To refresh our memories: I

am interested in the question of what figure of the subject might correspond
to the understanding of the phenomenal world in Kant’s philosophy – to the
understanding of the world which contains something that does not belong to
it, that is, the thing-in-itself, or more precisely, the absence of the thing-in-itself.
Based on my remarks concerning the first two Critiques, I can now state two
key traits of this figure of the subject. First, the subject is a logical operation,
a thought operation, which is empty in itself: in the case of the first Critique,
it is an operation of a synthetic unity of the multiple; in the case of the second
Critique, it is an operation of the rational determination of will. And second, the
subject-thought, to borrow a term coined by Badiou, is inseparably associated
with the moment of the real, which is present in it by not being there. In the
case of both Critiques, I have labelled this moment of the real as a moment of
the trans-empirical. Now I can add a third trait of this figure of the subject. It
results from connecting the first two traits and it reads as follows: the subject is
subjectivation, more precisely, it is an act of subjectivation. This connection was
only established in the third Critique. It is only the third Critique, therefore, that
offers the completed structure of the subject of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
Among the complex themes of the third Critique, three stand out as vital for
a possible meeting between Badiou’s philosophy and that of Kant.
First, there is the expansion of the notion of the transcendental aesthetic as
defined in the first Critique: as the science of all principles of a priori sensibility.26
In reality, in the first Critique, a priori sensibility is treated only as a sensibility of
objective sense, the Sinn. That is, it is treated simply as a function and an element
of cognition. The third Critique supplements the notion of a priori sensibility by
25 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000; hereinafter CJdg).
26 Kant, CprP, B 35/A 21.
adding the notion of a sensible feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The feeling of

pleasure or displeasure is that element in the representation of the object that is,
first, only subjective, and second, devoid of any cognitive, objective function, that
is, of any function that is constitutive of the object. The sensible feeling of pleasure
or displeasure is that ‘by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated,
but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation’.27 Under
the designation of a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, ‘the representation is
related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life’.28
The second crucial theme of the third Critique is the elaboration on the
notion of a case: the notion for that which, in a given particularity, is irreducibly
particular, that is, singular.
The third central theme is the main conceptual innovation of the third
Critique, its central issue and primary conceptual tool: the concept of reflective
power as an independent faculty of cognition, that is, the concept of the reflecting
power of judgement.
The expansion of the notion of a priori sensibility with sensible feeling
constitutes the ontological foundation of the reflecting power of judgement,
but I will disregard the issues this raises in order to focus on the notions of
singularity and reflecting judgement.
We are dealing with the reflecting power of judgement when we only have
available the representation of something, but no universal whereby that
something might be determined. This is precisely what the reflecting power of
judgement is about: its task is to invent, in its own process of judging, a universal
concept for something for which no cognitive category is available.
The reason that the universal is not available in the act of the reflecting power
of judgement does not lie in our inability to find the universal or in our simple
ignorance thereof. The universal is not available to us because, strictly speaking,
there simply is no universal for what we see before us. The universal of the
reflecting power of judgement is predicatively undeterminable, in a word, it is
generic. It can only be clearly established in the act of determining what it refers
to in each specific case.
As for the referent of a reflecting judgement, it is what Kant calls ‘a case’, der
Fall. A case of an aesthetic judgement, of a judgement of taste or of the sublime,
is that which represents the irreducible particularity of each particular instance
of such a judgement: a singularity. Hence, it corresponds to this particularity
27 Kant, CJdg, § 1.
28 Ibid.
itself in its irreducible singularity. The singular is that which, in a particularity,

is more than that particularity itself – without being truly, empirically or
objectively something more. On the one hand, the singular is inseparable from
the particularity in which it is embodied. On the other hand, this singular
only becomes a case due to its immediate connection to the generic universal,
to the universal of the idea of reason. It is something that can be immediately
universalized, something that could hold, as Kant would have put it, ‘for all
times and all peoples’.29 The singularity of a case corresponds to that element of
the particularity that only exists as a Sameness in the multiplicity of its possible
transtemporal and transhistorical consequences. Hence, it only exists in the
form of a decision ceaselessly renewed. ‘This is a case of the generic Idea of
Reason.’ Thus, it could be said that the universal too exists only to the extent
that it is possible to affirm the singular in the potentially infinite multiplicity
of its universally valid consequences. And conversely, a true multiplicity of
some particular givens of the world is only contained in that which is a case of
Sameness.
Like Badiou’s Idea, Kant’s Idea of Reason is not a thought to be realized, but one
that arises and exists only in the process of being realized. What we are dealing
with here is the Idea as the inseparability of thought and act. This inseparability
is the point of the specific materialism of both Kantian and Badiouan Ideas. In
short, what we are dealing with here is a materialism that characterizes all truth
processes. It is the materialism of a world that, to borrow Badiou’s words, has no
‘beneath’ that would be external to it, no pre-world matter, so to speak. Neither
does it have any heterogeneous ‘above’.30
In Kant’s philosophy, the point of the materialism of the idea is found in each
specific case of the idea. This is a case declared via the following statement of
reflecting judgement: ‘this is a case of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure’, that
is, ‘a case of the Idea of Reason’. In this sense, an aesthetic reflecting judgment is
built as a statement of existence. Ideas of Reason are not elements of objective
reality; they are the non-existent of that reality, while the act of the reflecting
power of judgement is a decision about the existence of the non-existent. It is
structured as an existential proposition stating what of that which is actually
exists, even if it does not possess an objective existence.
The presence of cases of ideas in experience thus requires an altogether special
ontological status: ideas are not elements of objective reality, but neither are they
29 Ibid., §17.
30 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 307.
purely hallucinatory realizations of the subjective desire of reason. Thus, we could

say that such an idea exists in the form of a given particularity of the world –
but a given particularity that, at the same time, is derealized in its immediate
givenness, so that it only counts as a point of absolute singularity which, as such,
directly participates in the universal. That is because derealization is nothing
but the operation by which the givens of objective reality are transformed into
potential material for the Idea – in short, an operation by which they enter the
pool of cases of the Idea. From the perspective of reflective judgement, the world
of experience appears as something objective only to the extent that it has already
lost its objectivity, or in other words, to the extent that it can be transformed into
a world in which reflecting judgement realizes its consequences.
A case of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is neither an object constituted
by reason, nor is it a sublime suprasensible object of pre-critical reason. Its
materiality is the product of this double negation. It is a derealization of objects
of experiential reality and a desublimation of the Ideas of Reason, which signifies
the transcendence of the world. But as such it is a materiality of a particular kind,
existing in the midst of constituted objective reality.
The idea of reason only exists in the world in the form of its specific cases.
A case of the idea itself is simply the minimal difference between what a case
is and what each specific case embodies in reality. It is a particular given of the
world whose particularity is subject to that in it which points towards its proper
singularity – that is, towards the singularity of the case of the Idea. This is the
universal singularity implied in the elementary formula of the reflective power
of judgment: ‘This is a case.’ This formula opens up the possibility of articulating
the multiplicity of the world in the creation of its specific materiality. A ‘case’
of reflective judgment is reason materialized in something that belongs to the
world without being contained in it. It is an excess of the given world itself. Thus,
under the appearance of the singular universality of a case, reason participates
in the constitution of reality by derealizing it at the same time. Strictly speaking,
reflective judgement is not a logical operation. It is a practical process of the
non-objective constitution of objective reality. It is a process of the derealization
of reality in the sense that a particular given of the world is transformed into a
body or a case of the Idea.
The formal structure of the reflecting power of judgement, then, has three
components.
First, the thought-subject: this role is fulfilled by the aesthetic reflective
power of judgement, which functions as the generic universal. The thought
that is at work in reflecting judgement is a thought embodied in particular

spatiotemporally determined objects of the empirical world.
Second, the empirical world includes the thought-subject as its inner exception,
as its excess: as such an inner exception, however, the thought-subject only
becomes visible on the condition that someone, anyone, is willing to tie his
subjective existence to a groundless act of reflecting judgement and to its
elementary proposition ‘this is a case of the Idea’. Thus, by tying his thinking
and action to that which eludes the laws of a given situation, that which is its
impossible, its real, this someone is subjectivated.
Third, the impossible of a given situation: a singular case of reflecting
judgement, which is also a mode of existence of the universal. It is true that a
case of the generic universality of the idea is always embodied in a particular
object or a particular event of the empirical world. Yet by itself, that particular
event or object is not the same thing as a case. A case of the universal is that
which never corresponds to what embodies it, nor does it ever correspond to
the something more which it itself embodies. A case is universal precisely in the
sense that it is a predicateless sameness, persisting in various spatiotemporally
determined worlds as a lacuna of their non-existent, in their real.
Let me conclude with a provisional answer to my opening question, which
asked what figure of the subject in Kant’s philosophy might correspond to his
understanding of the phenomenal world as a world containing something
that does not belong to it. Such a figure of the subject should be sought in the
threefold tangle delineated in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement: in the
interlacing of concepts of the thought-subject, subjectivation and a singular case
of the universal.
3
Lack and Concept: On Hegelian

Motives in Badiou
Dominik Finkelde
Badiou versus Hegel?
Badiou’s relationship with Hegel is a tense one. He asserts that ‘the essential Hegel,
the one feverishly annotated by Lenin’1 belongs next to ‘Plato and Descartes’ to
the ‘only three crucial philosophers’2 in the history of philosophy. And yet Badiou
repeatedly distances himself from the German idealist. The latter’s conviction of
the identity of being and thinking is, according to Badiou, ‘a totalized result’ of
perceiving the basic structure of reality as one totality and not – as Badiou claims
with respect to his own philosophy – as ‘a local occurrence’ within a world of
multiple multiplicities.3 He interprets Hegel’s monism therefore repeatedly as
belonging to classical metaphysics despite materialist potentials in it that even
Sartre and Althusser undervalued, according to Badiou, in debates on Hegel of
the 1960s and 1970s in France.4 Badiou calls Hegel in Logics of Worlds explicitly
a thinker of the ‘Whole’ and writes: ‘One could argue that whereas we [Badiou
and his school] launch a transcendental theory of worlds by saying “There is no
Whole”, Hegel guarantees the inception of the dialectical odyssey by positing
that, “There is nothing but the Whole”.’5 This means that within this classical view
of metaphysics the multiplicity of beings (Seiende) is time and again tied back to
a holistic structure of reality (Sein) that encompasses reality in its totality. And
1 Alain Badiou, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, ed. and trans. Tzuchien Tho
(Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 17.
2 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum,
2009), 527.
3 Ibid., 143.
Badiou comments on these debates in his text ‘Hegel in France’, in The Rational Kernel, 11–15.
4
5 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 141.

such an interpretation appears to be in fact also urgent with regard to Hegel at

first sight. For Hegel repeatedly suggests that basic categories in his philosophy
like ‘spirit’ and ‘concept’ denote an all-encompassing meta or second-order entity
that is more than the sum total of its particles. Badiou cannot share this belief
since he ties his philosophy exclusively to ‘local occurrences’ of the identity of
being and thinking within multiple multiplicities where the ‘Whole’ is a concept
without an extension.
One of his most extensive criticisms of Hegel is expressed in §15 of Being
and Event in relation to Hegel’s understanding of ‘bad infinity’ as opposed to
‘good infinity’ with reference to mathematics. According to Badiou’s criticism
presented in this paragraph, which picks up arguments developed in the early
text ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’,6 Hegel refers to a bad infinity among other things
as a continuous accumulation of numerical figures, as, for example, the sequence
of integers exemplifies. Here, a quantum becomes constantly larger inasmuch as
a certain unit of quantity (e.g. n + 1) is continuously adding itself to the existing
sum and keeps on going. Each step further convokes the void in which the count
repeats itself. Hegel:
In this emptiness beyond the finite, what arises? [. . .] On account of the
inseparability of the infinite and the finite (or because this infinite, which
stands apart, is itself restricted), the limit arises. The infinite has vanished and
the other, the finite, has stepped in. But this stepping in of the finite appears as
an event external to the infinite, and the new limit as something that does not
arise out of the infinite itself but is likewise found given. And with this we are
back at the previous determination, which has been sublated in vain. This new
limit, however, is itself only something to be sublated or transcended. And so
there arises again the emptiness, the nothing, in which we find again the said
determination – and so forth to infinity.7
To be sure, Hegel emphasizes to a certain extent the positive effect of this

infinity as well, since numbers are inscribed in the genesis of their own infinity
as quanta and, of course, can be regarded as infinite and productively unstable
entities in this sense. But in the end this infinity will ultimately be denied true
transgression as the progression itself is only a repetitive recurrence of the past
6 Alain Badiou, ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’, first published in Cahiers pour l’Analyse (Summer
1968): 118–37, reprinted and translated as ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’. In Concept and Form, vol. 1,
ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, trans. Robin Mackay with Ray Brassier (London: Verso, 2012),
187–207.
Georg W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK:
7
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112.

Lack and Concept 37
onto the future. So, for Hegel, the seemingly positive infinity of self-transcendence,
inscribed in the genesis of numbers, ends up finally in being ‘poor’ by its stasis
that abolishes what true infinity is about for Hegel: the self-transcending of itself
within a process of ever new and not repetitive falsifications. Badiou writes:
After all, the bad infinity is bad due to the very same thing which makes it good
in Hegelian terms: it does not break the ontological immanence of the one; better
still, it derives from the latter. Its limited or finite character originates in its being
solely defined locally, by the still-more of this already that is determinateness.8
Hegelian infinity is an intrinsic property of the finite. Therefore Badiou

accuses Hegel of missing the true potentiality – or better – the true actuality
of mathematics: its insight in various countable and uncountable infinities
‘in which God’ as a classical synonym of the ‘Whole’ ‘in-consists’ rather than
consists.9 For Hegel, the infinity of numerical entities is bad because, according
to Hegel’s classical monism (at least this is how Badiou reads Hegel), there is a
qualitatively different realm of the infinite, which he inter alia calls the realm of
‘absolute spirit’.
However, Hegel’s work is closer to Badiou than Badiou seems willing to
grant, despite the difference shown here at the outset with, admittedly, a broad
brush. This shall be illustrated in the following sections of this article. They show
affinities between Hegel and Badiou especially in their particular understanding
of dialectics and their respective interpretation of what Hegel calls ‘concrete’ or
‘actual universality’.
Thinking and being
If there is a fundamental conviction that Hegel as a dialectical idealist and

Badiou as a dialectical materialist share, then it is, as already mentioned, the
following: the ‘conviction about the identity of being and thought. But for us
[Badiou speaks here of himself and his school] this identity is a local occurrence
and not a totalised result’ as Hegel allegedly sees it.10 The emphasis on identity
should not suppress the fact that Hegel and Badiou give credit to a gap between
thinking and being as well. Hegel credits especially Kant with the merit of having
introduced this gap into ontology. For Kant’s solution of the conflict between
8 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 165.
9 Ibid., 170.
empiricism and rationalism exists exactly in not having delivered a synthesis

of both philosophical currents, but instead in formulating the avoidance of a
positivistic solution between two mutually exclusive ontologies. Hegel radicalizes
this Kantian insight for his process-philosophical purposes when he reinterprets
the gap between the ‘thing-in-itself ’ and ‘phenomena’ as a gap that separates
phenomena from themselves and no longer from a seemingly coherent matrix
of ‘the world’ as totality.
Hegel discusses this train of thought in almost all of his metaphysical works
when he repeatedly points out to what extent the primary structure of being is
to be understood as one that can be grasped by reason and that expresses itself
conceptually. The precondition for this insight, though, is the already mentioned
gap, which brings the space of reality(/-ies) at a distance to itself. For if there were
no difference between thinking and being, it would not be clear how knowledge
from its classical definition onwards as ‘justified true belief ’ (Plato, Theaetetus)
could be understood at all.
Hegel speaks of a symbiosis of being and thinking. ‘Being’ is ‘reflection of
itself into itself ’,11 ‘absolutely mediated’12 and proves to be in its abundance of
things, facts and states of affairs as ‘substantial content’13 through the conceptual
determinations of thought. In addition, Hegel points out that the content-related
object of thought is ‘the property of the self ’, just as the same object is ‘self-like’
(in German: ‘selbstisch’) through its determinate being in the thinking subject.14
An object, a thing, an entity is in its being insofar as it has its concept, just as
the concept is a concept for subjects. For Hegel, however, a symbiosis of being
and thinking can only take place – and this is decisive for the elective affinity
with Badiou – if the object takes, symbolically speaking, in its concept ‘a seat’.
As already mentioned, this is only possible if being and thinking are related but
not one. For were the difference between being and thinking resolved without
friction or tension, we would, as Hegel writes, ‘soon die of hunger, bodily as well
as spiritually’.15
In the vocabulary of Badiou one could say: thinking shows itself capable of
‘multiple-presentations’ but ‘the errancy of the void’,16 which is included in every
11 Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), §7.
12 Ibid., §37.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., §32.
15 Georg W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, ed. and trans. Klaus
Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199.
16 Badiou, Being and Event, 93.
Lack and Concept 39
situation, can never be entirely excluded by thinking. A gap or divide between

thinking and being is thus a condition of both, and until today it manifests itself
in the plurality of our references to the world, where a plurality of ‘fields of sense’
(to quote the neo-Quinian philosopher Markus Gabriel)17 opens up a plurality
of respective objects within these fields of sense – no matter if they are fictional
entities (like Sherlock Holmes), epistemic ones (numbers) or scientific ones
(subatomic particles). Even the law of identity ‘A = A’ expresses this train of
thought for Hegel. ‘A’ literally comes to a distance as part of a symbolic network
in ‘= A’ and only then becomes one with itself. The distance manifests itself in the
proposition that A is equal to A in a purely formal manner. A ‘fits’ into its mould.
From the first ‘A’ onwards, which assumes the role of a predicative subject, the
object ‘A’ becomes the predication ‘=A’. The first ‘A’ comes to coincide in the
second and says, albeit with little content, nevertheless very much for Hegel
formally about the self-reflexivity of entities in structures of their objectification.
Badiou endorses this division within identities and entities prominently
in his early work The Theory of the Subject. Here he presents a theoretical and
in his thinking recurring argument for his theory of the event. For an event is
conceivable only if, in addition to the reference between being and thinking,
a non-coincidence lurks between the two antipodes which opens up places of
untamed significations. But, as I already mentioned, even Kant shows to what
extent being must exceed thinking, because, similar to the flight of a dove ‘cutting
[with its wing] through the air’, thought needs ‘resistance’ from a world that can
never coincide with thought itself. This is indispensable in order for facts and
state of affairs to stand out (even untruly) in whatever forms of representation.18
In the first chapter of Theory of the Subject, Badiou introduces his reader
to this Hegelian dialectic according to which every identity imparts a formal
eccentricity to itself.19 Badiou shows how each being is constitutively split
into its ‘being-in-itself ’ and its indexical localization, that is, in the place of its
appearance. The splitting of an entity into an ‘in-itself ’ and its ‘localization’ is
the condition for something to appear. Badiou names the elements of division
by differentiating between A (read as: ‘A as such’ or ‘A as pure being’)20 and Ap
(read as: A ‘being placed’ at a location).21 A-as-such is the appearing being, the
17 Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2015).
18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129 (A 5).
19 Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 3–12.
Ibid., 7.
20
21 Ibid.
being that has no place – the utopian dimension of A (as such). Ap, on the other
hand, is A as placed. It is the being that is inscribed in a topos. A and Ap are not
two independent entities. Rather, they signify how each entity is divided into its
ideal form, its thought, its perfect identity, and its local embodiment in space-
time (presentable in its extension).
Badiou sums this thought up as follows when he writes: ‘A is itself, but it is
also its power of repetition, the legibility of itself at a distance from itself.’22 He
proposes the neologism esplace, which derives from the abbreviation of ‘espace
de placement’ (‘space of placement’).23 For the unregistered, not placed, and thus
utopian A, he suggests the word ‘horlieu’ (‘outplace’).24 This out-of-place or the
‘being in itself ’, which is the ‘real’ of the ‘esplace’ (‘splace’),25 is not representable.
It stands in for what Lacan calls a lack of being. Badiou makes clear here that the
entity A is affected in its division between A and Ap by an inherent negativity,
because the ‘in-itself ’ of A is by its localization even at a distance to its very
embodiment in A. It is utopian. Badiou thus illustrates Hegel’s thesis that
‘identity internally breaks apart into diversity because, as absolute difference in
itself, it posits itself as the negative of itself and these, its two moments (itself
and the negative of itself), are reflections into themselves, are identical with
themselves’.26 In the Preface of the Phenomenology, Hegel writes, ‘the bifurcation
of the simple [. . .] is the True’27 to express the extent to which each entity is
inscribed with a double negation: on the one hand, by being the difference from
other determinations and, on the other, by being in a purely formal self-relation,
which is always effected by an inherent non-identity.
Hegel once again expresses this idea in his Science of Logic in relation to the
already mentioned identity theorem. He asserts that the form of the identity
theorem (A = A) expresses more ‘than simple, abstract identity’.28 The first half
of the proposition: ‘A is’ stands for, ‘a beginning that envisages a something
different before it to which the “A is” would proceed.’29 Here Hegel underlines
that in the symbolic system of this ‘propositional form’ hides a ‘necessity of
adding to abstract identity the extra factor of that movement – Thus an A is
added’.30 If I understand Hegel correctly, this means that the symbolic structure
22 Ibid., 6.
23 Ibid., 10.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Hegel, Science of Logic, 362.
27 Hegel, Phenomenology, §18.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid. (My emphasis).
Lack and Concept 41
of language itself always embodies this ‘extra factor’ that it can never catch up
with. Hegel illustrates these thoughts also with regard to the proposition ‘God is
God’.31 What sounds like a boring tautology is, for him, the form in which things
become identities of themselves, as well as the symbols of their absence.
Badiou applies the Hegelian definition of identity, which is equally marked
by two excluding moments of identity and non-identity, to political situations.
As is well known, he formalizes them with the help of set theory in the form of
embedded and excluded multiplicities that can conflict with one another about
the sovereign claims of their representation. In Being and Event he describes, for
example, to what extent ‘there is nothing apart from situations. Ontology, if it
exists, is a situation.’32 But ontology is just a situation among others, so to speak,
on the meta-level of philosophical reflection. Other situations can be located
concretely in space and time. This implies that Paris in 1848 is a situation or
Russia in 1917 or the ‘White on White’ painting of Kazimir Malevich from 1918
as well.
What distinguishes these situations as exceptional situations from others, is
the manifestation of their inconsistencies through identities in which – as in
Badiou’s split of ‘A-in-itself ’ and ‘A-placed’ – the utopian moment (the in-itself)
opens the place of placement. For example, the painting ‘White on White’ of
Malevich as an artistically utopian idea, or the Russian Revolution as a political
one meet in their respective form of being ‘in itself ’ the place of their arrival
with incomprehension or resistance surrounding them. In other words, their
identity is shaped by inherent moments of non-identity. Consistency, as Hegel
and Badiou suggest, is always dependent on inconsistency. In other words,
every structured situation that is counted as one is based on a lack of structure
that cannot be presented from the point of view of the prevailing count. With
Slavoj Žižek one can say that the inconsistent situation is ‘the pure multiple, the
not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given;
this multitude is not a multitude of Ones, since the counting has not yet taken
place’.33 Therefore, Badiou can also write: ‘All multiple-presentation is exposed
to the danger of the void: the void is its being. The consistency of the multiple
amounts to the following: the void, which is the name of inconsistency in the
situation (under the law of the count-as-one), cannot, in itself, be presented or
fixed.’34
31 Ibid., 359.
33 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Psychoanalysis and Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou’, South Atlantic Quarterly,
vol. 97 (Spring 1998): 235–61, 235.
Antigone exposes such void within a situation in a Badiouan as well as in a

Hegelian sense.35 The tension between ‘situation’ and ‘inconsistency’ becomes
visible in her fate. With focusing on her, Hegel rejects explicitly Kant’s
philosophy of right as for him her desire is no illegal delusion of a misguided
conscience. As such, though, Kant would have to look at the daughter of
Oedipus and reject her claim according to his contract-theoretical dogma
that any uproar against state authority should be always and everywhere
prevented. For Hegel, however, Antigone is a facilitator of the fact that a
unity can be confronted with a paradoxical element that enters into the unity
from the unity’s own lack of being. It is her legal and illegal claim to bury her
brother Polynices, which makes her a paradoxical element in the ruling doxa
of the state.36 For Antigone acts on behalf of a right for which she cannot give
reasons in the light of the modern state. Sophocles emphasizes this mismatch.
The origin of the law Antigone refers to is lost in myth, that is, not accessible
to modern reason. It is thus Antigone’s stubborn will alone to defend a
purely utopian value (i.e. an ‘in-itself ’ without reasonable justifications) in
a location that has to resist this challenge as being outright irrational. The
laws of the underworld stand literally diagonal to the laws of the polis. The
state would risk abolishing itself as the reasonable unity of multiplicity. The
state can guarantee only his count through keeping distance to the mythical
past. For Hegel Antigone provokes nevertheless a productive crisis within
normative orders. With Badiou one could say, that although Antigone is
included in the life-shaping situation of the modern polis, she cannot defend
her normative claim as belonging to the situation. Her claim embodies a
‘point of excess’.37 In other words, Antigone is included in the polis of Creon
but she is not politically represented in it. For Hegel, the necessity of such
misunderstanding stands time and again for the birth of a new way of life.
The action of the individual has the ‘appearance of contingency’,38 but the
movement proves to be necessary retrospectively. By not bowing to doxa,
as her sister Ismene, Antigone becomes the progeny of what Badiou calls a
normative ‘excrescence’.39
36 See on this topic my book Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundations of Ethics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), especially ch. 4.
Hegel, Phenomenology, §475.
38

Lack and Concept 43
Subject within substance
As we saw in the section above, for Hegel the law of identity (A = A) expresses
the unity of an entity as reflected with its own other as its same. For this reason,
the proposition ‘A is equal to A’ can also be related to Hegel’s famous definition
of substance, which ‘shows itself to be essentially Subject’.40 We want to explain
this reference in more detail since this definition presents Hegel’s monism as
shaped by an ontology of contingency. Substance, as a ‘multiple-presentation’,41
is confronted with its own place of emptiness so to speak, the subject, which
is paradoxically also to be understood as substance. But what does the term
‘substance’ and ‘subject’ mean in this context, and to what extent is Hegel’s
redefinition contradictory from the point of view of ontology?
A long tradition of philosophy, faced with the change of things, facts and
state of affairs around us, tried to clarify at least until the seventeenth century
(via Locke, Hume, etc.) whether certain entities (substances) persist and can
be determined as permanent while others (accidents or modes) are defined
by relational dependence. For if – without this differentiation – there existed
only change, no structures of experience could form at all. Plato’s ideas feature
properties of substances, Spinoza’s understanding of God as nature, Russell’s
‘sense data’ as consistent building blocks of sensory perceptions as well, and even
a single stone can be, according to Jonathan Lowe, interpreted as a substance.42
In the wake of Hume’s rejection of the allegedly pseudo-scientific concept of
substance, Kant was one of the first philosophers of the eighteenth century to
contribute to the dethronement of this classical-metaphysical concept. For him,
substance was not a metaphysical entity, as Plato, Aristotle or Spinoza believed,
but a formal-logical structural principle of conceptual thinking. It embodies a
purely formal function: perdurability through time.43 It guarantees that an object
of experience lasts through time and can be intersubjectively experienced as
such.44
Hegel now reinterprets the concept of substance in a very unique way, because
he not only refers especially to Spinoza’s understanding of substance as the
totality of what exists in different modes of particularities, but he also connects
42 Jonathan Lowe, ‘Substance and Identity’. In Substanz: Neue Überlegungen zu einer klassischen
Kategorie des Seienden, ed. Käthe Trettin (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittoria Klostermann, 2005), 33–52.
43 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 183/B 226.
See Georg Sans, ‘Wieviel Substanz braucht Kant’, Rivista Portuguesa de Filosofia, vol. 62
44
(2005): 707–30.
to this concept of substance the concept of the subject, opposing Spinoza

himself. Substance, as we saw above, ‘shows itself to be essentially Subject’. That
is, where classical metaphysics, and especially Spinoza, speaks of substance as
a metaphysically consistent entity and – in contrast to everything changeable
and contingent (accidental) – associates it among others with a divine primal
principle of the universe or as the essential idea of form
in transformable things,
Hegel breaks with this understanding. He does so by consciously implanting in
the concept of substance a contingent particular: this very subject. ‘Subject’ here
is not something that, as a transitory particularity, is secondary to the substance
(just as accidents are towards their substantial bearers). For Hegel in contrast,
the subject is substance in its own subject-being. This is more than irritating,
for a person may well – as Aristotle describes in the Categories – be a primary
substance as well as instantiate the secondary substance of his species, and, ergo,
the individual Socrates may instantiate his own natural kind of human species
as well.45 However, Hegel does not mean this understanding of the substantiality
of a subject in the quotation mentioned above. For Hegel, the subject itself is
the paradoxical moment within substance where substance (qua subject) is
confronted with its own non-identity. So, substance is for Hegel ‘subject’ where
it, the monistic substance, is able to establish itself as a non-uniform entity in
an exception of itself. And this exception is the subject. It provokes moments of
non-identity – that is, where substance meets its own exception as substance-
qua-subject. However, according to the definition of the concept of substance –
especially Spinoza’s reinterpretation – this cannot actually be thought. Substance
cannot be carried by accidentals and contingencies themselves. Anyone who
asserts this actually annihilates the foundational criterion from which the
concept of substance, at least since Aristotle has gained its essential definition.
Hegel, however, does exactly this and Badiou will follow him on this path into a
materialist rearrangement of idealism’s insights. Badiou does so because he too
knows that each world has to conceal one or more points of exclusion to foster
its own coherence so that it, the world or a world, can count itself as one. What
is excluded stands for an indefinable potentiality that can cause the topicality of
the world to implode. In other words: Hegel’s speech of the subject that shows
itself as the out-of-place where the substance encounters its non-coincidence,
corresponds to Badiou’s theory of the ‘point of excess’46 from which any totality
can be remarked.
45 Aristotle, Categories, ch. 5.
Lack and Concept 45
For Hegel, therefore, substance via ‘subject-as-substance’ is affected by a

missed encounter with itself through a paradoxical particular that is included
in it (in the situation) but not represented in it or only represented too late. This
particular, as we shall explain more fully below, may itself stand within the series
of particulars for the universal. For ‘subject’, as I said, is not just placed upon
‘substance’ as a secondary and arbitrary property, but as accidental property
of substance as substance. Hegel’s talk therefore corresponds structurally to
the ontology of Lacan’s logic of exception, or more precisely, to the logic of a
parallax gap in a totality by an element included and excluded from that totality
at the same time.47 The subject as substance is then both particularity and the
universality enclosing this particularity. To make this argument palpable we
refer to the example of the fate of Jesus of Nazareth, which is very similar to
Badiou’s interpretation of Paul the Apostle.48 Both of them – Jesus of Nazareth
and Paul of Tarsus – are for Hegel as well as for Badiou part of one and the same
truth procedure, according to which a universality arises from a neglected count
that ultimately appeals to the raising of a new world.
Concrete universality
Hegel, the qualified theologian, has commented on the figure of Jesus from
Nazareth time and again through his entire career. For in the Messiah
crystallizes the uniqueness of a worldview, in which worldly matters themselves
enhance the world as ‘creation’ within a process of theological and teleological
soteriology. Jesus Christ has the structural peculiarity of being literally the
moment in the ‘substance’ of the God of the Israelites in which this same God
reveals via his ‘Son’ his non-coincidence. In this respect, for the Man-from-
Galilee’s own sublimation ‘in Christ’, he had to appear within orthodox Judaism
as a paradoxical subject, similar to the case of Antigone – both included in the
multiplicity of presentations of a world, as well as excluded from it. As the ‘Son of
God’, he represents the metaphysical substance that embraces creation as a whole
and is the reality of substance at the site of a particular exception. Jesus comes
from Nazareth, that is, from a place that has no symbolic location whatsoever.
47 On this topic see Jacques Alain Miller, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’. In Concept
and Form: Volume One. Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox
Peden (London: Verso, 2012), 91–102.
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford
48
University Press, 2003).
Jesus, as the ‘anointed one’, is, literally speaking, coming from nothing. He is the
Russellian antinomy in person, which in the fundamental debates of logicism
has led to various axioms for ensuring the coherence of a univocal ‘logical space’
of conceptual determinations, among other things through Russell’s type theory.
So far, however, it has not been clarified how the divine substance, whose
bearer is allegedly Jesus from Nazareth, can be embodied in an exception,
a human being at all. The ‘concrete’ or ‘actual universality’49 that is Jesus is
undoubtedly historically contingent and far from sharing the properties that
correspond to Yahweh’s traditional properties according to the Hebrew Bible.
Why is the man from Nazareth, for example, born near Bethlehem and not in
Jerusalem? Why does he show himself to some chosen Jews, but not to all, or,
to save time, to Romans, Greeks, and Persians too? This seems to contradict
the understanding of a universal entity. In addition, we do not experience Jesus
Christ according to the four Gospels as omnipotent, omniscient or omnipresent.
Certainly, qualities of the universal and the divine appear in him sometimes.
Think of his ethical way of life, the miraculous healings and the conversions
induced by him. But numerous other determinations of the divine substance are
put into question. God appears in him in a strangely capricious form. And yet
this form succeeds in retotalizing the universal via a particular and contingent
exception from which the universal can never really encompass itself. Why?
Well, he is particular and not universal. And if there is a mystery of Christ, it is
probably this: that he is supposed to be both nevertheless.
For Hegel, the just described tension between substance and subject,
particularity and universality is essential, since he expects a concrete universality
only at the site of a contingently historical realization. Where should it, the
concrete universality, be realized otherwise, if the universal in form of an idea can
only reveal itself in the world of phenomena as one phenomenon among others?
Jesus of Nazareth was a charismatic leader among many prophetical figures in
the first century. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, a prophetic figure himself.
In this sense, he was one phenomenon among others. This fact, though, did not
prevent him from subjectivizing his own soteriology in the name of the ‘the way,
the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). One could say therefore with a set-theoretical
term, Jesus from Nazareth ‘diagonalizes’ as Christ not only different prophetic
figures of his time but also the Yahweh entity of the Hebrew Bible, who cannot
even be named, let alone be seen with a human, even all-too human form. In
other words, a concrete subject overrides (or ‘crosses out’) willingly in the name
Lack and Concept 47
of his own name the traditional framework of what the classical metaphysical
substance, Yahweh, embodies. In this moment a place erupts where the ‘frame’
of orthodox Jewish doxa is confronted with its own non-identity: ecce homo.
A fracture becomes the site of a new calibration of a particular space of being.
Substance, that is, the substance of Jewish metaphysics, becomes within itself the
form of itself, but – and now it becomes paradoxical – in the form of another –
or, in other words, in the form of an ‘out-of-form’ of itself. This is what the Man
from Galilee is: the distance of Yahweh to Yahweh. In this rational hides the
train of thought, from which Hegel, but also Badiou, interprets the ontology of
dialectical materialism. With reference to the example mentioned above, one
can say that the universal must embody itself – in the wording of Cantorian set
theory favoured by Badiou – as a ‘subset’, that is, as a special element in its own
totality. It must incarnate itself into a paradoxical species among species (or in
a void of its subsets) that make up its genus (or superset), so that this species
can negate all other parts (species) within the extension of its genus-being.
Only in this way can true universality be conceived for Hegel in the name of a
substance that is constantly overwritten from an open future. The illustration
below explains the argument well. It is an adaptation of a drawing from Žižek’s
book They Know Not What They Do.50
A B (=-A)
a1 Bb a2 b1 b2
The drawing exemplifies several aspects that are unthematically part in the
moment when a concrete universality autocreates its space of arrival. What Hegel
calls concrete or ‘actual universality’ emerges – to say it with Badiou – from the
void of a situation that is the condition that anything exists as represented at
all. In relation to the drawing, the set A is this ‘situation’ with its elements (a1
and a2) as bound variables within itself. The mentioned void in the drawing is
50 Slavoj Žižek, They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2007),
35. I owe the drawing to Moritz Kuhlmann (unpublished manuscript).
marked with the variable: Bb. This place is the subset of the other elements (a1,
a2, etc.) in A and provokes that Bb is the part in A which has no part because
it is the subset, which in radical demarcation of all other subsets (a1, a2, etc.)
in A is an ‘other’ of A. The radical opposition of Bb to other signifiers (a1, a2)
means that it can mutate to the one signifier that potentially occupies the place
of exclusion within A and becomes A in an inverted form, namely B = –A.
The combination of meaning and excess announces itself when an apparently
consistent plurality (in our case the genus A) suddenly sees itself confronted by
a lack of itself. Literally: a defect shows itself and becomes excessive. And ‘Jesus
Messiah’ is a defect in orthodox Judaism, while Jesus of Nazareth is obviously
not. Jesus as Messiah is entrapped in Judaism, growing out of it, but does not
belong to it. A place of remarcation opens up from which substance forms itself
into a new form at the point of its non-coincidence with itself. A totality not
only experiences its non-identity in an element that is excessively and seemingly
anamorphic to itself, but also expands into itself through this non-identity of
another. Badiou expresses this idea when he writes: ‘nothing has taken place but
the place’ (rien n’a eu lieu que le lieu).51
The conflict between Arians, Sabellians and Gnostics about the soteriological
status of Christ Jesus, which Badiou touches upon indirectly in his Theory of the
Subject,52 shows how virtually impossible it was within early Christianity to apply
the traditionally positive determinations of God’s infallibility, infinity and so on
to a spatiotemporal exception that destroys exactly these positive determinations
in one form or the other. In a sense, we are faced with a similar absurdity, which,
as Badiou points out elsewhere, the painter Malevich introduced into the art-
world in 1918.53 He exhibited a painting depicting a ‘white square on a white
background’. In doing so he confronted the contemporary doxa of art lovers,
claiming at the same time that anyone who does not see the meaning of the
difference between white and white as difference that makes a difference must
necessarily be excluded from a novel universality: modern art. The situation is
similar in Christian soteriology. Those who do not believe that the arrival of
the Messiah at a certain space and a certain time implies no victory over the
Roman occupiers but another, rather mystical form of salvation, will not be
able to understand the concrete universality that Paul the Apostle announces
in his epistles. A new theology is taking shape because for orthodox Judaism

52 Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 18–19.
53 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. and commentary Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2007), 55.
Lack and Concept 49
the Torah reveals neither the Messiah in the figure of Jesus Christ nor any such
universalism as Paul describes among others in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:28).
The conflicts surrounding Christological movements of the first centuries
like Sabellianism and Arianism illustrate how almost impossible it was (or is)
for a particular element (which embodies a paradoxical structural principle in
a situation) to be given a permanent status of a missed encounter between the
universal and the particular.54 When a true event has occurred and established
itself in the course of a truth-procedure, it is necessarily exposed to the fate of
reification. It even has to become, in Quinean vocabulary, a ‘bound variable’
again. It proverbially needs a state-apparatus that manages certain properties of
the event but thus immobilizes other properties of the event at the same time,
at least to a certain extent. Badiou describes this difficulty, as aforementioned,
in The Theory of the Subject. Certain forms of political management of an event
can undo the event. Badiou charges the followers of Arian but also the Gnostics
with this failure.
Badiou’s reverence to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) derives
from this background of events failing in the long run. This political movement
embodies for him one of the few revolutionary attempts to give the ‘void’ of a
political situation even after the success of an event a potential space to, again,
rein freely. The Chinese Revolution is the event and the Cultural Revolution of
Mao, so to speak, an attempt to protect the revolution from reification through
its own doxa. Badiou admits the failure of the Cultural Revolution repeatedly.
But in various writings and interviews he emphasizes nevertheless its utopian
potential: to protect the multiplicity of situations after an event from the process
of auto-annihilation.
For Hegel, but also for Lacan and Badiou, the fact that something can be
opened up in substance in the passage through its non-coincidence (via
subjects), is due to the fact that reality only opens up in the inferential network
of justifications, knowledge and beliefs, that is, in the so-called web of belief.
This network depends on transcendental-virtual beliefs in its own coherence.
Recall Lacan’s famous saying that ‘truth is when it inhabits fiction’.55 But why is
that? Because for Lacan and Badiou, as well as for Hegel, there is at the core of
reality an unrepresentable excess that is both revealed and covered up by that
54 Sabellius, a third-century priest, taught that God was single and indivisible. Arius (256–336) and his
followers subordinated Jesus Christ as the Son of God to the Father. Both teachings contradict the
homoousian understanding of Christ, that is, the latter’s ‘consubstantiality’ with the Father.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.
55
W. Norton, 1996), 4.
moment of retotalizing the whole in an event. The emptiness – or, to put it with
Hegel, the negative (with Lacan’s words: the real) – is inconspicuously enclosed
in every situation and master signifiers are representational ‘templets’ to close
this emptiness off. A gap as real opens up nevertheless time and again out of the
blue. It allows a missing object, claim, value, universality to appear when there
is a subject that, by virtue of its particularity, assigns an extension to what until
now cannot be thought. And this is even so if the object is hallucinated and – as
in the case of Paul’s downfall on the way to Damascus – can be perceived only as
a hallucinatory ‘voice’ or a ‘gaze’ of (an)other. Lacan expresses this thought when
he writes, ‘Le tableau, certes, est dans mon oeil. Mais moi, je suis dans le tableau’.
‘The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am in the picture.’56 This can mean that
‘I, Jesus Christ, see the reality in the year 37, but not only that. Reality also sees
me: as Messiah’.
56 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: Book XI, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 96 (translation modified).
4
Hegel’s Immanence of Truths

Frank Ruda
Je crois, moi, qu’il n’y a pas de précurseur.

– Alain Badiou1
Introduction: Back forwards
The greatness of a singular way of thinking sometimes manifests most directly in

its ability to change the past. This is less paradoxical than it may seem at first sight.
It has, for example, famously been stated that the greatness of Kafka becomes
fully apparent through the fact that he was able to create his own predecessors.
But this was not a magic trick. Rather, after Kafka – when one read his work,
obviously – one recognizes a certain Kafkaian ‘something’, a Kafkaesque style, a
Kafkaesque scene or character even in writers that predated Kafka by centuries.
After Kafka, in reading Dante one may be involuntarily reminded of something
Kafkaesque, of something that could not have been there before Kafka – as there
was no Kafka – but will appear to have already anticipated him and will therefore
forever be in Dante after Kafka’s emergence. But this is peculiar back-forward
dynamics is not limited to the history of literature or the arts in general, but also
applies to what happens in the aftermath of the emergence of great thinkers in
philosophy. After Hegel, not only parts of Kant’s project but even Plato’s dialectic
will have latently anticipated Hegel. More dramatically put, after Hegel even
Plato will have been Hegelian. And a Hegelian perspective adds another twist
to this dynamic, since if there is an adequate philosophical conceptualization of
this historical dynamic (pertinent to philosophy) – in short: if there is a proper
1 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Images du temps présent: 2001–2004 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 306.

history of philosophy – it cannot but present not only a multiplicity of such

back-forward loops but must ultimately culminate in one particular articulation
of this very logic that cannot but retroactively totalize this very history – from
its end-point, as it were.
Against this background, what about a philosopher who has been compared
not only to Plato, but, curiously enough, even to Parmenides, namely Alain
Badiou? How does someone supposed to recommence philosophy relate to
the back-forward movement? The comparisons suggest that something of
Parmenides or of Plato, or both, repeats in his work. But this cannot be a case
of a simple repetition.2 On the one hand, Badiou seems to incorporate the very
birth of philosophy, that is under present conditions a rebirth of philosophical
thought – as if he were a Parmenides for the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Yet, according to Badiou’s own reading, even though Parmenides
brought philosophy into the light of the day, philosophy proper is not born
from Parmenides’s intellectual womb. Rather he brought into the world its
embryonic form, something that is not-yet fully philosophy, because it is still
too much inscribed in an already constituted physis. Such Parmenedian newly
born philosophy was still too natural, as most births are; it was still too naturally
embedded in a poetic mode of thinking.3 This is why for Badiou philosophy
proper only begins with Plato. As he was the first philosopher to have examined
the conditions and potentials of a post-poetic philosophy, inter alia by unfolding
a more complex theory of philosophy’s conditioning by other practices and
by attempting to create a first space of compossibility between them. With
Parmenides philosophy was born. And with Plato it was raised to become a
grown-up woman. So, if Badiou reinvented the very possibility of philosophy –
a philosophy after the declared end of philosophy – he also unfolded what this
philosophy must look like, and this is his Platonic side, which is also why it
necessarily took a structured or systematic form.4
The comparison with Parmenides and Plato thus suggests that after Heidegger –
and one can specify that for Badiou Heidegger was our Parmenides5 – and after
2 Obviously Kierkegaard would beg to differ such a thing could even exist, but already the very form
of Badiou’s actual repetition of Plato’s Republic (Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen
Chapters, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) indicates that things are more intricate.
3 For this characterization, cf. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Parménide. L’être 1: Figure ontologique
(1985) (Paris: Fayard, 2014).
4 As everyone knows, grown-ups differ from children because they are structured differently. Freud,
for example, depicted infantile sexuality as lacking ‘centering and organization’, whereas in adult
sexuality ‘a well-organized tyranny has been established’. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 401.
5 Cf. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger. L’être 3 – Figure du retrait (1986–1987) (Paris: Fayard, 2015).
Hegel’s Immanence of Truths 53
the different versions of Heideggerianism (from the Strasburg school and the
diverse branches of deconstruction6 up to a broad variety of newly emerging
sophists that inhabit the space left empty by philosophy’s disappearance and
thrive on the vanishing of any claim to truth), Badiou thought what had to
be thought to properly conceive of the transformation needed for philosophy
to resurge. Badiou begins anew, not with a clean philosophical slate, but with
a historical slate that needed purging as well as with a new formation, so as
to determine what can be done with this new(re)born.7 And within this
very endeavour, Badiou necessarily and retroactively totalizes the history of
philosophy and thus articulates the previously depicted logic – of the loop back-
forward – as a genuinely subjective – not subjectivist – understanding of history;
an understanding of history that is finally without object.8
This becomes intelligible, for example, when he demonstrates why and how
after the historically dated emergence of the idea of communism even the long-
gone Spartacus revolt can be retroactively read as something that will have
been a part of the history of communism. But again, this does not hold for the
practice of politics and the so-called conditions alone. I contend that Badiou
also had such an impact on the history of philosophy.9 But as it is too broad
a task for one article to determine the status of the history of philosophy after
Badiou, I limit myself to something like a particular case study. I single out
one thinker with whom Badiou has repeatedly engaged during all the phases
of his work, namely Hegel, and attempt to demonstrate that with and after
Badiou emerged a peculiar new possibility of reading Hegel. My claim is that
after Badiou’s systematic and conceptual intervention, it has not only become
possible to conceive of a different Hegel, but furthermore to read Hegel as a
thinker who actually already published a detailed systematic elaboration of the
6 There are many places where this becomes explicit. One particularly instructive text in this regard is
Alain Badiou’s Can Politics Be Thought? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
7 The characterization of Badiou as Parmenides and Plato could also imply that Badiou is not one but
two thinkers, so that out of his own conceptual deadlocks – a philosophy still too sutured to one
of its conditions, notably politics in Theory of the Subject and before – his thought re-emerges as if
rejuvenated and reborn, reborn because of a specific and singularly determined deadlock. This idea
is not at all foreign to Badiou’s oeuvre. Recall the discussion of Lacan. If Freud is comparable to Marx
(as he invented a new discipline), Lacan actually is ‘the Lenin of psychoanalysis’ and at the same time
its Mao, since he is ‘like a king succeeding himself ’. Lacan, as much as Badiou, is his own successor.
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 126f.
8 Cf. Alain Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’. In Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduaro
Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24–32. Badiou repeatedly
claimed in public lectures, ‘I am philosophy’.
9 This obviously raises the difficult problem – difficult within Badiou’s own conceptual framework – if
there can be ‘events’ in philosophy. I have to disregard this problem here but have provided the sketch
of an answer in my For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2015).
last – and as yet unpublished – cornerstone of Badiou’s philosophical oeuvre,

notably the last part of his Being and Event trilogy. There is thus an additional
temporal-historical loop involved in the following reflections: not only does the
appearance of a great thinker retroactively transform the precedent history, it
even allows for the paradoxical possibility that what this very thinker is involved
in expounding and developing already exists in the past, in a past that becomes
only readable as anticipating the as yet inexistent future because of his very
intervention into history.
In the following I try to show that after Badiou one is able to see that there
already exists a book deserving of the title ‘The Immanence of Truths’, even
though now, in 2018, Badiou is only on the brink of publishing it himself. This
book is Hegel’s Science of Logic. To substantiate this claim I do not engage with
Badiou’s explicit criticisms of Hegel10 or try to defend Hegel against them. I also
do not investigate Badiou’s own comparisons of his system with that of Hegel
(his Being and Event being his Science of Logic, his Logics of Worlds being his
Phenomenology of Spirit). I endeavour to do one and one thing only, namely to
present how after Badiou one can read a hitherto unread book, namely Hegel’s
Immanence of Truths – that might even ultimately be able to make a highly valuable
contribution to Badiou’s own system. Yet, in the frame of the present article I am
only able to present a highly condensed fragment of such a reading. However,
I hope that it demonstrates why a continuation of this kind of exploration is
worthwhile. Before I begin: Lenin once argued that no Marxist had understood
Marx’s Capital because no one properly understood Hegel. And so he went to
Switzerland to study Hegel after the emancipatory movement in Russia suffered
a brutal defeat and returned right in time for the Russian Revolution to take
place, an act that might therefore be read as the first time someone practically
applied Hegel’s thought to political practice. Althusser twisted Lenin’s diagnosis
by asserting that the latter had actually understood Hegel even prior to reading
him – because he was such a precise reader of Capital – but without knowing
it. In the following, my claim is that, given the back-forward dynamics, it is
plausible to claim that no one has properly understood not Marx but Hegel,
simply because he has not yet been read the way he has to be, after Badiou, that
is as a Badiouan.11
10 See ibid., 133–53.

11 This might be said to even hold for Badiou himself, since Badiou’s criticisms of Hegel still refer to
a Hegel constituted before Badiou, and the Hegel I try to bring out in the following is thus even
unknown to (the) Badiou (critical of Hegel), even though he is the one who allowed for him to
become intelligible after all.
Encountering an event, or absolute knowing
The first step must consist in addressing Hegel’s most notorious and most
frequently criticized concept: absolute knowing. What is absolute knowing for
Hegel, the Badiouan? This question can best be answered by asking another
question: what does Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit seek to achieve, since only at
its end does absolute knowing appear. A classical answer, one that does not rely
on any knowledge of Badiou, is that the Phenomenology is the introduction to
Hegel’s system. It introduces into the system by depicting that and how we must
get rid of all our presuppositions and preconceptions of what it is that we are
about to engage in, namely thinking the absolute (or truth). The Phenomenology
therein works like the self-negating ‘presupposition for a presuppositionless’12
(scientific) presentation of the absolute – that we encounter in the Logic. It is
thus a gigantic endeavour of subtraction that is more Cartesian than Descartes;
it is maybe the most encompassing subtraction in the history of philosophy.
Hegel articulates this task by stating that the ‘road’ of the Phenomenology is
not only ‘the pathway of doubt’, but ‘more precisely . . . the way of despair’13 –
a redoubling radicalization of doubt (Zweifel) to the despair (Verzweiflung)
indicative of anxiety.14
The Phenomenology traverses all possible forms of consciousness and thereby
takes us down a path on which we lose any stable ground that we could cling
to. Yet, this movement is not only performed apropos of the substance, as the
famous Hegelian saying goes, but also apropos of the subject – that is to say,
not only do we lose all substantial ground and our footing in a given substantial
symbolic universe (be it a life-world, community, family, etc.), we also lose the
substance of the subject or the subject as substantially determined in itself so that
we experience something that exceeds our coordinates of experience. And we
thereby even lose the substantial link between substance and subject. The subject
neither has a substantial preordained place in substance nor does the subject
itself have any kind of inner substance. Undoing all substantial conceptions of
substance, subject and their relation is the precondition for the commencement
12 William Maker, Philosophy without Foundation: Rethinking Hegel (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1994), 85.
13 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49.
14 Kant reached this point as he had ‘anxiety of the object’ (G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2010], 30, translation modified, F.R.], but he shied away from facing its
proper consequences. A systematic elaboration of this point can be found in chs. 1 and 2 of Rebecca
Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2018). In much of my argument I rely on this work I have done together with Comay.
of philosophy or the commencement of thinking – which is as much practice as

it is theory of – truth(s). If the Phenomenology is a book that presents us with an
immanent perspective of a process in which all presuppositions are subtracted
and our world crumbles, the conceptual name for reaching the point,15 at which
the peculiar completion of the gigantesque process of undoing is attained, a
point where completion coincides with incompletion, is absolute knowing.
So, absolute knowing is not a name for a knowledge of an object (the absolute),
but rather for an encounter with a moment of utter decreation of everything
that is. And this is the very precondition for thought to begin (as thought is
creative). The Phenomenology depicts the attempts of consciousness to avoid
confronting the rational insight(s) that there is no substance, no substantial
subject and no subjective or substantial relation between the two – and it
presents the inventiveness of consciousness that is driven by the will to avoid
what it cannot but encounter16 – ultimately we move from the impotence of
consciousness to avoid what it cannot but encounter to a point of impossibility:17
to the impossible point where we experience that our knowledge is constitutively
incomplete, not because we do not know enough, but because the world and
universe is constitutively incomplete – and thus something new can emerge.
Another way of putting it is that in absolute knowing we know that any kind
of knowledge is incomplete because it cannot account for the very thing that
drives the very creation of new knowledge. Absolute knowing is the paradox
and impossible knowledge of the incompletion of knowledge that we cannot
integrate into our knowledge, as incompletion is not an object. The absolute
known is the point where it becomes entirely clear that we have nothing – not
even a substantial nothingness – that we could knowingly rely upon. And this
point is the point where we are about to begin to think truth(s). Thinking is in
this sense constitutively unprecedented. All theoretical knowledge of the world
and our capacities, all practical knowledge and knowhow does not help when
15 Hegel explicitly refers to this as a point, when he claims that, ‘In pressing forward to its true
existence, consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened
with something alien, with what is only for it, and some sort of “other”, at a point where appearance
becomes identical with essence, so that its exposition will coincide at just this point with the
authentic Science of Spirit.’ Hegel, Phenomenology, 56f. Literally, as the reader might have noticed,
Hegel refers to the point three times, as if indicating this very elision and subtraction by stating: ‘. . .’
Cf. Rebecca Comay, ‘Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel’, Research in Phenomenology, vol.
16
45 (2015): 237–66.
17 Raising impotence to a point of impossibility was Lacan’s definition of the psychoanalytic cure, of
the end of analysis, of the moment when there is a (re)constitution of subjectivity. Badiou himself
refers to this formula in Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy (New York/London: Verso, 2008), 34.
The transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic deals structurally with the same thing.
we want to commence thinking, or more precisely: think thinking. To begin

thinking we need to reach this impossible possibility of absolute knowing.
This is why Hegel’s shortest definition of it is articulated in the language of
sacrifice: ‘to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself ’.18 The sacrifice –
that is absolute knowing – is not a sacrifice for any greater good, or for oneself as
a greater good, but is a sacrifice of the very idea that one would have anything to
sacrifice. To begin to think means to ‘throw oneself as if into a boundless ocean
. . . all footholds have disappeared, all otherwise friendly lights are extinguished.
Only the one star, the inner star of spirit shines . . . But it is natural that spirit in
its loneliness with itself is affected, as it were, by horror; one does not know what
it is pointing at [wo es hinauswolle], where one will get.’19 In thinking, I do not
simply give up myself and thereby retain myself in the representation of being
a sacrificed object – which would amount to a form of melancholia – but I give
up everything even the idea that giving up myself is a sacrifice and that there
is anything I could sacrifice. The attentive reader might have already figured
that what Hegel’s absolute knowing formally presents us with is precisely what
happens to an individual at the moment when he or she encounters an event. His
or her world is shaken, no certainties remain intact, nothing – not even nothing –
is there to rely upon, there are no objective guarantees, the only thing one knows
is that one does not know what will follow from it and one did not anticipate
this possibility even to exist. One experiences that something new is potentially
about to take place. This is to say that the Phenomenology depicts what happens
when we encounter an event. When we fall in love, for example, we quite literally
traverse all possible forms of consciousness, from sense certainty (can I trust
my eyes that this is really happening, even if I cannot see it?) to religious belief
systems (is this what destiny or God had always planned for me?); we ultimately
rebut all of them, because one is suddenly confronted with the emergence of
an entirely new possibility that makes one radically responsible for what will
happen with it.
Absolute knowing in this sense confronts us with what happens when we
encounter something new, or, more profanely: a problem of totally different
kind. We experience the incompletion of knowledge – thus the impossibility
of experiencing the way we experience otherwise. Falling in love, for example,
we experience that we will never know why we fell in love with precisely this
18 Hegel, Phenomenology, 492.
19 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Konzept der Rede beim Antritt des philosophischen Lehramtes an der Universität
Berlin’. In Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 3, Werke, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1970), 416. My translation, F.R.
person20 – and this is the experience specific to absolute knowing. And this
experience amounts to a ‘problematization’ of everything we were supposed to
know. We experience something out of this world, something real and ‘the real
makes a hole’ – in knowledge – ‘for truth’,21 since ‘a truth is always what makes
a hole in a knowledge’.22 Absolute knowing names the point where we have the
paradoxical experience of a hole in knowledge and in our structure of experience,
a hole through which the absolute might seep through. It is thus not a kind of
objective knowledge, but rather the transition from objective knowledge to a
subjective (conviction and) truth. It is an index of subjectivization.23 The whole
of the Phenomenology of Spirit can thus be read as a very elaborate account of
what happens precisely at the ‘moment’ we identify an event as an event.24 At
such an evental ‘moment’ it is as if we traverse the whole Phenomenology in
less than a nanosecond – that is, in no objectively measurable time. Absolute
knowing thus radically changes the established coordinates of the existing
regime of possibility, as it points us to the very impossible possibility of an event.
And just as an event is constitutively unforeseeable, absolute knowing does not
know what the event will have been, but it confronts us with a moment of utter
freedom: we must choose, either to affirm the newly emerging possibility and act
and think accordingly or refuse to engage in it.
In this sense, absolute knowing is a pointed knowledge, a knowledge of a point
(of the real) that can change everything; but this change only occurs when we
start doing what we did not know we were capable of. Absolute knowing means
to know that one must do something that one does not know how to do, even
though, or more precisely because, it is impossible. And this is why in passing
20 The trivial explanation of this is that if we were able to tell the other why we loved him or her, it
could only be an utter disappointment (e.g. if it is because she earns more than a million per year or
because he is so charmingly tiny); we only know that we do not know why we are in the situation we
are in, and even if it seems utterly contingent, we are nonetheless fully responsible for what happens
afterwards.
21 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 199.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2005), 327.
22
23 Against the obvious objection that Hegel’s discourse is the discourse of philosophy and he is hence
not talking about any ‘condition’ in Badiou’s sense of the term, the reader should be reminded that
Badiou himself described the function of philosophy in similar terms: ‘Philosophy is subtractive,
in that it makes a hole in a sense or interrupts . . . the circulation of sense.’ Alain Badiou, ‘The
Definition of Philosophy’. In Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy (London/
New York: Continuum, 2003), 166. So, philosophy produces holes, too, by constantly affirming the
very impossible possibility of truths that make holes in knowledge, by affirming absolute knowing.
This is why the despair that pertains to it is not accidental, but an evental encounter cannot but
24
produce anxiety. But it needs to be confronted with the right amount of courage – as Badiou
elaborated in Theory of the Subject and – as Hegel points out when he emphasizes that ‘the will
and courage for the truth’ is absolutely necessary to think. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia
Logic (with the Zusätze). Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), 5.
through it, we – for Hegel – also place ourselves in an impossible position, an
impossible point (of view), notably that of ‘God as he is in his eternal essence
before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit’.25 If for a moment we lay aside
the apparently megalomaniac language here, one can see that for Hegel with
the encounter of an event and through its affirmation, we are in a position from
which we can create something new, a new world, including ourselves (the finite
spirit) and even everything we will regard as unchangeable (nature). An event
confronts us with a choice and allows for the impossible possibility of finding
ourselves in the position of creation. And in creating, that is by unfolding the
consequences of the newly emerging possibility, we ‘live “as an Immortal” ’.26
That is, we live, act and think like God did in creating the world.
If one takes seriously Hegel’s reference to God before the creation of the world
in our context, and if this is the peculiar ‘perspective’ from which the Science of
Logic will run its course, not only does this mean that everything we read in
this work are God’s thoughts before the creation of the world, but it also means
that we are in the very same position and think his or her thoughts. To put this
differently: passing through the Phenomenology – which presents what happens
when we encounter an event – we reach a point (this is subjectivization) where
we are in a position of utter exception from the previous laws and norms of the
world (or situation). The world, the situation, the whole universe is bracketed not
phenomenologically, as in Husserl, but ontologically. And if Hegel’s Logic depicts
us the very thoughts of the creator before or while creating, it can consistently be
claimed that this very book is formally presenting the immanence of any truth
procedure as such. Any true creation, this must be Hegel’s claim, follows the very
logic depicted in the Logic. But before we can examine – at least in parts – the
formal constitution of this creative procedure, we have to take a brief detour
and tackle one intricate question, namely the question of how, for the Badiouan
Hegel, the Phenomenology is actually related to the Logic.
Affirming the event, or resolve
If one can defend the claim that the vanishing of all determinations that the
Phenomenology depicts is what happens when we encounter an event, and if the

26 This is Badiou quoting Aristotle, in Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto
Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 507.
Logic structurally follows the Phenomenology, it cannot but depict the unfolding
of the consequences of an event. Yet, an intricate question arises: do the two
books follow one and the same dialectical schema? Hegel, the Badiouan, cannot
but give a straightforward answer. It cannot be the same dialectical movement.
In the Phenomenology we can begin by writing something on a piece of paper, by
then waiting a couple of hours and articulating the dialectical insight that what
once seemed true, is not any longer. This instigates the dialectical processes that
Hegel describes as that of overcoming ‘sense-certainty’.27 The same does not hold
for the Logic. For one, this is because after the Phenomenology we have nothing
left, nothing we could take for granted or as a given. The process of subtracting
all determinations that it depicts is so profound that absolute knowing does
not provide us with a new footing. Rather, as Hegel states in the Logic: ‘Pure
knowledge . . . has sublated every reference to an other and to mediation; it
is without distinctions and as thus distinctionless it ceases to be knowledge;
what we have before us is only simple immediacy.’28 The process of the vanishing
of all determinations – the Phenomenology – culminates in absolute knowing
and absolute knowing is so pure – it is the pure identification of an event as an
event – that it ceases to be knowledge. So, there is a process of disappearance of
all determinations and appearances that ultimately disappears itself: a vanishing
of the process of vanishing.29 What does this leaves us with? With simple
immediacy. What does this mean?
It means that the Phenomenology leads us to something immediate, but that,
as it is mediated by its whole process, it is a mediated immediacy, an immediacy
of a newly emerging choice.30 For Badiou as well as for Hegel, in the beginning
there is the immediacy of a forced decision, as this is precisely how an event
appears to an individual. The forced decision is the form of subjectivization. But
the subjectivization, that is, the identification of an event as an event, the forced
recognition that one must choose, is not identical to the practical exploration
and unfolding of the consequences of this very event. It is precisely Hegel’s
Logic that presents the latter from an immanent perspective. This also means
that in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic we are dealing with
a logic of subjectivization; a logic of becoming-subject due to the encounter
27 Hegel, Phenomenology, 58–67.
29 This and the following points are elaborated in detail from within Hegel in Comay and Ruda,
The Dash.
30 And one can obviously see that the Phenomenology, as saturated with historical references and
material, proves the fact that any event is essentially historical; even if for the emergence of history
proper, one needs something that cannot but appear a-historical. See Badiou, Being and Event, 173ff.
of an event. But to uphold this reading one must demonstrate that the actual
process of subjective practice that springs from the evental encounter is thus not
identical with the moment of subjectivization (i.e. the dialectical movement of
the Phenomenology is different from that of the Logic). If absolute knowing is the
knowledge of the emergence of an evental exception to the laws of the situation
and if this places us in an exceptional position vis-à-vis the previous laws of
appearance (the position of God before the creation), to more precisely articulate
the move from the former to the latter, it is important to note that there is no
automatism of the event. An event does not automatically yield consequences.
They are produced by those who have become subjectivized in them.
There is no automatic unfolding of the consequences of an event. The event
forces us to be responsible for its very unfolding, but we can obviously refuse this
responsibility. Either one becomes practically engaged in seeing what the event
will have been through unfolding its consequences in a concrete situation or
one refuses such an engagement. Encountering an event, we have no choice but
to choose, between engaging in its consequences practically or not engaging in
them. And only in the practice initiated by the event, can we thus fail in a strong
sense of the term. Only after falling in love one can ruin one’s own love practice
and will one have become responsible for this particular failure. This means that
with the event the responsibility emerges for us to determine what the event will
have been. And, as if to add insult to injury, this is important because the event
is essentially nothing other than what it will have been – it is nothing but its
consequences. Since we are forced to choose, the choice in question is not a free
choice, neither deliberate nor the result of reflection.31 But is all this reference
to choice not entirely foreign to Hegel, the thinker who in recent years has been
prominently read as theorist of normativity and the space of reasons?
It is in the very transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic – in a text
that precedes the actual beginning of the Logic proper – that one can find Hegel’s
rendering of precisely this point. He raises the question of how one can begin
with the endeavour he is about to begin – the Logic, that is the presentation of
truth(s) as such – and it is here that he elaborates what it means that we are, after
the Phenomenology, left with simple immediacy. Since the only thing to make
a beginning is ‘to take up, what is there before us’.32 We just have to take up the
simple immediacy, which it itself already ‘an expression of reflection’,33 notably of
31 In this sense, the choice is paradoxical. Since no one decides to fall in love, for example. One is either
in love, without ever having consciously decided to be in love, or one is not. This choice was thus
(unconsciously) taken.
Hegel, Science of Logic, 47.
32
33 Ibid.
the subtractive process of the Phenomenology. But what does this mean? Hegel
answers by stating what is there before us:
There is only present the resolve, which can also be viewed as arbitrary, of
considering thinking as such. The beginning must then be absolute or, what means
the same here, must be an abstract beginning; and so there is nothing that it may
presuppose, must not be mediated by anything or have a ground, ought to be rather
itself the ground of the entire science.34
In the beginning – as an effect of the encounter of an event – there is a resolve, a

decision. This decision decides nothing but to consider thinking as such; it decides
to start to think, it affirms the very newly emerged possibility of thought. This
resolve – like the ‘decision’ to fall in love – is not an individual resolve,35 not my
decision, but it is a kind of anonymous decision36 taken within me to which in
the following process I can only remain faithful. Resolve is Hegel’s name for the
affirmation of the event.
Immanence of truths: The logic
Following this, Hegel’s Science of Logic depicts in great detail the consequences
of such an affirmative resolve that will only have become possible as an effect of
the forced choice of the event, that is, the point of absolute knowing. The Logic
is therefore not an exhibition of the transcendental coordinates of thought or the
world, but it presents the very form of any practical creation of any post-evental
truth. This is why Hegel also refers to the Logic as ‘the science of absolute form’37
because the absolute – truth – is nothing but a practical creation of a form for that
which did not yet receive any since it previously seemed impossible. And this very
creation does not happen automatically, it is the result of an immense labour of
thought. What is the first result of the decision to affirm the eventually emerging
possibility of thinking?
34 Ibid., 48. This is in line with Badiou’s claim that ‘philosophy is a construction of thinking where
. . . it is proclaimed that there are truths’. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/
New York: Continuum, 2008), 11.
35 This is what mistakenly Kierkegaard claimed.
36 Badiou also refers to the anonymity in his elaboration of the status of the intervention (or decision).
Cf. Badiou, Being and Event, 229f.
As any reader of Hegel will know, the first concepts the Logic begins with
are being and nothing.38 Why is this? Because the very ‘being of an event is a
disappearing’39 or put differently: because an event is essentially undecidable.40
This is to say that there are no objective criteria by means of which one could
determine in advance if what is happening to us is an event or not. Only its
consequences will offer the proof of that. Or more precisely: there is no proof that
something is happening to us except what might follow from it. This is another
way of saying that truth is index sui. There is no objective proof that we fell in love
when we fell in love, other than that we start acting in a peculiar manner. That
is to say, an event has no special kind of being – as it is something that is not, for
example, it happens41 – and it can only become something if it produces effects.
An event therefore creates a peculiar indistinguishability between being – as
it is happening to us – and nothing – as its whole ontological status depends
on the consequences it will have yielded. This is why the Logic begins with
the indistinguishability of being and nothing – since being is not identical to
nothing, but also not different from it, because both have no determinations yet.
As such indistinguishability characterizes any event, being and nothing being
peculiarly indistinguishable from one another are the first determinations one
can gain from encountering an event. With this indistinguishability all thought
commences.
Being and nothing are undistinguishable and yet distinguished – ‘they are not
without distinction’42 – they are two that form an inseparable unity that is the
event. Hegel articulates this in stating: ‘Pure being and pure nothing are therefore
the same.’43 In the beginning there is a ‘non-being . . . since in non-being there
is contained the reference to being . . . – and this can also be expressed, if one
so wishes, simply by saying the mere “not” [durch das bloße Nicht]’.44 This is
commencement of thinking in the emergence of the ‘place of thought of
that-which-is-not-being’,45 that is, the event. But if an event is nothing but its
consequences, this also means that there is never the pure moment of the event
38 A critical examination of the beginning of Hegel’s Logic can be found in Alain Badiou, The Rational
Kernel of Hegelian Dialectics (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 49–85. I want to suggest that the whole
ontological status of the beginning of the Logic changes if one takes into account the decision that
precedes and thus (un)grounds it.
39 Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’, in Infinite Thought, 87.
40 See Badiou, Being and Event, 327ff.
41 Obviously, on another level an event is a multiplicity, as everything that is a multiplicity (for Badiou).
But it is a special kind of (paradoxical, self-belonging) multiplicity.
43 Ibid., 59.
44 Ibid., 61 (translation modified, F.R.).
in which we could dwell. Rather one is ‘immediately in the consequences’46 –

note the emphasis on the immediacy again. The evental indistinguishability that
forces us to decide does thus not present us with being and nothing as stable
entities, rather both always already ‘had passed over’47 into the other. Because
an event immediately places us in the realm of consequences, the unity of being
and nothing articulates itself also immediately in ‘a third’.48 We can only speak of
the peculiar ontological constitution of an event after we already moved on, that
is in retrospect and this is the reason as to why for Hegel, we only retroactively
introduce being and nothing to give an account of that in which we already are,
the third (concept), which is becoming.49
What is becoming? It is determined as twofold transition from nothing to
being and from being to nothing – so we are still determining the event as event
in a purely formal manner, becoming is the unity now of this repeated movement
of one passing over into the other. This is what Hegel calls coming-to-be and
ceasing-to-be.50 No evental consequences without bringing new determinations
into the world and without the vanishing of into nothing of others, but the latter
is not simply nothing, but obviously introduces a more determinate form of
negation (as we are negating this or that determination51). The unity of these two
movements Hegel calls – and the reader should be reminded that we are here in
the Logic and are thus not dealing with appearances52 – existence, being-there
(Dasein).53 What is being-there? It is the determinate and qualitative unity of
being and nothing. It is qualitative because it is real, it is there and determinate
because due to its being-there it entails negation. Being-there is the first real
consequence of an event; events create a new existence, a new ‘something
concrete’.54 We thus move from a newly emerging possibility to the creation of
a concrete new something, a new existence. So, being-there is there and thus
real, but it also entails a negation, being this being-there and not another and
46 Alain Badiou, Séminaire: L’images du temps présent II, 2002–3, session of May 14, 2003. www.
entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/02-03.3.htm.
48 Ibid., 69.
49 Consistently with what I suggest above, Hegel claims that ‘all further logical determinations . . .
are therefore examples of this unity’ (ibid., 62) of being and nothing that characterises the evental
encounter. For Hegel, as for Badiou, philosophy only thinks events – which are what they are only
because of their consequences – and shapes its concepts accordingly.
50 Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 80.
Not ‘this or that’ concrete determination. But the ‘this-ness or that-ness’ of determination, since we
51
are here still on a entirely formal plane.

52 As Hegel remarks, ‘the representation of space does not belong here’ – as we are in the process of
creating a world and did not yet arrive there; ibid., 83f.
53 Ibid., 81.
54 Ibid., 84.
precisely because of this determinateness of the unity of being and nothing –

that is the event – we here encounter something.
This means that the consequence of an event is that there is something and
this means that there is something-there (das Dasein ist Daseiences, Etwas). And
this something is ‘the beginning of the subject’55 – even if it is only its beginning,
because it only ‘obtains in the concept its concrete intensity’.56 Any subject begins
as a something, even though this is not the most intense subjective form. But
because the something is a more determinate unity of being and nothing and their
unity conceptually necessitates the concept of becoming, something becomes,
even though in a more determinate manner. Something becomes something else,
an other. Yet, there is no stark difference between something and some other, as
this other is also something (actually the becoming-other of something). But if
something necessarily becomes an other and the other is a something that therefore
also becomes other, both – something and the other of something – ‘are other in
the same way’.57 So, the something that we seemed to have as a stable ground is less
stable than assumed. One can here see that in the unfolding of the consequences
of an event, what is produced are not simply new forms of existence, but the fact
that these forms do not have any substantial identity except that they become other.
But with the other, there also emerges the other of the other – as the other is simply
the other of something and hence a repetition of something. But the other of the
other is different from the other, the other of the other is the other becoming other,
whereby we see that we can only properly determine what follows from an event in
its most formal manner if we account for something in itself – something just as it
is there – and something for an other – as any something constitutively is in itself
becoming other.58 Any something is in itself a being-for-others, as it is constitutively
othering (and othering of this very othering) – which is what it means that we are in
the realm of becoming.59 The identity of something is determined by its becoming
and thus being other.
But what then is the something formally, if it is not supposed to vanish fully in
something else? Hegel replies by introducing a further distinction, namely that
between determination and constitution. What any being – any something – is in
itself equals its determination, its ‘affirmative determinateness’,60 notably – here
55 Ibid., 89.
56 Ibid. (Translation modified, F.R.).
57 Ibid., 91.
58 I cannot but apologize to the reader for the many elisions needed to be able to at least proceed even
through the first pages of Hegel’s Logic.
Ibid., 95.
59
60 Ibid.
in the beginning – that it is (there as something). But because any something

becomes other, any something also has a constitution, which is ‘that in the
something which becomes an other’.61 The constitution is what changes; the
determination is what subsists through the change. But because any something
is in itself something for others, it is not entirely just an othering, because there
is still something in the something – even if it is just the indistinguishable
difference between the in itself and the for-others of this very something –
that does not become other. Another way of putting this is to say that there is
something that resists in the something and this is its determination. Hegel’s
point is that what resists becoming other, the being-for-the-other is precisely
the othering of something itself. That is to say there is nothing which does not
become other and hence it is precisely this determinate nothing, or this very
othering that resists the othering. The only thing that does not become other is
the becoming other itself and it is thus precisely what determines the identity
of the newly created something. No commencement of the subject without a
constant othering that resists all stability, except that of othering. One can
here see, and very much in line with Badiou’s most recent elaborations of the
concepts of identity and difference (that nonetheless Hegel at this point did not
yet introduce),62 why we very slowly begin to determine the identity of the newly
emerging subject.
The consequences of the event can only be unfolded if a new subject
emerges and if this subject does not rely on any stable form (of identity or
transformation), but is engaged in a permanent process of othering, of becoming
other. This is a conceptual necessity of thought itself. But with this move it is
clearly determined that becoming other is part of the subject on the level of
something. But the problem is that the othering is not clearly determined.
Because something can only become other – constantly – if we still can make a
difference between something and an other. Otherwise, there is no othering and
we ended up precisely where we did not want to end up, in a peculiar substantial
undifferentiated and indeterminate stability. This is why one must avoid the
complete collapse of something into something else, hence the distinction
between determination and constitution. But this difference itself is not enough
and therefore Hegel derives the concept of the limit. There must be a limit
(Grenze) between something and something else to avoid there collapse in a
61 Ibid., 96.
62 See Alain Badiou, ‘True Communism Is the Foreignness of Tomorrow’. www.versobooks.com/
blogs/1547-true-communism-is-the-foreignness-of-tomorrow-alain-badiou-talks-in-athens.
generalized othering. Since if something would be constantly become something

else, it would not be something but the othering into something else, which then
could not be conceived of as there would not be anything else anymore.
So, to remain something (new), something must be different from something
else (something old, for example). It must be affirmatively this something and
posit a limit between itself and something else. Otherwise, not only something
vanishes but also the very process of othering that is needed so that the something
remains what it is conceptually supposed to be. Hegel resumes this very idea
by stating ‘that something has existence only in limit’.63 It only and properly
exists not only when it is different but in the very difference from something
else. Hence, in that which limits it from being something else is where it truly
exists. But precisely thereby it does not seem to exist truly in itself but only by
the negative determination of what it is not. To elaborate this point, Hegel takes
refuge to the dialectic of the point and the line. I will end my commentary – a
bit arbitrarily – here, as it is this discussion which will subsequently give rise to
one of the most complex discussions in the first part of the Logic that leads into
the distinction between good and bad infinity, which would need an article of its
own to be adequately linked to Badiou’s own treatment of the concept of infinity.
From the point to the line to the finite
Hegel’s treats the concept of the limit by recourse to the dialectic of the point
and the line. Why? Because the line is only a line if it is not a point – the point
is the limit of the line because if the line becomes a point it stops being a line.64
But any line begins in a point, there is always a point not only from which a line
starts, but also from which one starts calling a line a line. The point is the limit of
the line but at the same time it is its ‘absolute beginning’ – and remains, however
infinite the line is, ‘its element’.65 The limit thereby becomes the very principle
of that which it limits. Hegel’s point vis-à-vis the point is that the limit is not an
external limit, but an internal one – which is why the next concept he starts to
discuss is the concept of finitude (i.e. the idea of something that is internally
limited).

64 See ibid., 99f.
65 Ibid., 100.
What do we get from this transition from the limit to finitude? First, we
learn that an event produces a new (form) of existence. We then see that it can
only remain what it is when it relates to (and becomes) something else. But this
becoming must have specificity and determination, something must remain
stable in the overall becoming other of something. What is this what remains
stable? It is precisely what is affirmed when the event is affirmed, what the in
itself of the something new is – that which determines it – is what Badiou calls
‘the evental statement’.66 The beginning of the consequences of an event formally
manifest in the effects the affirmation of the event as event has. This manifests
so that the something has no other ‘kernel’, no other in itself that this very
affirmation. Otherwise, it is nothing but a constant process of becoming-other.
But this means that its constitution changes, yet its affirmative determination
remains the same. Why does this have anything to do with finitude? Because
the evental affirmation internally limits and thus determines the something,
as this or that specific something. It relates to something internally finitizing it
on a formal level, because, say, if I affirm the possibility of ‘proletarians of the
world unite’ then this excludes any kind of action which stands in violation with
this very affirmation and thus inscribes a limit into my actions – which is why
finitude is as immediate67 as the decision which constitutes the something as
one of the (infinity of) consequences of the event. The question that arises here
is how does this finitude relate to the inherent infinity of the truth procedure
itself? How does finitude finalize itself? And how is this finitude here related to
what Badiou refers to as an ‘oeuvre’? These are questions that we will have to deal
with in another place.
66 Alain Badiou, ‘Thinking the Event’. In Philosophy in the Present, ed. Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek
(Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 33.
5
The Torsion of Idealism

Jan Völker
Before
My aim in this chapter is to analyse a fundamental structure in philosophical

thought and to emphasize the specific turn it takes in Badiou’s philosophy. I will
argue that it is in this specific turn, that Badiou’s philosophy repeats and changes
a fundamental moment of German Idealism. The fundamental structure I want
to analyse is the relation to the world that any philosophy unfolds. Philosophies
relate to objects, and to thought, and often they relate objects to thought as
objects of thought. By ‘world’ I thus simply propose we understand the entirety
of these relations between objects and thoughts.
Now, one of the most peculiar traits of Badiou’s philosophy is to be found in
its exceptional form of relation. Philosophy, for Badiou, is conditioned by four
truth procedures – love, politics, art and science – that is, it is related to them,
but philosophy is not able to grasp these procedures as its objects. Philosophy
does not produce an objective knowledge about that upon which it relies. On
the contrary: philosophy relies on the singularity of the truth procedures that
are to be found in the difference they inscribe into objective knowledge. The
challenge for philosophy is thus twofold: it cannot classify the occurrences in
the conditions within a preexisting order, but it relies on the singularity of their
‘taking place’.
Philosophy’s relation to the world is thus not inscribed into the frame of
knowledge, and thereby a certain unease must appear, a restlessness concerning
the actual relation of a philosophy to the world. Can we ever know that what
the philosopher declares is true? Philosophy unfolds its relation to the world
as an exception within and from the world, philosophy is itself the place of an
exception within and from the world.
Alongside the general construction of a relation to the world, philosophies form

relations among each other. One might consider those relations as another instance
of the relations to the world, and definitely other philosophies are part of the world.
But as philosophy builds an exception within the world of relations, a philosophy
relating to another philosophy does also relate to it as to another exception.
If we want to address the form of the relation to the world in Badiou and want
to relate this form to the forms of relating to the world in German Idealism,
we are then neither dealing with two different things, nor with two identical
things; instead, we are working towards a repetition that receives a derivation at
some point. To get to this point, we will follow a twofold program: in a first step,
we will assume that the general aspect of relation can be referred back to the
construction of a ‘before’, the formation of a line by which philosophy indicates
something it relates to. In a second step, this distinction itself will be shown to
refer to a ‘desire’ for philosophy. And it is this ‘desire’ that marks an incision, in
which philosophy begins. Our hypothesis then is that it is in this incision that
Badiou’s philosophy repeats an essential moment of German Idealism, although,
as already alluded, this repetition is marked with a specific incision, inserting a
difference into it.
Beginning
Everything is about the beginning then, and I will provide two prominent
examples to show how the question of the beginning can be unfolded: one says
that we won’t be able to understand this problem of the beginning, because we
always have already begun to think. Even if all the differences between objects
and subjects, between philosophy and non-philosophy are a result of thought
itself, we cannot think the difference from thought in thought. Thus we are always
already in thought, and philosophy is a specific way to think, but is incapable to
say what is not-thought. Thinking is marked by the infinity of its possibilities,
but also by the finitude of its capacity. This is the transcendental answer given by
Kant. Recall one of its canonic statements: ‘The a priori conditions of a possible
experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the
objects of experience.’1 It is thought alone that gives us access to its outside, but
strictly speaking we cannot think anything outside thought.
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge/
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234 (A 111).
The Torsion of Idealism 71
The other answer is that we can actually escape this paradox if we take it into
account as such. We can basically think the paradox because it is the paradox of
thought. Thus, at the moment we think, we are in the middle of the paradox. The
paradox of the ‘before-thought’ is thought itself, although thought might not know
this from the beginning on. Thought will disentangle its presuppositions, but will
then find out that it is itself the split between the inside and the outside, it is, so to
speak, its own outside. Thought will already have been there, and thinking will have
to grasp its own difference that is always inscribed into its belatedness. Thinking
is marked by the finitude of its inscriptions, but also by the infinity of its capacity.
This is the Hegelian answer. We can refer to of the beginning of the Logic, in which
being and nothing prove to be only distinguishable in a movement that sublates
the distinction: becoming. Thought and its outside can only be distinguished once
thought realizes itself as the real outside itself.
For Kant, then, there can be no ground of philosophy before philosophy. We
thus get an abyss as the negative ground, the infamous thing in itself, the ontology of
being about which we cannot know anything. For Hegel, the paradox of the missing
ground is the ground itself, we thus get the abyss of the ground as the ground itself
of absolute knowing. The ‘before’ remains unthinkable in Kant, and it is precisely
not before thought, but rather the centre of thought in Hegel.
If we take the line of the ‘before’, separating philosophy from that to which it
relates, and read it as the line between the object and the subject, then we might
even say that the object is the object of the subject in Kant, and the object is the
subject in Hegel.
And we can also draw a further conclusion from this comparison. On the one
hand, the assignment of a ‘before’ is an act that is closely related to the existence of
philosophy itself, as philosophy can only exist once there is something before it. On
the other hand, yet again, the actual ‘before’ gains a problematic status, suspended in
Kant, sublated in Hegel. But once the line of the ‘before’ is precarious, the existence
of philosophy itself is also rendered uncertain. In Kant as in Hegel the question
of a true beginning is obscured, the beginning is deferred into an unreachable
prehistory of thought or the beginning will always already have been there.
For Badiou, as it is clear that philosophy has not existed at all times, there is
a ‘before’ of philosophy, by which it is conditioned. The before of philosophy are
its conditions, and if not all of the conditions are in place, philosophy cannot
properly exist.2 This is a temporal and a structural before: structurally, philosophy
2 See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1999), 35.
follows upon its conditions, on which it relies. But it is also a temporal ‘before’,
philosophy itself has a beginning, and before it there was no philosophy.3
The structural ‘before’ seems to imply that the before is set only when
philosophy is there too. Philosophy is there, and its before is indicated within it.
But what happens when there is no philosophy and we are not sure about how to
figure out its structural before? How do we find out about the conditions if that
what is conditioned does not yet exist, simply because the conditioned does not
indicate the conditions to be its before?
In this temporal aspect of the ‘before’, we can also recognize a very modern
aspect. To begin something new and not to belong to the ancients any longer
is a decisive moment in the understanding of modernity. To be modern, it is
necessary that before it there were the ancients; ancients that only become
ancients for the modern. ‘Modern’ in this relation is the consciousness of a
break: modern philosophy does perhaps not, if it is not too narcissistic, declare
itself to be the beginning of a new time, but it declares eras of thought to be dead
and other eras to be beginning. This modern moment of philosophy did already
take place within the ancients, if we think of the famous parricide in Plato, when
he refutes Parmenides. Let us say that philosophy accepts that there are changes
in time, and because of this it necessarily has to engage with time. Structurally,
something non-philosophical exists before philosophy, but there is also a time
before and a time of philosophy.
It might also have been a different philosophy that took place ‘before’
philosophy. For example, a certain philosophy declares that metaphysics reigned,
before reason was able to unfold and develop itself in its full strength. In Kant’s
understanding, metaphysics was a disoriented affair before critical philosophy
came along, and metaphysics after criticism can only be better, can become an
oriented thinking. This temporal aspect of the before – thus the time before
philosophy and the time of philosophy – can result in a history of philosophy
that is also a philosophical history.
But there is a peculiarity to be recognized when this ‘before’ refers to
another philosophy. Another philosophy can be turned into a simple before of
philosophy. It is then treated not as an exception from the world, but rather is
taken as a part of the world, to which (the new) philosophy relates. This implies
negating the actual philosophical impact in any ‘previous’ philosophies, it
implies stripping off their exceptionality by reducing them to just another part of
the world. The true difficulty is the singularity of the relation of one philosophy
3 Ibid., 33.
to another: philosophy relates to another philosophy as to another exception,

and the latter is a part of the world as well as an exception within and from it.
But often the singularity of the relation to another philosophy is tacitly reduced.
Any real philosophy in Kant’s sense, for example, can only be transcendental. In
this sense the line of the ‘before’ does lead into the one history of philosophy,
and the question of the ‘before’ is reduced to the temporal development of
philosophy as such: there is a time in which philosophy exists, and there is a
time in which philosophy does not exist. But the problem of the relation to
other philosophies points us to a different, more complex understanding. The
temporal notion of the ‘before’ is split: on the one hand, if philosophy situates
itself as an exception within and from the world, it can only do so by referring
to exceptions and their becoming in this world. Philosophy relates to the world
not only as to something non-philosophical, but it relates to the world in its
exceptions and their time. And on the other hand, the existence of philosophy
itself is not simply an exception from the world, but an exception within the
world, insofar as philosophy unfolds itself in time. Thus philosophy inscribes
a time of its own into the world, a time that continues into the ‘before’, which
becomes a before of exceptions. Philosophy creates an exceptional world.
Once philosophy is there, structural and temporal aspects of the ‘before’
fall into one. Now that philosophy is there, something is there that is not
philosophical and this non-philosophical moment introduces a temporal gap
into a philosophy that comes after the before. But now that philosophy does also
unfold a time of its own, as an exception, it does also relate to the becoming of
other exceptions. The relation of one philosophy to another is a specific case
then, insofar as we can grasp in it the specific problem of the before. On the one
hand, it does relate an aspect of time with an aspect of timelessness, which is the
case in any relation that philosophy inscribes. But on the other hand, in other
philosophies these exceptional relations are negated or affirmed and are thus
given a specific existence or are repressed.
Philosophy then, in its beginning, inscribes a difference: not only a difference
in the sense of the acknowledgement of the existence of another object, different
from philosophy, but a difference in the fundamental sense: philosophy inscribes
difference itself, as that which differs from objects and makes it possible to say
that this is a different object. Philosophy indicates its having something before it,
and it deems itself different to what precedes it, although this will be a different
exception.
In this act, philosophy is a subject that distinguishes an object as its ‘before’.
Subsequently, the object might prove to be a subject, and the subject to be an
objective structure, but still we can say that the question of beginning comprises
three elements: an object, a subject and the before (in its structural as well as
in its temporal aspects). The problem here, the problem of all beginnings, is of
course that the first two moments – the object and the subject of the beginning –
show the beginning to be filled with presuppositions.
Philosophy sets the before: it arranges the object as coming before the
subject or vice versa, and both of them to be before philosophy. But philosophy
is incapable of inscribing this inaugural gesture into its own discourse. Both,
Kant and Hegel, develop different answers to this problem, deferring from or
inscribing the unbridgeable gap in philosophy itself. This unbridgeable gap is the
motor of modern philosophy itself, with the uncertainty of its inaugural gesture
it is marked by a certain impossibility.
However, in this triad of the subject, the object and the before, the third
component, the before, opens up a different angle from the other two, as it differs
structurally from the other two components. The essential moment of difference
is that we can understand the before as the interruption between the object and
the subject: the object comes before the subject or the subject comes before the
object, and both are ‘before’ philosophy. The ‘before’ establishes a relation, and
therefore it differs from the components of the object and the subject. The third
component, the question of the ‘before’ belongs exclusively to philosophy alone.
In the indication of a ‘before’, it is philosophy that brings itself into relation
with the world of subjects and objects by making the incision of a before in the
structural and the temporal sense. With the incision of a ‘before’, philosophy
adds itself, it adds itself as this incision.
So where does this ‘before’ properly belong, if it belongs properly to philosophy
but comes before it? Philosophy creates a before, and we do not know how to
handle this philosophically. Philosophy is marked by an incision in itself and
it is itself an incision in the world. How can we understand philosophically
the cut that philosophy is, in itself and for the other in which it makes its cut?
Philosophy as this incision is without a place.
Un pas de plus
I suggest to understand as of one of the fundamental claims in Badiou’s

philosophy that the beginning begins with the second step. The first step is
constitutively missing, as it is in Kant, but this does not mean that we cannot
think it. We begin with the second step, as in Hegel, but this does not mean that
we actually cannot begin, because we would always already have begun. Rather,
beginnings are possible. The first step is missing, yet beginnings are possible.
This might be reformulated as: there is no beginning, but there are beginnings.
Thus, philosophy with Badiou makes ‘un pas de plus’, takes a step further.4 This
pas de plus is, and this is decisive, fundamental and secondary; it is a step without
origin. This is how we can understand the first part of the incisive cut of Badiou’s
philosophy: to think the fundament, the ground of thought without implying
any reference to it as an origin of thought. Ein Grund ohne Ursprünglichkeit (A
ground without originality). We infer this pas de plus by purloining a passage
from the beginning of Being and Event. Here it is a matter of the philosophical
balance between the one and the multiple:
For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not.
But this is unacceptable for thought, because what is presented is multiple and
one cannot see how there could be an access to being outside all presentation.
If presentation is not, does it still make sense to designate what presents (itself)
as being? On the other hand, if presentation is, then the multiple necessarily
is. It follows that being is no longer reciprocal with the one and thus it is no
longer necessary to consider as one what presents itself, inasmuch as it is. This
conclusion is equally unacceptable to thought because presentation is only this
multiple inasmuch as what it presents can be counted as one; and so on.5
The pass to this impasse is given by Badiou in the form of a decision:
We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana
of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of
its own sophistic consumption. This decision can take no other form than the
following: the one is not.6
Philosophy is defined on the threshold of this distinction and as the consequence

of a necessitated choice. Subsequently, Badiou will unfold the one as the result
of an operation, so that the one is not in any ontological sense, but rather results
only from a secondary operation that Badiou will name the count. What is
presented is multiple and is counted as one.
Thus, we begin with the second step: not because we would have to begin
with the one that is counted, but because the decision about the non-being of
the one cannot be a first, but only a second step. It is a philosophical decision
4 Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 12.

6 Ibid., 23.
built on the necessity fuelled by the impasse of the one and the multiple. It is
the reaction to an impasse, but it is not as a reaction to this impasse that it is a
second step; it is a second step in the full paradox of a second step as the first step
of a beginning. It takes the decision to set another beginning.
But still, we see, beginning with the second step, the first step can be thought.
Only now, after the second step has been taken, the first can be thought. But why
think the first step at all, the fundament, the ground, if this ground does not give
the reason for the second step? This is the second part of the incisive cut: we
need nevertheless to think the first step. If the one is not, then the multiple is,
but the multiple brings us back to the one. In Badiou’s philosophy ontology will
be the discourse that grasps being in its inconsistent multiplicity, as that which
is excluded by the law of the one. But here, our question is the beginning of
philosophy in the second step, and if mathematics as a discourse is the proper
tool for grasping being as multiplicities of multiplicities, then philosophy takes
the risk to deny the being of the one. Which is to say, it takes the risk that being
is ‘neither one . . . nor multiple’7 – for otherwise the multiple would be a multiple
of ones – and can only be grasped in its inconsistency.
If the one is a count, it has to be a count of the multiple, the multiple that is in
itself multiple as it is consistent and inconsistent. That the one is not leads us to
the point that it results from the multiple, it has to be the multiple of something
and the multiple reveals an inconsistency upon which it relies to be truly
multiple. This is why the one as a count cannot be understood, if the inscription
of being is not understood. Thus we get from a philosophical decision to the law
of the count and only then can being be accounted for.
The first step, the ground, the fundament, can be thought, but it becomes a
ground that is cut off from any direct causality that might install it as the first
from which everything else would have to be unfolded: it is the first that comes
after the second. And this first needs to be thought, not only because the one is
the one of something, but also because otherwise being that is not one would
contradict itself. The decision that the one is not demands that something else
is. And if something else than the one is, then it is without one. One might
say it is multiple, but it is multiple without one. And it is impossible to begin
without one.
Thus, the philosophical decision that the one is not is a second step, as it does
not serve as a fundament upon which a philosophical structure could be built.
But it does allow to infer the first step that ontologically precedes it, namely to
7 Ibid., 24.
claim a possible discourse on being that inconsists in the one. All this would
not be possible if the multiple would be set as the first step. The difference is
one of the order of steps: it is the difference between stating ‘the multiple is,
therefore the one is not’ and ‘the one is not, and therefore being is neither one nor
multiple’. What is being radically erased is any notion of the fruitful ground of
being. For Badiou, being does not necessitate existence. This is the first moment
of the incision. But to think existence as inherently multiple makes it necessary
to think its being. This is the second moment of the incision.
Thus, we have to begin with the second step – existence – in order to think
the first step – being – properly. The pas de plus is to think a being that is not
an origin, a being without origin. This is an incision, because it separates being
from itself, it separates being from its existence. Being is not-one. We cannot
start from being, because it is not-one.
At this point, we might return to our structure of the ‘before’. We gain two
different ‘befores’ in Badiou’s philosophy from this pas de plus. Before Badiou’s
philosophy, being was one, even if it were multiple, insofar as it ever was
the – negative or positive – ground of something. But the ‘before’ is also to be
understood in the structural sense: before philosophy there is being that is not-
one, that cannot serve as an origin: this impotent ground now comes before
philosophy, philosophy follows upon this impotency of being. This ‘before’
therefore cannot come ‘before’ philosophy because it does not exist. What exists
are the differences of existence and they are the effect of being’s not-being-one.
What is before philosophy is not the not-one of being, but the effects of its being
not-one: the differences of existence. This is what we said before: we have to
think being, because it enables differences to exist. But if being cannot come
first, that what really is the ‘before’ of philosophy are the effects of the not-being-
one of being.
This is a very radical moment to say: yes, we are able to think being, but
being as such does not ground anything. In the contemporary discourse the
postmodernist might come along and say: ‘Of course, there is no ground of our
existence or our actions. Maybe we can define rules and reasons, but the ground
of it all, this does not exist, and it would be a metaphysical gesture to claim
this.’ Against this, Badiou’s claim is: we can think being, but we will think it
differently. It will not be the one being that in any way imperatively commands
our existences. It is rather a being that founds nothing. As such a being it does
not necessarily bring about anything, it is a being without being the being-of-
something. And as such a being it is not-one, because it is always the being-one
of being that turns it into a foundational ground. Whenever you start with a
ground, it is already one. Whenever you start with a ground it is already one
that serves as a foundation for something else. But if you reject all thinking of
the ground at all, you presuppose the most absolute ground, the darkest One,
because you will not be able to account for differences. If you claim the absence
of the ground, all differences are in the end the same and thus there are no
differences at all. In the night of the abyss all cows are black. Because without
thinking being, you cannot even think that which differs from existence. You
cannot even think an extant difference at all. That is why we will have to think
being, as enabling differences, but without being the one being that is the point
of origin.
What comes before philosophy is, then, fundamentally not-one in the form
of extant differences. For this claim to be made, we need the difference between
being and phenomena, for otherwise in the world of phenomena no real
difference could be thought of. But being is not-one and the differences in the
world are not grounded in being. Un pas de plus is the step that philosophy takes,
it starts with the second step, it starts with what has begun, but it is philosophy
that decides that being is and that enables differences to be different. We can
also say: the fundamental decision that philosophy makes is one in favour of the
existence of the multiple, in favour of differences.
Let us again change the terminology. In the first step, we said that the
question of beginning comprises three moments: the object, the subject, and
the indication of the ‘before’; the structural and temporal implication of the
exceptional relation of philosophy. And now, in the second step, we say that
philosophy begins with the second step, and thinks a being that is not the one
ground of existence. But because existence is full of differences, we still need to
think being. What we get is a ‘before’ that is not one, but multiple, as a temporal
and structural before; but also we get a structural and non-temporal before of
the inconsistent multiplicity.
What we called ‘object’ in the first step was only understood as an indicator
of the material of philosophy. What we called ‘subject’ was understood as an
indicator of the difference in the material. And what we called the ‘before’ was
understood as the original secondary gesture of philosophy, namely to add itself.
So we have object, subject and the plus-one of philosophy.
In Badiou, the secondary ‘plus-one’ comes first and we have a different
before: the before of the multiple, as effects of being’s not being one. We can
now translate the first step of object, subject and the ‘gesture of the before’ into
the second step, the Badiouan triad: being, subjects and truths. Subjects are the
multiple effects of being’s not being one. And truths? Truths, as the description
of the taking place of the conditions, and thus truths as the truths of the
multiple ‘before’, need the incision of the act of philosophy as the plus-one, the
act of the pas de plus. Philosophy thus begins with a decision for philosophy,
a decision that precedes any relation of object and subject. The secondary ‘plus
one’ of philosophy is the necessary second step to take first. It is a logical part of
every thought, as a revolt against the given. Being is before only after philosophy
indicates truths and their subjects – as its non-temporal and temporal effects.
Truth
To explain this in a little more detail, a fundamental structure of Badiou’s

philosophy will have to be outlined, namely philosophy’s twofold relation to
truth. If philosophy takes a step further, we can understand this in the sense that
philosophy always follows the event. Something happens in the world and the
philosopher comes later, in the evening, after everything is said and done, and
then explains the truth of what has happened. This is the first understanding of
un pas de plus. Obviously, we stumble upon all the above-mentioned problems.
Notwithstanding, such is the structure of philosophy in Badiou: philosophy
follows events. For Badiou, events take place in the world, and they do so in
four possible spheres, namely in the spheres of love, art, science or politics. It
is the philosopher who is able to discern the truth in these events and it is the
philosopher who is able to balance the different truths of different events in one
system of philosophy. So, here, philosophy comes after the event and philosophy
begins as the second step.
But the question is precisely how the philosopher takes this second step.
What does it mean to follow after the event? What does the philosopher do,
when looking upon the event before her or him? The philosopher works by
acknowledging that there is something new, that there is something different
in this love, in this political event, in this scientific invention or in this work of
art. The philosopher’s work consists chiefly in taking up the declaration of the
novelty and formalizing the truth of what is happening as the minimal structural
difference. The minimal structural difference is what distinguishes the event
from anything that is reducible to its circumstances. It is the very small ‘nothing’
that cannot be reduced to its circumstances; it is the ‘nothing’ that results from
the subtraction of all objective circumstances, it is what cannot objectively be
stated. The philosopher formalizes a certain objective nothingness of the event,
which is at the same time the incision of the new. So in the midst of everything
that is happening, the philosopher reduces the event to the structure of its
irreducibility, a structure that is in itself void. Subtracting all objective moments,
the philosopher formalizes the subjective structure of the eventual process. It
is important to see that this is what the philosopher does when looking at the
event before him or her: the philosopher subtracts all objectivity and marks
the difference of the subject. There is, then, no object to philosophy, nothing to
make sense of, there is only what differs from the objective. One could call this
the inobjective. The philosopher marks the cut of inobjective, distinguishing the
subject from the object.
Therefore, the first important moment of the pas de plus is that the
philosopher inverts the process: philosophy follows after the event, takes it as its
condition and declares its truth to be what it is not, namely this minimal cut of
the inobjective. This inversion is the first part of the philosophical act, the first
part of what it does mean to follow the event.
The second part arises once we take another look at the philosophical
operation as such. Philosophy does not only follow the one event, but instead
several events. Thus it declares not only one truth of one event, but it rather
declares that there exist multiple truths of multiple events. Philosophy operates
in relation to different truth processes. The philosopher declares that there are
multiple truths: and this can be done because philosophy asserts at the same
time that there is Truth with a capital T.8 So, philosophy makes a twofold
declaration: that there are multiple truths and that there is the category of Truth,
in the singular, with a capital T. Of course, if the one-Truth-with-the-capital-T
would be the meta-truth, the one truth of all other truths, the multiplicity
of truths in the plural would vanish. They would all be nothing than forms
of the one-truth. Truth with a capital T is not a meta-truth, but rather is the
construction of a place. So, whereas we noted above that philosophy as the pas
de plus is without a place, we see now that it creates a place of its own. Philosophy
creates an excessive place.
Badiou describes this operation, the construction of a place called Truth-
with-a-capital-T, as an operation that consists of two moments. On the one
hand, philosophy imitates the procedure of knowledge – philosophy argues,
concludes, concatenates. It imitates the procedure of knowledge, but it does not
produce knowledge. Therefore it is a ‘fiction of knowledge’.9 On the other hand,
philosophy imitates art, as Badiou explains, by using the power of language as
8 Cf. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 11.

9 Ibid., 12.
art. It imitates art, but it does not produce art. Therefore it is a ‘fiction of art’.10
So neither moment attempts to seize the truth as if it were an object. But the
moments of the operation proceed negatively and thus create a place: The void
place of philosophy is the ‘inversion’ or the ‘reverse-side’ of the argumentative
chain and the ‘limit-point’ indicated by the image.11 The void as an operative
place of philosophy is the result of an imitation of the procedure of knowledge
and the procedure of art, but an imitation that uses these procedures only
to bring about the effect of a difference: that which differs from the chain of
arguments and that which differs from the image. Philosophy imitates two of
its conditions – science and art – in an inverted way, to become receptive for
them. Badiou describes this operation as one of a ‘pincer’, one part ‘link[s]‌’ its
elements together – concatenating, via the argumentative chain – while the
other ‘sublimates’ via the density of the image.12 We recognize a qualitative
moment in the latter, a quantitative moment in the former. The pincer is one
that combines quality and quantity in a spatial figure: a void place, in which we
find the spatial as the quantitative and the void as its qualitative determination.
The philosophical operation creates an excessive place in which it can receive
multiple truths from different events.
Here we find a decisive structural moment: Philosophy embraces different
truths and opens up a space in which different truths can co-exist, or rather,
in Badiou’s terminology, become ‘compossible’.13 Philosophy creates the one
place of Truth in which multiple truths can co-exist, become compossible. It is
very important to see that the reason for philosophy’s assertion that there are
multiple truths is not a meta-truth, but rather is the operation of philosophy, the
creation of its place.
The tricky point is, then, the following: on the one hand, the events in the world
come before philosophy comes along. But then philosophy does not only declare
the truth of the one event to be that what it is not; it also declares this one truth
to be one out of several. From the beginning on, philosophy does not only follow
one truth. Philosophy’s operation, the pincer, is a negative and undetermined
operation. And it is an operation that collects the inversions or flipsides of its
own method: the method is linking and concatenating, the method is also to use
metaphors, but what is collected in the void place of philosophy is the flipside
of the concatenation as well as that which is limited by the image. Philosophy
10 Ibid., 13.
11 Ibid., 12.
12 Badiou, Conditions, 13.
13 See Badiou, Manifesto, 37.
inverts the singular truth, and it collects its own inversions. As an operation,
it is repeatable. In its fundamental arrangement, philosophy is not determined
to accept only one truth. It is an operation of seizing truths as moments of the
inobjective, and as such there is no prescription about the number of truths.
Thus there are can be multiple truths, but there also have to be multiple
truths. The reason for this is, that already in the one event before philosophy,
philosophy denotes its not-being-one. Philosophy declares the truth of the event
to be that it is not-one, because the truth is what it is not. One event is inherently
multiple. The place of philosophy allows for a multiplicity of truths. There have
to be multiple truths, because the one truth does not exist. All that exists are
differences.
I maintained that philosophy imitates science and art in its operation. Let us
add that philosophy ‘resembles love’14 in the intensity with which it embraces
each singular truth, and that it resembles politics in the structure of the
compossibility of different truths. The philosophical operation is an inverted
mimesis of its own conditions, as it combines the imitation of the procedures of
science and art, and as it resembles the condition of love in its intensity and the
condition of politics in its combination of different singularities.
To summarize this last point: Philosophy takes up the event by inverting it,
proving it to be multiple. And philosophy constructs a place in which it collects
events as the result of the inversion of its own method. Now, it is by this operation,
as Badiou argues, that philosophy seizes truths as well as those truths seize us.15
The excessive place of philosophy is an act, an act of incision, by the means of
which multiple truths are not only collected, but also collected as inverted.
So if the multiple difference of existence comes before the not-being-one
of being, it is philosophy as the place and act of Truth with a capital-T that
arranges this ‘before’. It is philosophy that initiates the difference, that places the
incision, that makes the cut and that is the cut as an act and as an excessive place.
So, again, is there nothing that comes before philosophy, because philosophy
arranges its own before? While it is true that philosophy arranges its own before,
this does not mean that therefore the before is lost in its reality. This is the result
of the twofold operation of a philosophy that only collects multiple truths as
the inversion of the philosophical method and as the inversion of what exists
as given. Due to this, philosophy is the one operation that arranges the before –
but it nevertheless does not swallow the ‘before’ to be only a ‘before’ set by
15 Ibid.
philosophy. There is a real before, one that does not come before philosophy,
but begins in philosophy. The real of philosophy are the multiple conditions that
come before philosophy, but only start in philosophy.
Does then everything begin with philosophy? No, it does not, because there
is always something that comes before philosophy.
Desire
That what comes before philosophy now needs to be understood as neither being,
nor the subject, nor the truth, if it is true that philosophy is to be understood
in a relationship with these three. What comes before philosophy then is the
difficult notion of desire. Before there is philosophy, there needs to be a desire
for philosophy. How then can we understand, what this desire for philosophy is,
if we cannot name it properly, at least not philosophically?
Badiou has described the desire for philosophy as a fourfold structure. It
contains moments of revolt, logics, universality and risk. In his derivation of this
fourfold structure in the first chapter of Métaphysique du Bonheur réel, Badiou
extrapolates this structure from two quotations of two poets, Rimbaud and
Mallarmé. The famous phrase by Rimbaud called upon is that of ‘les révoltes
logiques’, logical revolts, and the quote by Mallarmé, is that ‘All thought begets
a throw of the dice’.16 We have two quotes from poets, and we get the notion of
revolt – every thought intends to revolt against the given thought. We also get
the notion that this revolt is logical, of logic within it, and then we get the notion
of universality as the desire to realize the universal, together with the notion of
risk, of the wager, because this desire is not grounded in any necessity, but rather
always takes on a risk of failure.
It is clear that in this description, the desire for philosophy is not simply what
comes before philosophy, but is also what comes along with philosophy. It is
both: it is the desire for philosophy to be the risk of the logical revolt that realizes
the universal, and as such a desire it continues to be the desire upon which
philosophy thrives. Philosophy, being nothing in itself, being just a place that is
marked by an operation of negativity and by a redoubled inversion, needs the
desire to continue, as it would otherwise fall apart. But in its excessive existence,
philosophy is the split of the existing being. Thus, the desire is also the desire
16 See Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Desire’. In Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy,
trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London/New York: Continuum, 2004), 39–57: 39.
for this split: And it is again both; it is the desire to risk the split of being, and
as such a desire it is the existing split of being. Is this to say that there is strictly
nothing before philosophy, that the real of philosophy begins in philosophy, and
that the desire for this philosophy is the inversion of philosophy, is itself the
motor and the split of philosophy? We find the same structural moment as it
occurred in the relation between the real before philosophy that only begins
within philosophy. The desire for philosophy, if it exists before philosophy, is
the desire for a place without a place. It is not the desire that desires one of the
existing places, but a desire for a place without a place. The desire for philosophy
does not exist before philosophy; it can only be understood as the inexistence
of a possible difference. Therefore, it does not exist in the sense that somebody
could utter it and would be able to say: I desire a place of philosophy, a place that
would have the following demarcations. In its purity it is already there, always,
without being there.
Let us go back to the first structural moment, namely the poetic formulas. At
the beginning of the text on ‘Philosophy and Desire’, Badiou clearly states: ‘This
philosophical investigation begins under the banner of poetry; thus recalling
the ancient tie between poetry and philosophy.’17 And then he invokes the two
quotes by Rimbaud and Mallarmé to find the fourfold structure of desire in these
quotes. The quotations are more than some simple illustration: one thing that
comes before philosophy is, for example, poetry with which philosophy breaks.
Badiou writes: ‘These two poetic formulas capture the desire of philosophy.’18
Capture – what does capture mean here? It says the following: Thought is there.
In every thought there is the possibility of another thought, and therewith the
desire for a new thought. But as this revolt is not yet fulfilled, it bears the risk of
failure. We have a paradoxical situation before us: is there something else or is
there not?
Philosophy
In the beginning we referred to Kant and Hegel and to the problem of the
existence of philosophy in their construction of the ‘before’. If the ‘before’
thought is unthinkable in Kant, it gets lost, if the ‘before’ thought is the kernel of
thought in Hegel, it gets lost as well. That the status of philosophy is problematic
17 Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Desire’, 39.

18 Ibid.
is, as we can see now, related to the question of the being one of the ‘before’. And
here is the problem: on the one hand, the status of philosophy is blurred because
its before is rendered as unthinkable or to be the kernel of thought, but on the
other hand, philosophy’s status is excessive precisely because there is a ‘before’.
So here, in German Idealism, we find the paradoxical situation or the moment
in which it is undecidable as to whether philosophy exists or does not. But we
see that the manifest moment of these philosophies is to conceal or to catch the
inherent problem of philosophy, namely that it is unable to close its discourse.
German Idealism, Kant and Hegel, then do apply a strategy of dissimulation.
Although there is the incision of philosophy and its before, it is then again
blurred, because it is declared to be unthinkable or to be the point of thought.
What is being dissimulated then is precisely the incision and the desire for it.
German Idealism then is a decisive moment in philosophy precisely because
nowhere else do the moments of incision/scission and dissimulation overlap so
exactly as to become indistinguishable.
But, of course, German Idealism, as philosophy, is what we have before us, as
a philosophy. It is what we have before us in its twofold existence, as an incision
and as a dissimulation. It is there before us as the difference that philosophy
makes and the dissimulation of this incision. That it is, that it exists, is rendered
very clearly by Hegel at the beginning of the Phenomenology when he insists on
the impossibility of summarizing the content of a philosophical work in advance.
For whatever might appropriately be said about philosophy in a preface – say a

historical statement of the main drift and the point of view, the general content
and results, a string of random assertions and assurances about truth – none of
this can be accepted as the way in which to expound philosophical truth.19
This cannot be done, because precisely philosophy needs its time and space
to unfold and is fundamentally irreducible to a result. It is the movement of
the speculative sentence in which philosophy unfolds itself, and which cannot
be reduced to the indication of a content. Philosophy needs the length of the
text or speech in which it actually exists. But although Hegel rejects the idea
of summarizing the unfolding of philosophical ideas, this does not imply that
philosophy would simply exist by itself, in a kind of arbitrary existence, relying
only on itself. Philosophy is a form of the spirit itself, and as such necessary, but it
is also not self-evident and rather needs the labor of the concept. The speculative
19 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford/New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 1.
movement of the sentence does create an interruption, and in the practical reality
the appearance of contradiction does not guarantee its overcoming. In the early
text on the Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Hegel
concludes: ‘When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the
antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence,
the need of philosophy arises.’20
There is a desire (the word Hegel uses is ‘Bedürfnis’21) for philosophy, a desire
for philosophy to exist and a desire to have philosophy as an incision in the
given world. This becomes clear when Hegel begins to unfold the aims of the
Phenomenology in the next step of his introduction, after he has declared that the
objective orientation of the philosophical text to follow cannot be given.
And isn’t Kant’s primary claim that the world needs philosophy, that there is
a need for the philosophical incision, because otherwise human reason will get
tangled up in the dialectical semblance of reason? And clearly enough this task
cannot be resolved once and for all. Toward the end of the first Critique, Kant
discusses ‘transcendental hypotheses’ that might serve as weapons in the fight
against the delusions of reason, and he writes:
Hypotheses are therefore allowed in the field of pure reason only as weapons of
war, not for grounding a right but only for defending it. However, we must always
seek the enemy here in ourselves. For speculative reason in its transcendental
use is dialectical in itself. The objections that are to be feared lie in ourselves.
We must search them out like old but unexpired claims, in order to ground
perpetual peace on their annihilation. External quiet is only illusory. The seed
of the attacks, which lies in the nature of human reason, must be extirpated; but
how can we extirpate it if we do not give it freedom, indeed even nourishment,
to send out shoots, so that we can discover it and afterwards eradicate it with its
root?22
But as reason is itself dialectical, this annihilation will never be complete, and
the drastic tone of this passage reads as a symptom of the impossibility to purify
the structure of reason.
In Hegel as in Kant, philosophy cannot be guaranteed, but it is needed.
German Idealism utters the need for philosophy as an incision into the world.
It utters the need to add itself as a necessary structure to the world, and thus to
20 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris
and Walter Cerf (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), 91.
21 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie. In Gesammelte
Werke, Bd. 2, Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 9–138: 22.
22 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 663 (A 777).
change the world. In the cases of Kant and Hegel, there are two different moments
in which this need is placed. On the one hand, for Kant, it is the necessity of a
critique of reason, which is actually – I take up a formulation by Rado Riha –
a self-critique. That is the inner necessity for philosophy: there is reason, but
without its critique, possible progress cannot be realized. The critique of reason
has to be a self-critique. On the other hand, for Hegel, reason, if we use the
Kantian terminology, has to realize its own existence in time. It has to become
aware of the difficult structure of its own unfolding in time. Reason thus is not
only reason as a self-reflective capacity, but a self-reflective capacity that, due
to its development, has to become aware of its own contradiction. It is thus a
contradiction that unfolds in time: it is a history of its own.
What we have is thus the transcendental I – the impossible object of reason’s
self-critique – and the Logic, as an attempt to grasp the impossible point of
the Phenomenology of Spirit, logically to grasp the point of the becoming
of the Logic. The transcendental I in its most basic structure is constitutively
withdrawn from Kant’s philosophy and the becoming of spirit is incapable of
becoming anything else in the Phenomenology than precisely its own becoming.
It is always becoming something else, and therefore it cannot radically differ, it
cannot unfold a real difference.
Thus, we have two different strategies of dissimulation. But they dissimulate
the incision that philosophy is, by turning it into the unthinkable or into the core
of thought itself. It becomes thus undecidable as to whether philosophy exists.
Ideology
Do we not live in a similar situation today? It is unclear whether something else

than what exists can exist. It is unclear whether philosophy, which is the place in
which the difference exists, itself exists.
What we do have today for sure is the dissimulation of thought: that which
exists tries to cover up the idea that it could be different. The desire that exists
pretends to be a desire only for something else that already exists. That everything
that exists could also be different, that is what is being covered up. Therefore, we
can say that the strategy of what exists is to dissimulate that it could be different.
This strategy is in itself a sort of philosophy that wants to be a dissimulation
without an incision. This strategy can be called ideology.
But what exists, as existing, can also be different, because difference exists
as well. Philosophy, the incision of the before, the act that creates a place for
the plural of different truths, philosophy is the act that enables something else
to exist. But philosophy does actually nothing else than to remind the existing
of its possible difference: It takes the logic of what exists seriously. This strategy
then could be called ideological, because it presents an idea that is the idea of the
logic of existence.
But German Idealism indicates not only the one moment in philosophy
in which the strategy of dissimulation and the strategy of incision become
indistinguishable. German Idealism also proves that it is impossible to have a
philosophy that is only the philosophy of dissimulation, and not also a manifest
incision at the same time. This is why we find the problem and the reality of
German Idealism today before us: because we are living in a situation in which
thought is said to be the same as the thing and it cannot be different. But by the
very act of saying this, the ideological dissimulation already takes the stance of an
incision, because it is in itself already the statement from a place that is without
a place. The claim that nothing can be different already makes a difference. The
strategy of ideology thus fails fundamentally in that it is in itself an incision, that
it needs to dissimulate itself. It is therefore wrong.
Badiou’s philosophy makes an incision into the overlapping of incision and its
dissimulation, it extrapolates and affirms the incision. Thus it relates to German
Idealism in an exceptional form of a relation, namely by separating it from
itself. Badiou’s philosophy presents a torsion of German Idealism. And if we
take German Idealism to be the philosophy of modernity, and if we understand
modernity as a non-temporal moment of philosophy as such, then Badiou’s
philosophy presents a torsion of philosophy as such. In a very early definition
of the concept of a torsion we can read: The ‘process of torsion [is a process] by
which force reapplies itself to that from which it conflictually emerges’.23 Badiou’s
philosophy is a torsion of philosophy, splitting the temporal from the structural
before, but inferring the latter from the former, erasing any temporal relation
from it, and thereby insisting on the desire for philosophy as a necessity: for it is a
desire that continues to be, and as a desire for the actuality of differences it brings
philosophy about, which by its incision indicates the existence of truths, effects
of the inconsistency of being, the real before philosophy, an exceptional world.
23 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Continuum,
2009), 11.
6
Marx, an ‘Antiphilosopher’? Or Badiou’s

Philosophical Politics of Demarcation
Svenja Bromberg
But Marx is so little German!

Perhaps he’s not exactly a philosopher, either.
Anyway, let’s leave Marx to one side.1
Philosophy is always heir to anti-philosophy.2
Badiou’s relationship to Marx and Marxism has been the object of much
debate.3 And while it is my aim to build on and add to this already long list of
interventions, I will do so from a probably at least slightly unexpected angle. So
far, readers of Marx and Badiou, myself included, have often been concerned
with the way Badiou utilizes classical Marxist concepts, as, for example, the
materialist dialectic, communism, revolution and emancipation, with the effect
of redefining them at a distance from Marx and Marxism. But as this volume
is concerned with Badiou’s relationship to German philosophy, understood
‘not as the attribution of an identity [based on national territorial boundaries
1 Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT
Press, 2018), 8.
2 Alain Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, Pli, vol. 11 (2001): 10.
3 Some of the key references are Daniel Bensaïd, ‘Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event’. In
Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum,
2004), 94–105; Bruno Bosteels, ‘The Fate of the Generic: Marx with Badiou’. In (Mis)readings of
Marx in Continental Philosophy, ed. Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), 211–26; Antonio Negri, ‘Is It Possible to Be Communist Without Marx?’, Critical
Horizons, 12.1 (2010): 5–14; Panagiotis Sotiris, ‘Beyond Simple Fidelity to the Event: The Limits of
Alain Badiou’s Ontology’, Historical Materialism, 19.2 (2011): 35–59; Alberto Toscano, ‘Marxism
Expatriated’. In Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, ed. Jacques Bidet and Stathis
Kouvelakis (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 529–48.
or language], but rather as a broad framework for complex contestations’,4 we

are challenged to consider the role that Marx plays within these philosophical
contestations that take place in and around Badiou’s oeuvre. For Marxists this
premise might seem rather misled as the whole point is that Marx’s project lies
precisely in grasping his break with German philosophy and not to repatriate
him back into it.5 And as we see in the epigraph, Badiou himself would rather
avoid an explicit discussion of Marx’s place within (German) philosophy,
because he doesn’t quite belong there.
But Badiou’s suggestion that Marx ‘is not exactly a philosopher’, his not-
quite belonging to philosophy, while not a generally surprising claim, takes
on a curious resonance when considered in the context of Badiou’s broader
philosophical politics of demarcation. With that I mean his constant effort
of establishing his own philosophy against and in contradistinction from
other philosophies that are, in his eyes, either not at all or only partially
worthy of being considered ‘philosophy’. Besides the philosophers, there
are in Badiou’s universe of proper names the sophists and antiphilosophers.
Against this background, Badiou’s comment on Marx, questioning his status
as philosopher, is not just a commonplace or throwaway comment but it
raises the serious question whether Marx does indeed fit one of the categories
that Badiou has prominently used to describe and evaluate the work of other
non- or not-quite philosophers. More specifically, this article will investigate
whether Marx might fit the category of ‘antiphilosopher’, a label that Badiou
has taken from Lacan and prominently extended back to him as well as to
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and a longer list of other, yet-to-be-developed and
more minor or tenuous candidates.6 Exploring the question whether Marx’s
critique and overcoming of philosophy fits within the delineations that define
antiphilosophy for Badiou will allow us to revisit the premises of Badiou’s
reading of Marx and Marxism in a new light. And it simultaneously gives
rise to an investigation of Marx’s own relationship to philosophy that is very
much an unfinished project within contemporary continental philosophy and
Western Marxism.7
4 Jan Völker in Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue, 79–80, amended trans. See also my
debate with Ishay Landa in Svenja Bromberg, ‘Badiou’s Recommencement of the Young-Hegelian
Purification of Politics: A Response to Ishay Landa’, International Critical Thought, 4.3 (2014): 367–83.
5 See, e.g., Karl Korsch, ‘Marxism and Philosophy’. www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-
philosophy.htm (accessed 15 May 2018).
6 See Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London: Verso, 2011), 71, 83; see also Bruno
Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 16 (fn14).
7 See, e.g., Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 2014).
Marx, an ‘Antiphilosopher’? 91
Renewing philosophy from the midst of its crises
Badiou’s concern with antiphilosophy becomes explicit only in the 1990s, when
he dedicates several year-long seminars at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris
to four major antiphilosophers: Nietzsche (1992–3), Wittgenstein (1993–4),
Lacan (1994–5) and Saint Paul (1995–6).8 But, we shouldn’t be misled by this
somewhat late occurrence of Badiou’s explicit engagement with what he defines
as anti- or non-philosophy and its proper names. Because in one way or another
all of Badiou’s writings are concerned with the triangular relationship of the
failure of philosophy the spread of which he witnesses from the 1980s onwards
(after the end of the red years), his own project of renewing philosophical
thought in the face of its desertion9 and the importance of philosophy’s ‘other’,
its ‘outside’, for such a renewal.
Throughout his work Badiou is therefore concerned not just with establishing
his own philosophical doctrine, but with simultaneously fathoming, drawing and
defending the frontiers to that which potentially endangers as well as enriches
(his) philosophy from the two other sides of the triangle – on the one hand, the
failed or would-be philosophies in contrast to which he is formulating his own
project and, on the other, the problem of how to allow the non-philosophical
dimensions of the world, such as politics or art, to affect philosophy without
reducing it to these other, non-philosophical logics. The meta-philosophical
explications of the struggles on the ‘philosophical front’,10 as Badiou perceives
them in proper militant fashion, can sometimes appear overly principled or
even simply polemical and therefore lacking in nuance. But it is precisely part of
the challenge that these position statements and categorizations of philosophers
as rivals or dangerous yet necessary tempters present to us as readers of Badiou,
that, looking at the vast range of them together, one philosopher is rarely
confined to only one side of the ‘front’.
These vacillations in Badiou’s oeuvre concern not just whether he reads
someone as an antiphilosopher, sophist or philosopher at a certain moment
of his theorizations but it notably also concerns the very distinction between
antiphilosopher and sophist, which is not always clearly maintained. That is
why it wouldn’t make sense to start with a thorough attempt of defining criteria
for antiphilosophy, not just because the criteria themselves appear variable, but
8 Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 13.

9 See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009), xxxviii.
10 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy (London: Verso, 2012), ch. 1.
because antiphilosophy gains its meaning and stakes only once the frontiers on
which philosophy fights for its survival and renewal have been clearly delimited.
Crisis of sophistic defeatism

Badiou arrives at his project of beginning philosophy anew via a diagnosis of a
deep crisis that the main philosophical traditions have entered at the end of the
twentieth century. By citing some of the most famous French representatives
of poststructuralist or postmodern theory, such as Lyotard, Deleuze and
Derrida, Badiou highlights the different ways in which they have all given up on
philosophy. ‘Most of them say in fact that philosophy is impossible, completed,
assigned to something other than itself.’11
Badiou sees the proclamation of the end of philosophy due to it having
become impossible or completed as a crisis of defeatism, of philosophers giving
up on their own discipline and declaring its ‘end’ as the end of grand narratives,
of metaphysics, of truth, of the subject.12 In other words, the end of philosophy
in its ancient and modern incarnations.13 Within the most prominent strands of
twentieth-century French postmodern, German hermeneutic as well as Anglo-
Saxon analytic philosophy Badiou observes a disorientation that led to the
replacement of the philosophical concern for truth with some version of relative
truths, meaning, sense, knowledge(s) and language games.14 It is thus not just
the philosophers giving up on the potentiality of philosophy, but philosophy
itself losing its ability to formulate universal truth claims about the world as it
is and, equally important, to contribute to its transcendence.15 All it can do is
historicize its own more or less glorious metaphysical past.16 We find ourselves,
writes Badiou in a paper from 1999, so right at the turn of the century, ‘in a
difficult and dark passage in which the destiny and even the very existence of
philosophy is at stake’.17
The category under which Badiou sums up this exhausted and misled
philosophy that has given up on itself is ‘generalized modern sophistry’. The
modern sophists have two modes of denying philosophy’s quest for truth,
11 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 27.
12 Cadava, Who Comes after the Subject?
13 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 42.
14 See Norman Madarasz in Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 7.
15 See Jelica Šumič, ‘Another World Is Possible, or the Task of Philosophy in Worldless Times’. In Beyond
potentialities? ed. Mark Potocnik, Frank Ruda and Jan Völker (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011), 55–75.
17 Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought (London: Continuum, 2005), 40.
either by replacing Truth with ‘effects of discourse’ and the rules of language
or by merely pointing to that which cannot be said, which Badiou calls ‘pure
showing’.18 They are historicist through and through in the bad sense in that they
let themselves be taken hostage by the multiplicity of appearances and history’s
genealogical judgment of what is, or respectively by what cannot be said/known.
Only enunciations and interpretations of the given on one side, mysticism on
the other.
The modern crisis of philosophy is, however, not wholly of its own making,
because the world as it is currently configured also bears responsibility in the
sense that it ‘exerts an intense pressure upon [ . . . ] philosophy’.19 This is a world
that, at the turn of the century, is ordered by fluxes of money and circulation,
a world of ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’.20 It is a world of multiplicities of sense
and meaning that are produced, exchanged and managed under the auspices
of capital and the state. What appears as politics in this world is nothing more
than ‘Realpolitik’, the political administering of supposed necessities without
alternative that is carried out through supposed democratic electoral rituals
while it is really ruled by private interests negotiated in the market place. What
appears as the natural and most advanced societal order is, for Badiou, a world
of horror and emptiness. It is empty or ‘barren’ because of the absence of ‘truth’,
that is, the lack of events that could provoke the formation of subjects and the
seizing of truths qua thought by philosophy.21 All such a world does is administer
the exploitation, domination and economic and spiritual immiseration of the
people that live within it. It is a world in which being itself is lacking or remains
absent, a nihilistic world.22
Badiou’s diagnosis of the state of the world at the turn of the century has
implications not just for the state of philosophy within this world, that is, that
it is under pressure to conform to the reigning nihilism and denial of truth,
but also for its very purpose, definition and survival. Philosophy, according to
Badiou, only deserves its name if it stands in conflict to this nihilistic world, if
it aims at its interruption. That means, philosophy cannot be of this world, it
has to be in and against it. Revolt is one of philosophy’s key dimensions and its
unconditional requirement. And it is precisely the problem of the main strands
of twentieth-century philosophy – postmodern, hermeneutic and analytic – that
18 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 116; Alain Badiou, Conditions (London: Continuum, 2008), 6.
19 Badiou, Infinite Thought, 40.
20 Ibid., 48; Badiou, Conditions, 166.
21 Badiou, Conditions, 149; see also Sumic, ‘Another World Is Possible’, 62.
22 Badiou calls this state of being ‘désêtre’ or lack of being; see Badiou, Conditions, 159.
by giving up on ‘the care of truths’23 in the name of a multiplicity of meaning and

sense, they reflect or mirror the state of the world too much and thereby forfeit
their ability to confront and interrupt it.24
If revolt is one key condition for philosophy’s return in and against the nihilistic
world, which Badiou develops clearly starting with what many of his readers
consider as his main philosophical contribution, Being and Event (1988), it is,
however, by far not the only one. For philosophy to return to ‘the care of truths’
it also has to (2) involve ‘universality’ (3) be grounded in ‘logic’ and (4) take
‘risks’.25 Involving universality means philosophy as thought must be framed as
addressing being in its entirety, that is, its truth is a truth for all thinking and
everyone who thinks, all of humanity. That also means that philosophy can never
be limited to its own time or be realized in any one time. Philosophy’s Truth is
transversal and transhistorical in that it captures something eternal with which
it turns against its own time and history.26 To be grounded in logic is first of all to
make recourse to reason, to claim a rationality that is specific to philosophy and
with which, once again, philosophy is able to confront an illogical and irrational
world. Finally, philosophy takes risks in that it engages in speculation and makes
decisions in situations that are undecidable because they don’t adhere to the
logic of the status quo. Mallarmé’s roll of the dice is the archetypal risk-taking
image that Badiou borrows from poetry.
Crisis of relocalization into non-philosophy

At this point let’s conclude that the first manifestation of the crisis of philosophy
is that having entered the stage of ‘generalized sophistry’, it merely mirrors a
nihilistic world and thereby stops exercising its own singular power, which
Badiou ties to the four conditions of true philosophy, revolt, universality, logic
and risk-taking. In order to complete this picture, we need to move on to the
second frontier on which philosophy struggles for its survival. The struggle
here manifests as philosophy assigning its task of producing universal truths to
‘something other than itself ’. This something other than itself has been as varied
as language (or linguistics), poetry (a development Badiou already traces back to
Heidegger27), art more generally, journalism, psychoanalysis, science, ethics and
23 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2010), 4.

24 Badiou, Infinite Thought, 39, 49–50.
25 Ibid., 39–40.
27 Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 23–24; also Badiou, Manifesto for
Philosophy, 49–50.
politics. Closely following Badiou’s terminology, we can define this tendency as

philosophy’s crisis of relocalization.28
Now, for anyone who got to know Badiou’s philosophy via his more explicitly
political writings, for example, on the idea of communism, or his writings
on theatre and poetry (we just mentioned his borrowing from Mallarmé),
this concern might come as a surprise as he clearly seeks the encounters with
those non-philosophical practices. In his early work Theory of the Subject, first
published in 1982, Badiou goes so far as to argue that ‘the modern philosopher
is [ . . . ] a systematic proletarian’,29 meant here in a moral and spiritual sense
rather than a strictly sociological sense. By overlaying the philosopher with a
subjective political figure loosely adapted from a Marxist canon, he emphasizes
his desire to reconfigure the tension between philosophical, ambitious thoughts
and political revolutionary acts and between the written and the spoken word in
the practice of a philosophy that also wants to be politically engaged.30
Badiou is already concerned at this point with defining his own philosophy
based on a specific relationship between thinking and being-in-itself, a
relation that he defines against other idealist and materialist philosophies as
torsion and that lies at the basis of the quest for ‘truth’.31 With this definition he
simultaneously rejects reducing politics to being or practice without thought as
well as any dreams of integral totalization, whether anchored in the past or in
the future. But due to his focus on the emergence of subjects as truth that disrupt
a given situation, whether political, psychological or philosophical, he is unable
at this point to separate philosophical truth from any other truths production
as he does not account for the specificity of the role and operational logic of
philosophy vis-à-vis these other procedures.
Badiou’s later identification of the danger of more or less accidentally giving
up philosophy by displacing it into those non-philosophical practices instead
of finding a way of rendering them accessible to philosophical thought needs
to therefore also be read as a moment of self-criticism, of Badiou taking sides
against his earlier self and that muddled attempt of renewing philosophy.32 He
himself momentarily succumbed to the temptation of suturing philosophy to
a non-philosophical logic,33 thereby running the risk of giving up philosophy’s
task of ‘thinking truth’ by replacing the ‘thinking’ part with a celebration of any

29 Badiou, Theory of the Subject, xxxviii.
30 Ibid., xxxviii–xlii.
31 Ibid., 117.
32 See Badiou, Being and Event, 4–5.
subject-effects. It is from Being and Event onwards that Badiou perceives and
works to avoid this danger: first of all, by introducing one of his most important
conceptual distinctions, namely between philosophy and its conditions.
The first, well known step, of which we need to remind ourselves before we
can look at the conditions in more detail, is Badiou’s three-part definition of
philosophy with reference to Descartes: philosophy is a knot of being, Truth and
subject.34 The foundation for this nodal relation is established via the axiomatic
thesis mathematics = ontology (or being-qua-being), whereas ontology is further
defined, with the mathematical tool of Cantorian set theory, as ‘the theory of
inconsistent multiplicities’.35 Mathematics as the science of being has thereby
entered philosophy and serves as the ground for its ‘rationality’ or ‘logic’ – a
logic of multiplicity rather than of the One to escape any illusion of wholeness
or totality of that which ‘is’. This however, does not mean that philosophy has
become a foundational or self-authorizing discourse that can develop its own
Truth based on thinking ontology.36 In order to tie the first knot between being
and Truth we need to make a detour through philosophy’s outside.
It is at this moment that the conditions become crucial. Badiou has established
in the first part of Being and Event that every ontological situation, that is, a
moment where the pure multiple of being is structured into a consistent one,
‘inconsists’. The important dimension of the argument is that (ontological)
situations always contain the possibility of being disrupted, of being opened up by
an event to the infinity of multiplicity or simply the new, within their ontological
constitution.37 Second, Badiou, citing Plato, also argues that in philosophy we ‘do
not take as our point of departure words, but things’.38 This statement combines
a persisting materialist desire to reconfigure the relation between thinking and
being as torsion, to give a place to the non-philosophical in philosophy39 and
the need to reject discursivity as the ground for philosophical thought. Both
arguments combined result in the key assertion of Badiou’s philosophy that
the evental procedure, that is, the intervention of ‘that which is not being-
qua-being’40 into the situation, making a ‘hole’ that is not discernible from the
34 Ibid., 32 (the author amended ‘truth’ to ‘Truth’ with capital T to differentiate from truths that are
produced by events).
35 Badiou, Being and Event, 13, 28.
36 Ibid., 4; Justin Clemens, ‘Conditions’. In The Badiou Dictionary, ed. Steven Corcoran (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 69.
37 See François Wahl in Badiou, Conditions, xii–xiii; Badiou, Being and Event, Parts I–III.
38 Plato cited in Badiou, Infinite Thought, 50; see also Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 34; Peter
Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003), 5.
40 Ibid.; see also Badiou, Conditions, xiv.
situation itself, cannot be initiated by philosophy itself. It instead takes place

in what Badiou argues are the four conditions of philosophy today: science,
politics, love and art. It is these non-philosophical conditions that give rise to
events and subjects and thus produce ‘truths’.
We have thereby arrived at the true challenge for philosophy in Badiou’s
understanding: how is it possible to relate to these evental truths and the
emergence of scientific, political, passionate and artistic subjects philosophically,
that is, how is it possible to respond to these truths by producing a ‘Truth’
that is strictly immanent to philosophy? Or simply, what does it mean to
think these truths? When developing our answer, we have to remember that
Badiou carefully rejects labels such as political philosophy or aesthetics that
would classically be applied to the strictly philosophical grasping of political or
artistic events, because he sees them as ‘academic division[s]‌of philosophy into
would-be objective domains’41 that they are not.42 They are not objective because
the grasp of these non-philosophical domains cannot be grounded in a purely
philosophical foundation. Or in other words, the philosophical truth about art
and politics (and love and science) cannot have a specific or substantive ground
in philosophy.
The task is to carve out the distinct space of philosophy vis-à-vis non-
philosophy under the condition that events are contingent, rare and not
produced by philosophy itself. Of primary concern – and one of the key axis of
confrontation with antiphilosophy as we will come to see – is to simultaneously
avoid and alleviate any false relocalizations of philosophy into this outside,
namely the disastrous suturing43 of philosophy to one specific condition that
would immediately contradict the multiplicity of truths by imposing the Truth
and thereby give up on what Badiou calls philosophy’s ‘critical virtue’.44 Philosophy
is treading on narrow ground: it needs to forcefully assert its specificity in the
production of Truth against sophistry (as discussed in the previous section)
but resist any extreme temptations to prove the sophist wrong, once and for all.
Because once philosophy exists under the condition of its outside and arrives at
Truth under the condition of evental truths, ‘philosophy must forever endure the
sophist’s company and sarcasm’,45 because it is this company that will save it from
itself and its own dreams of totalization and substantial Truth.
41 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2011), xxxi.

42 See ibid., ch. 8.
43 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 131; see also Bruno Bosteels, ‘Radical Philosophy’, Filozofski
vestnik, 2 (2008): 176.
44 Ibid., 130.
45 Ibid., 133.
That means, in order for philosophy to embrace its outside – the conditions –
in a truly philosophical manner, it does not produce Truth or, in other words,
‘the philosophical category of Truth is by itself void’. The operation of Truth –
systematically defined, without causing philosophy to become a system – is the
thought of the truths of events as types of being that are however indiscernible
and undecidable from within the law of the situation in which they occur. Badiou
refers to the act of thinking the truths produced by conditions as ‘seizing’ truths.
The philosophical act of capturing evental truths and stating ‘there are truths’
first of all links the events to being, thinks them as types of being. But it does
so in an act of subversion, because it subtracts these truths from the situations
in which they are not presented as part of the ontological count, in which they
are thus indiscernible and undecidable. Seizing then can never be representing
or approximating, but it implies affirming a speculative fiction against the non-
existence or active denial of this fiction from within the situation (or ‘the world’)
in which philosophy argues this fiction has occurred.46 Badiou uses the notion of
the matheme, borrowed from Lacan, to systematize the philosophical operation
of seizing Truth. Mathemes, as Samo Tomsîc summarizes insightfully, ‘formalise
something that does not exist but nevertheless has material consequences’.47
We see here the category of revolt and risk-taking as essential conditions
of philosophy returning: a revolt against the world, and – in the register of
ontology – against the situation has to be a risky and militant endeavour.
But philosophy does not only seize singular and localized truths. Having
defined it as a distinct space that operates according to its own logic means
that it is the space in which all truths produced by the different conditions
within a certain moment in time are welcomed and find shelter, to use Badiou’s
terminology.48 More precisely, it ‘propose[s]‌a conceptual framework in which
the contemporary compossibility of the conditions can be grasped’.49 We
can now formulate in strictly philosophical terms what we merely asserted
above: by seizing truths from situations qua subtraction, philosophy establishes
the compossibility of truths within and against a certain time. Because truths
always reopen a seemingly closed, whether that is ontologically consistent or
genealogically determined, situation to the eternal and universal multiplicity of
being.50

47 Samo Tomsîc, The Badiou Dictionary, 199; see also Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 81.
50 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 39, 82.
From antiphilosophy in general to the case of Marx
We have carefully established the relationship between Badiou’s renewal of

philosophy, which we read through its double crisis of generalized sophistry
and defeatism, on the one hand, and the crisis of delocalization of philosophy
into non-philosophical discourses, on the other. On this ground we are now
able to reach a more solid definition of the notion of antiphilosophy51 that will
then allow us, in a second step, to interrogate whether it would make sense,
starting from Badiou’s own reading of Marx and Marxism, to label Marx an
antiphilosopher.
Defining antiphilosophy
It can appear as if Badiou had not reached a clear distinction between
antiphilosophy and sophistry, especially as he also identifies some of the most
prominently discussed antiphilosophers, like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche,
as major modern sophists – drawing a parallel between Plato’s sophistic
opponents and his own modern ones.52 I’m however going to contradict this
initial impression by arguing that sophistry and antiphilosophy have distinct,
yet equally important and ultimately interlinked roles to play as the polemical
enemies and tempters of Badiou’s philosophy. And we can understand these
roles along the lines of the two frontiers of the crisis of philosophy previously
outlined.
Modern sophists perform a three-step devaluation of philosophy: they
reduce its logic to the laws of language, a reduction of what is or can be to what
is or can be said, whereby logic becomes tied to rhetoric, making language the
new sovereign of philosophy;53 they thereby deny philosophy the possibility of
making universal truth claims; and they introduce into philosophy the realms
beyond language as that which is inaccessible for philosophy, a remainder or
simply ‘the real’. Antiphilosophers also try to wrest truth away from philosophy.
But instead of denying its possibility tout court and making themselves complicit
with the continuation of the world as it is (philosophy’s nihilism), they try to
overcome what they identify as philosophy’s limitations or failures by instituting
51 For an extensive study of antiphilosophy, see Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’.

53 See Bosteels, Radical Antiphilsophy, 162–3.
a radical act that ultimately destroys the world and philosophy. They achieve
this by replacing the production of classical philosophical truths in three ways.
First of all – and in this regard they are very close to the sophists if not occupying
a sophistic position54 – antiphilosophers reject philosophy’s drive towards
systematization and its institutionalized form. This rejection of philosophy
proper is inherent in Lacan’s deployment of the notion of ‘antiphilosophy’ which
inspired Badiou’s uptake for his own polemical demarcations.55 In ‘Peut-être
à Vincennes. . .’ (1974), Lacan suggests that antiphilosophy could serve as the
category under which to investigate what the ‘university discourse’ owes to its
‘educational’ assumptions.56 Antiphilosophy would then serve to expose the
perversion and ultimate failure of philosophy by being turned into knowledge
that can be passed on as a complete Weltanschauung or even as a self-sufficient
and coherent theory within an educational, thus ideological apparatus.
Antiphilosophy is the rebellion against philosophy as something close to a master
discourse – for which Hegel’s system or the French ‘philosophes’ are prominent
examples, in addition to some of Lacan’s more immediate contemporary rivals
such as Deleuze and Guattari.57 Part of the rebellion is aimed at exposing the truth
philosophy claims to think as misleading, harmful or even criminal, whether
it is Wittgenstein’s identification of philosophy as nonsensical (unsinnig) non-
thought58 or Nietzsche’s descriptions of the philosopher’s loss of their mastery of
knowledge and of their value judgements.59 Philosophy is unable to think ‘life’ –
its core task according to antiphilosophy.
Second, and here antiphilosophy departs notably from sophistry, it wrests
truth from classical philosophy by somewhat allowing it back in via a detour
through non-philosophy. Based on having delineated in a sophistic fashion
what can and what cannot be thought, antiphilosophy goes on to make access to
that which is beyond thought and therefore the key to grasping life conditional
upon non-philosophy, whether that’s politics (Nietzsche), science (Lacan) or
art.60 To make it conditional on these non-philosophical discourses neither
54 See Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 11.

56 Jacques Lacan, ‘Peut-être à vincennes’. In Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 2001), 314. http://
espace.freud.pagesperso-orange.fr/topos/psycha/psysem/vincenne.htm (accessed 15 May 2018).
57 See Adrian Johnston, ‘This Philosophy Which Is Not One; Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou,
and Lacanian Antiphilosophy’, Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 3
(2010): 137–58.
Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, 77.
58
59 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente-1885’. In Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe

(eKGWB), Gruppe 35 (24). www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,35[24] (accessed 18 May
2018); ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’. In eKGWB, §205. www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-205
(accessed 18 May 2018); see also Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, 1.
60 Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, 172.
means displacing philosophy into them nor making philosophy the foundation
from which to interpret non-philosophical events. Instead antiphilosophy
requires ‘philosophy’ to imitate the non-philosophical practices by means
of a ‘radical act’. Mimicking scientific, political or artistic events via a radical,
supraphilosophical act is for the antiphilosopher the only way to overcome the
limitations of classical philosophical thought. The reason why Badiou calls the
radical act supraphilosophical and distinguishes it clearly from the notion of the
event in his own philosophy, is that while the act draws on non-philosophical
events, like Nietzsche’s anecdotal reading of the French Revolution, it remains
firmly anchored within philosophy; a philosophy that reimagines itself as
practice that is more radical than what, in the antiphilosophers’ eyes, a political,
artistic, scientific or passionate event could ever achieve. In order to mark
clearly which condition a certain antiphilosophy wants to replace with its own
act, Badiou places the prefix ‘archi’ in front of the four conditions.61 It further
allows knowledge (savoir) of that which cannot be known (connaître) as long as
philosophy’s logic is predicated on the existence of that which cannot be known,
that is, grounds itself in a logic that accounts for the limits of pure thought.
Antiphilosophy positions itself not radically outside philosophy, but in what
Bosteels insightfully calls ‘the strange topological position of an . . . “internal
exteriority” ’.62
Third and last, the antiphilosopher himself (even the antiphilosophers are all
men!) enters the stage. Part of the specificity of the radical act that for Badiou
makes it distinct from the operation of the philosophical seizing of the event
is the role that the antiphilosopher plays. Because the radical act sits in an
indistinguishable space between reality and its philosophical announcement or
declaration, on the basis that there is no distinction between the philosophical
logic and the logic of the event, it is antiphilosophers themselves who become
the proper name of the act. The antiphilosopher brings the act into existence by
declaring its rupture as well as the new world it has created. It is not a seizing
of that which will have taken place (in the temporality of the future anterior),
but it is an act of creation by pure power of will and thought. That means, the
antiphilosopher, in the last instance, sacrifices himself for this creation.63
If we now summarize the role of antiphilosophy for a renewed philosophy, it
is to remind philosophy of its new duties, to keep it ‘on guard’.64 The sophistic
61 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 79–80.

62 Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, 158.
63 Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, 8–10.
64 Ibid., 9–10.
dimension, that denies philosophical truth as well as systematization, helps to

keep its category of Truth minimal, or more precisely ‘empty’, and to grant a
place to the singular and to the contingent.65 The exclusively antiphilosophical
dimension is a reminder of a) philosophy’s duty to disrupt not just rival
philosophies but the world as a whole and b) that this disruption will depend
on philosophy’s incorporation of philosophy’s outside and of what takes place
beyond philosophy’s specific horizon. When Badiou argues infamously that
‘philosophy is always an heir to antiphilosophy’,66 this is for him not just an
intraphilosophical claim about what a renewed philosophy needs to learn by
discovering antiphilosophy ‘in its truth’ and finding the relevant provocations
and tasks. It is also a proposition about the ethics of philosophy as practice: while
the philosopher needs to ultimately lose the antiphilosopher in philosophical
terms, the antiphilosopher is forever the philosopher’s double, whose polemical
challenges the latter can never escape once and for all, if they want their
philosophy to live on.67 Because antiphilosophy puts philosophy, as Bosteels
formulates, ‘to the test of its own contemporaneity’68 – a contemporaneity that is
grounded in a constructed understanding of the contemporaneous situation the
philosophers find themselves in, allowing them to define the requirements for
continuing the revolt against it.
Marx, an antiphilosopher?
We are finally in a position to return to the key question of this chapter, namely
whether and to which extent Marx might ‘fit the bill’ of the antiphilosopher.
There is an intuitive answer to this question which jumps out at us if we just
open the very first pages of Being and Event. Summarizing the ‘global state of
philosophy’ Badiou mentions Marx twice: once, alongside Lenin, Freud and
Lacan as those who have developed interpretations for the origin of a post-
Cartesian doctrine of the subject in non-philosophical practices. And second,
again alongside Lacan (as well as Heidegger and analytic philosophy), Marx is
listed as one of the prophets of the end of an entire philosophical epoch. As he
writes, ‘Marx announces the end of philosophy and its realization in practice.
Lacan speaks of “antiphilosophy”, and relegates speculative totalization to the
imaginary’.69
65 Badiou, Conditions, 19, 21.

66 Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, 10.
67 Badiou, Conditions, 25; Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 144.
68 Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 27.
In his recent dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Badiou develops this latter point
slightly further, arguing that Marx (and Freud) have ‘a definite praxis’ as the
explicit goal of their thought. That means in turn that they don’t aim at creating
a philosophical oeuvre, instead they use philosophical argumentation for a non-
philosophical purpose.70 The key reference point from Marx’s writings, which
otherwise contain plenty of variations on his critique of philosophy, is here the
infamous eleventh Feuerbach thesis: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’71
What we can immediately gather from these comments on Marx is that a) he
plays a central role within Badiou’s polemics of demarcation and b) that he does
so not as a philosopher but as someone who proposes a critique of philosophy in
general that becomes synonymous for Badiou with pronouncing its end. Marx’s
critique seems furthermore primarily aimed at the inability of philosophy to
change the world as it is currently constituted.
These points taken together make Marx a rival of philosophy who certainly
does not fit into the purely sophistic, namely conservative camp that ends up
mirroring the world. But whether he fits into the category of the antiphilosopher
requires a slightly deeper investigation into how Marx’s critique of philosophy
unfolds in more detail and how it corresponds to the three dimensions of
antiphilosophy identified in the previous section.
Our first axis of inquiry will be Marx’s sophistic tendencies, that is, his
explicit rejection(s) of philosophical truth. These are not entirely easy to pin
down in that they require a survey of an oscillating trajectory rather than an
analysis of a single position. It is therefore important to consider key moments
of Marx’s avowed relationship to philosophy between his early student years
in the mid-1830s and The Poverty of Philosophy, first published in 1847, which
marks a threshold from an explicit debate with philosophy to what Marx himself
perceived as ‘his entrance to science’,72 which is accompanied by a certain loss of
interest in confronting philosophy in and of itself.
If we start with Marx’s letter to his father from 1837, we find an account of
his urge to, above all, ‘wrestle’ with philosophy73 as well as of his difficulty to
maintain a clear sense of purpose and distinction throughout confrontations
with specific philosophical positions:
70 Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue, 34.

71 Karl Marx in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 173.
72 Marx, ‘1859 Preface’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 427.
Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Werke (hereafter MEW), vol. 40 (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2012), 7, my
73
trans. (See English version in Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 10.)
In the discussions here many contradictory views appeared and I chained myself
ever more closely to the current world philosophy that I had intended to escape.
But all that used to resonate was silenced and a true fit of irony came over me, as
could easily happen after so many negations.74
Despite his self-doubt at the end of the letter, Marx does put forward a concern
at this early point in his life that ultimately becomes the pivot for his critique
of philosophy. If philosophy’s ‘grasp of truth’ depends on configuring the
relationship of the world of ideas and the ‘object itself ’, that is, the real, the
world or simply life, it is his concern that it does so in such a way as to allow
the rationality of the object to unfold on its own terms;75 something German
Idealism, specifically Kant and Fichte, but possibly Hegel, who at this point
simply makes him feel uneasy, do not allow due to giving unrivalled primacy
to the idea.76
In the works that follow, from the ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’ over
his dissertation, the German-Franco Yearbooks up to his double-edged critique
of Proudhon and Hegel in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx solidifies this unease
(Unbehagen) into a firm critique of Hegel who he perceives as embodying the
great philosophical adversary of his moment.
One must not let oneself be bamboozled by this storm that follows a great, a
world philosophy.77
From this moment, Hegel and philosophy largely become synonyms in Marx’s
writings, which turns Hegel into the only German idealist worthy of explicit
rivalry. And while other Hegelians are led astray in the aftermath of the Hegelian
storm towards unphilosophical quarrels about Hegel’s morality,78 Marx sees
himself on course to reconfiguring not just the relationship between thought and
being, but between thought (the concept) and reality as such, between thought
and the world.79 When Badiou therefore argues that what French philosophers
of the twentieth century sought in Germany was a ‘new relation between concept
and existence’,80 this is precisely what Marx is after a century earlier fuelling his
appreciative rivalry with Hegel.
74 Ibid., 10, my trans. (Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 10).

77 Marx, Hefte zur epikureischen, stoischen und skeptischen Philosophie. In MEW, vol. 40, 217, my trans.
78 See ibid. 327.
79 See Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London: Verso, 1979), 134; Stuart Hall, ‘Marx’s Notes on
Method: A “Reading” of the “1857 Introduction” ’, Cultural Studies, 17.2 (2003): 113–49, 137.
80 Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, lv.
First of all, the world as it is – the bourgeois world – is for Marx divided,
fragmented and deeply conflicted, whether he expresses this through a
reconfigured Hegelian separation of civil society and the state81 or, from
the ‘1844 Introduction’ onwards, through the notion of class struggle.82 The
question of the world is then not coextensive with language in particular –
something Badiou emphasizes in relation to the modern sophists – but with its
religious, political and economic, in short its social relational configuration. The
development that Marx observes in Hegelian philosophy is a double-edged one.
On the one hand, he acknowledges how Hegel strove to open his system up to
the outside world, how, in Marx’s own words, this new philosophical paradigm
‘flung itself to the chest of the worldly siren’.83 On the other hand, this opening
of philosophy towards the different non-philosophical dimensions of society or
‘the world’ is misleading as it follows its own agenda: instead of opening itself
up to the thought of the world itself, to the truths that lie within it, it turns itself
into the world.
As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to
settle upon the earth, so does philosophy, after it expanded to be the world,
turn against the world as it appears [the ‘real’ world]. The same now with the
philosophy of Hegel.84
By creating a philosophical system Hegel (thus, the philosophy of the moment)

sets up a spiritual, abstract totality that not only takes itself for the world, but,
motivated by the will to fully realize itself, it creates a critical tension with the
world as it currently appears. Despite its dialectical mediations, it pits Ideas or
concepts against particular appearances that do not conform to them. While
this direction towards a critical relation to a conflictual and ultimately unjust
and irrational world is the same direction that Marx seeks for his own renewal
of philosophy, it is, in his mind, pursued by the wrong means.
The problem with Hegel’s philosophy is that it assumes reason has already been
realized and can be realized in the realm of spirit alone. This critique is clearly
formulated in Marx’s accusation of Proudhon’s Hegelian critique of property
and inequality as being grounded in ‘pure, eternal, impersonal reason’85 which
81 See especially Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 46–70.
82 See Marx, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’. In McLellan, Selected
Writings, 71, esp. 80–82.
83 Marx, MEW, vol. 40, 215, my trans.
84 Ibid., my trans.
85 Karl Marx, ‘Poverty of Philosophy’. In Collected Works (hereafter CW), vol. 6, ed. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 105–212, 162.
is not dependent on anything outside itself, that is, formulated independently

from any historically specific rationality of the world that produces the specific
inequalities and property relations. This type of principled Hegelian reason has
outside itself ‘neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it
can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself ’.86 Instead it is
fully detached from the rationality of things themselves, from the objective and
subjective relations, struggles and consciousness(es)87 that create and in turn
might be able to alleviate inequality. Thus, while reason does move ‘through
the world’ with its dialectical method, it does not truly open itself up to being
affected by the (ir)rationality of it. The contradictions it deals with remain
internal to philosophy.88
It is against this background that Marx pits his own project of formulating
a ‘critical philosophy’ whose aim it is to help clarify the struggles and wishes
of a conflictual bourgeois world and its subjects89 against philosophy (Hegel)
and against unphilosophy (positive philosophy that lets itself be determined
purely by reality). And however many variations we are going to identify in the
following section of the precise relation that this critical-philosophical or ‘self-
clarifying’ approach takes to the world, once it tries to move beyond the critical
dialogue with those who helped pave its way: at this point, we can say that truth
for Marx, while he hasn’t abandoned its possibility, which is bound up with his
faith in the possibility of changing the world and realizing human emancipation,
certainly lies beyond the limits of philosophy proper or the ‘old’ philosophy. In
this sense he turns against philosophy as a discipline and prefigures the Lacanian
critique of the university discourse.90 By wedding a certain sophistic rejection
of the possibility of philosophical truth with his radical desire of changing the
world for which he needs to gain access to the truths that the world holds in its
falsity, he fulfils the first criterion of the antiphilosopher.
The second step in our inquiry concerns the means by which Marx formulates
the possibility of gaining access to the truth of the world in order to change it.
The precise question we need to answer: is Marx a thinker of the radical act and
if so what kind of act is it?
86 Ibid., 162–3.
87 See Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin: 1992), 380 (‘Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts’).
88 Ibid., 382.
89 Ibid., 209 (‘Letters from the German-Franco Yearbook’).
90 See Marx on the transition from philosophy as discipline into freedom in McLellan, Selected
Writings, 17.
In his famous letter to Ruge from 1843 Marx argues that the role of critical
philosophy is to formulate an immanent critique of the world that, instead of
imposing new dogmas, makes the world aware of the dreams and possibilities it
already holds within itself, even if they are currently buried in false appearances
of the worldly relations and in the false consciousness of the world’s bearers.91 This
position is certainly far away from any Nietzschean and thus antiphilosophical
desire to break the world into two – instead it argues for critical philosophy’s
responsibility to understand itself as the gold-digger of past ideas that it needs to
unearth in order to uncover their critical and transformative potential. This line
of thinking weds ‘critical philosophy’ firmly to its task of exposing the errors of
idealist thought alongside the contradictions of bourgeois society.
But if the task of critical philosophy or ‘critique’ is merely to help the world
become conscious of what it does and how it conceives of its actions, then
philosophy needs something and someone else of the world to translate the new
insights into political action, someone to be made and become conscious outside
of philosophy. This is where Marx’s demand for critical philosophy having to be a
‘united effort’, ‘a task for the world and for us’,92 comes to bear. It is, however, not a
united effort between the entire world and critical philosophy, but, as we see in the
‘1844 Introduction’, the world gets reduced to one particular class, the proletariat,
who is tasked with the dissolution of the entire world order.93 This is the moment
when Marx ‘takes sides in politics’94 – not just against the conflictual bourgeois
world as a whole, but where he becomes the partisan thinker of the proletarian
movement, aiming to bring about a revolution that can truly succeed in the aim
the French revolution set itself but failed to bring about: human emancipation.
In that sense, the radical act that Marx ultimately seeks is the revolution that will
abolish bourgeois social relations and bring about communism. And this act is –
if we hear the echo of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ – a practical, a political event;
it is not a philosophical act. Only ‘in human practice and the comprehension of
this practice’ lies rationality and truth for thought.95 The role of philosophy has
been reduced vis-à-vis idealist philosophies to midwife and witness while its
constitutional dimension was relocated into non-philosophy, that is, practice. It
has therefore not been radically and hyperbolically expanded into a radical act
as it is the case for the antiphilosopher.
91 Marx, Early Writings, 208–9.

92 Ibid., 209.
93 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 81.
94 Marx, Early Writings, 208.
95 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 171 (amended trans.); Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. In
McLellan, Selected Writings, 171–3, esp. theses 2, 8 and 11.
Nevertheless, there is a moment when Marx comes close to formulating the

role of philosophy with resemblance to that of the archipolitical event that Badiou
identified in Nietzsche, where the latter denies that the French Revolution has
taken place as it left the Christian value system intact and aims to rectify it with
a more radical supraphilosophical event. This moment is Marx’s discussion of
the possibility of a revolution in Prussian Germany which lags so far behind
France and North America regarding the modernization of its political and
economic relations that it has neither experienced a political revolution nor
formed a consistent class society.96 But, so Marx argues, Germany has a different
productive mode that makes it the contemporary of the overall political situation
by other means:
As the ancient peoples went through their pre-history in imagination, in mythology,

so we Germans have lived our future history in thought, in philosophy. We are
the philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical
contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German
history. [ . . . ] What, in progressive nations, is a practical break with modern
political conditions, is, in Germany, where those conditions do not yet exist, at
first a critical break with the philosophical reflexion of those conditions.97
Thus, Germany’s revolution is essentially bound up with critique, which is why,

in Germany, philosophy cannot be negated tout court. It has to be ‘realized’
(verwirklicht) and only through its realization it can and will be lost.98 The
realization of philosophy is here conceived as the philosophical conception of
‘the emancipation of man’: an emancipated individual (the social individual99)
who is freed from both religious and political abstractions that take its powers
away from him/her.100 Curiously, Marx ties this realization of philosophy and
liberation of Germany to the formation of a proletariat about which he himself
has in that same text delivered all the arguments for why structurally, it cannot
yet exist in Germany.101 Which causes suspicion whether the political act is
ultimately a rhetorical proclamation of the formation of the radical subject,
96 See Völker in Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue, 80.

97 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 75, amended trans. based on this version available at www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm (accessed 15 May 2018).
98 Ibid., 76; see also Marx, MEW, 329.
99 See the work on the social individual and transindividuality by Jason Read, Politics of
Transindividuality (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
We have here a link to Marx’s critique of religion in general and Christianity in particular, which
100
could be developed in relation to Badiou’s notion that the struggle against some or all dimensions
of Christianity is a key dimension of the antiphilosopher’s turn against philosophy. But this will
need to be developed elsewhere as it leads beyond the scope of the current inquiry.
See Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 81–2.
101
grounded in philosophy (namely, its realization and ultimate loss) and denied by
the structural sociohistorical conditions – all of which would well qualify Marx
as a potential antiphilosopher. However, we have to be careful not to overlook the
very last sentence of the ‘Introduction’: ‘When all the inner conditions are met,
the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic
cock.’102 In the end, philosophy is still nothing more than the midwife to the
revolutionary event and the political subject, which are a contingent occurrence
dependent on economic and political structural conditions that are always
also historical conditions. When Badiou mentions in passing the possibility of
Althusser almost qualifying as a twentieth-century antiphilosopher due to ‘the
proximity of revolutionary politics [to his materialist philosophy], under the
partisan name of “taking sides”, that silently educated the clarity induced by this
separating act’,103 then it is this same closeness that we have just witnessed in
Marx’s conception.
But this is not the final word Marx speaks concerning the relationship of
philosophy and the world – even though the concepts of ‘philosophy’ and ‘critique’
appear much more sparingly in the publications that follow The Communist
Manifesto. In there, Marx (and Engels) firmly state that ‘man’s ideas, views, and
conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the
conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life’.104
If we have so far developed the impression that philosophy takes a backseat to
(political) practice, we are now seeing another side of the Marxian primacy of
man’s social and material existence over the realm of ideas and thus, the realm of
thought. At this moment philosophical thought is truly stripped of any possibility
of conceiving transcendental or, as Badiou likes to say, eternal truth precisely
because it is firmly overdetermined by the mode of production or ‘economic
structure of society’.105 We have, in a way, circled back to Marx’s most modest
formulation of philosophy in his 1843 letter to Ruge: namely that as critique it
can help unearth the economic, political, religious, etc. principles that govern the
historical moment and thus will help those living within such a moment – for
example, within a capitalist class society – to understand their condition and find
the weapons to change it. The only difference is that in his later work Marx has
truly given up on his archipolitical temptation from the ‘Introduction’ where he
suggests that philosophy could ‘think’ human emancipation and ‘emancipated
Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 81–2, trans. modified.

102
Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 81.

103
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 62.
104
Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 425.

105
man’. By radically historicizing ‘truth’ – as understanding of the world and all

that live within it – when reducing philosophy to critique, Marx holds on to a
reconfigured notion of philosophy against sophistry precisely because Marx
never gives way to the rules of sense or meaning alone; we only need to remember
‘commodity fetishism’ and the distinction between the appearance and essence
of a commodity. That which is not attainable within pure or Idealist philosophy
can be thought if philosophy opens itself up to the worldly elements by which
it is conditioned. And by tying ‘truth’ (as radical change) to the emergence of
political subjects, Marx leaves the primary emancipatory function with politics
instead of trying to draw it back into philosophy. We therefore don’t even need to
traverse the third and last criterion of antiphilosophy anymore, namely whether
the antiphilosopher becomes himself or herself the subject of enunciation or
the name of the act. If Marx ever falls prey to such a rhetorical conjuring, it is
not with regard to himself but, as we’ve seen above, in relation to his preferred
political subject, ‘the proletariat’.
Conclusion
Not formulating an archipolitical or indeed an archieconomic act106 means that

Marx is ultimately uninterested in reclaiming a fundamental emancipatory
role for philosophy after he has achieved107 its multifaceted materialist
deterritorialization. In that sense he differs from the antiphilosophers who are
happily taking the risk of destroying philosophy altogether in order to rectify the
failure of the non-philosophical realms to deliver a radical exit from the worldly
status quo. And it makes Marx’s concern a very different one from Badiou’s,
whose philosophical Kampfplatz with sophistry and antiphilosophy is set up
to reclaim philosophy’s emancipatory potential and regain the license of doing
philosophy unashamedly.108
In this chapter, we have not dealt very much with Badiou’s own reading
of Marx and Marxism, of which there are many accounts elsewhere. What
concerns us nevertheless is that, while Badiou himself never explicitly suggested
You might accuse me of not having sufficiently explored the possibility of Marx formulating an
106
archi-economic act as we have, of course, the moments of technological determinism in Marx’s

writings from The Communist Manifesto onwards. But this will have to be explored another time.
‘Achieved’ is, of course, a strong word considering the many oscillations that this materialist
107
deterritorialization of philosophy takes throughout Marx’s work – and which we have certainly not
been able to address comprehensively.
See Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, 161.
108
considering Marx an antiphilosopher, he has, via his reading of Althusser’s

struggles over determining a satisfactory relationship between philosophy and
politics in the name of founding a ‘materialist philosophy’, formulated a much
more straightforward criticism of Marx’s relation to philosophy. That is the
problem of suture, which we briefly mentioned earlier on in the chapter:
I called this rupture of symmetry and determinant privileging of one of

philosophy’s conditions a suture. Philosophy is sutured whenever one of its
conditions is called upon to determine the philosophical act of seizing and
declaration. [. . .] The trouble with sutures is that they make their two edges, that
is, both philosophy and the privileged condition, difficult to discern. On the side
of philosophy, the suture, which invests the philosophical act with a singular
determination concerning its truth, destroys the categorial void necessary to the
philosophical site as a site of thought by filling it in.109
I think what we experienced while trying to read Marx along the lines of
the categories of antiphilosophy was precisely this indiscernibility between
philosophy and politics, which comes hand in hand with Marx’s refusal of
defining the philosophical act on its own terms. But the previous discussions
of Badiou’s and Marx’s struggles with philosophy strongly suggest that this
distinction simply marks their fundamentally differing desires concerning
philosophy, that reflects a different understanding of what helps humanity/class
society to grasp and change the world.
Badiou is trying to reinvigorate radical philosophy by carving out a space in
which its thought is clearly distinguished from its conditions while maintaining
what he above calls a ‘symmetry’ between the world’s singular events in all
four conditions and philosophy’s operation of seizing the truths they produce
to formulate its Truth. Philosophy has to remain, above all, without an object.
Marx, on the other hand, is not concerned with the future of philosophy in
any substantive manner. He continues to draw on philosophy – which might
challenge us into qualifying our statement by distinguishing explicit and
implicit concern – but he does not fear the loss of philosophy as he makes clear
at several points. That, it seems to me, while on some level a fairly obvious
conclusion, offers a sometimes forgotten starting point, from which we might
reread Badiou’s discussion of Marx and Marxism as well as the many Marxist
criticisms of Badiou’s work more productively. And we might bear in mind
Barbara Cassin’s objection to Badiou’s categorization of his rivals into sophists

and antiphilosophers: ‘The philosophy/antiphilosophy binary will have been a

pure product of philosophy, one that philosophy will present as always-already
having a structuring effect.’110
Not having found Marx an antiphilosopher might then have not just
allowed us to clarify why Badiou hesitates to subsume him under his existing
categorizations of philosophy’s rivals, but it might also come as a relief. A relief
for Marx’s legacy, for whose work it would be ironic to be subsumed back into
philosophy by such an operation (which doesn’t mean the last word is spoken
on whether Marx is really ready to lose philosophy) and a relief for Badiou
(or rather the Marxian readers of Badiou?), who we have found continues his
struggle with Marx and Marxism’s thought even though it might prove more
explosive to his firm aim of renewing radical philosophy than any of the sophists
and antiphilosophers could ever be.
110 Barbara Cassin, quoted by Bruno Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 64.

7
The Question Concerning

Technology: Badiou versus Heidegger
Justin Clemens
For those interested in Alain Badiou’s work and its development, it is striking
how little he refers throughout his oeuvre to that of Martin Heidegger. From
his earliest published essays such as ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’ (1968) and ‘Mark
and Lack’ (1969), through Theory of Contradiction (1975), up to and including
Theory of the Subject (1982), there is a notable paucity of reference by Badiou
to the German philosopher.1 Given the astonishing priority that Heidegger’s
thinking established for itself in twentieth-century philosophy – whether in the
familiar forms of overwhelming passion for his thinking or the intense analytic
rejection thereof – this is prima facie an odd, that is, a nonstandard expression
of something like indifference or distaste.
In the preface to Theory of the Subject, for example, Badiou expressly lists
his key materials as deriving from ‘the two great German dialecticians, Hegel
and Hölderlin’, ‘the two great modern French dialecticians, Mallarmé and Lacan’,
‘the two great classical French dialecticians, Pascal and Rousseau’, and from
‘four of the five great Marxists: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao Zedong’.2 (Stalin
is the fifth.) Heidegger goes notably unmentioned. Aside from Hölderlin and,
perhaps, Hegel, this is in itself a very un-Heideggerean list of masters. Heidegger
receives only four pages in the index. When he briefly appears in the text proper,
it is, rather unremarkably, first in regards to the ontological question and to the
deconstruction of metaphysics, but also, perhaps less usually, as an analogy to
contemporaneous Marxist struggles. Badiou writes:
1 See A. Badiou, ‘La subversion infinitésimale’, Cahiers pour l’analyse, vol. 9 (1968): 118–37; ‘Marque
et Manque: à propos du Zéro’, Cahiers pour l’analyse, 10 (1969): 150–73; Théorie de la contradiction
(Paris: Maspero, 1975); Theory of the Subject, trans. and introduction by B. Bosteels (London/
New York: Continuum, 2009).
2 Badiou, Theory of the Subject, xl.
Heidegger would like to put an end to the philosophical idea of a guarantee of

consistency by the cause.
You will be able to shed some light on this point if you know that what we
contemporary Marxists want to put an end to is the theme of a guarantee of
communism by the socialist State.3
That, however, is just about the extent of Heidegger’s appearance in the treatise.
The paucity of reference in this context is particularly noteworthy given the
notorious impact of Heidegger on ‘French philosophy’ of the twentieth century,
at least since the early 1930s. Along with Hegel and Husserl, Heidegger is a clear
and present influence upon thinkers as diverse and as important as Maurice
Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and so on and on – to the extent that the high points of such
philosophy are literally unimaginable without Heidegger’s impact.4 But this
is not clearly the case for Badiou. Not only is Heidegger almost absent from
Badiou’s early work, but he doesn’t seem to fare any better in the later.
If one cites Badiou’s own express affirmations of influence, Heidegger
never appears in any significant, let alone positive, way. In Logics of Worlds,
for example, Badiou asserts that: ‘In effect, I think there are only three crucial
philosophers: Plato, Descartes and Hegel.’5 When Heidegger is mentioned at all,
it is as the object of a certain irritated disdain coupled, moreover, with Badiou’s
characteristic hostility to any concept or trope that smacks of theological or
religious affiliations. As Badiou puts it in the same text: ‘Phenomenology, in
its German variant, is indisputably haunted by religion. This probably stems
from the motif of a lost authenticity, of a forgetting of the true Life, of a deleted
origin – a theme that traverses all of Heidegger’s writings.’6 Even when Badiou
deploys the apparently emblematically Heideggerean terminology of ‘Dasein’,
things are by no means as Heideggerean as they might initially seem. As Alberto
Toscano, the English translator of Logics of Worlds comments: ‘Badiou often
evokes Heidegger, with some irreverence. It is rather Hegel’s Dasein . . . that is at
stake here.’7 Once again, Heidegger seems to have failed to have made any real
impression upon Badiou’s work.
3 Ibid., 235.
4 For an incomparable overview of the impact, see D. Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. F. Raffoul
and D. Pettigrew (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015).
5 A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 527.
Ibid., 516.
6
7 A. Toscano, ‘Translator’s Note’ in Logics of Worlds, xvi.

The Question Concerning Technology 115
Badiou’s seemingly essential indifference towards Heidegger has been to

some extent mirrored in the commentary, where, if we find a sequence of dutiful
articles laying out key terms in a ‘compare and contrast’ sort of way, as well as
the usual obligatory smattering of references to Heidegger in the dedicated
monographs, no real encounter seems to have been adequately registered.8
In fact, the commentary itself tends to suggest that, outside of a few general
indications – the primacy of ontology, the importance of events – there is no
especial significance to their relationship . . . or non-relationship.
Let me give a couple of instances here. As Mark Hewson writes:
If Badiou [like Heidegger] restores the primacy of ontology for an understanding

of what philosophy is, he does so, I would suggest, in a largely autonomous way.
His project is not conceived primarily as a critique of Heidegger . . . despite the
similarity of the titles – Being and Time, Being and Event – these works do not
stand in the kind of close communication and dialogue that one might expect.9
Even in regards to the one ‘book’ that Badiou has published in which Heidegger’s
name appears on the cover – Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy (whose English
8 See, e.g., B. Bosteels, ‘Vérité et forçage: Badiou avec Heidegger et Lacan’. In Alain Badiou: Penser
le multiple, ed. C. Ramond (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 259–94; M. de Beistegui, ‘The Ontological
Dispute: Badiou, Heidegger, and Deleuze’. In Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. G. Riera
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 45–59; J. Clemens and J. Roffe, ‘Philosophy
as Anti-religion in the Work of Alain Badiou’, Sophia, 47.3 (2008): 345–58; G. Harman, ‘Badiou’s
Relation to Heidegger in Theory of the Subject’. In Badiou and Philosophy, ed. S. Bowden and S.
Duffy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); M. Hewson, ‘Heidegger’. In Alain Badiou: Key
Concepts, ed. A. J. Bartlett and J. Clemens (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 140–48; S. Prozorov, ‘What Is the
“World” in World Politics? Heidegger, Badiou and Void Universalism’, Contemporary Political Theory,
12.2 (2013): 102–22; B. Radloff, ‘Ontotheology and Universalism: Heideggerian Reflections on Alain
Badiou’s Political Thinking’, Existentia, 22.3–4 (2012): 301–35. I think the paucity of commentary
is perhaps most evident, however, in anthologies such as B. Besana and O. Feltham (eds), Écrits
autour de la pensée d’Alain Badiou (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) and I. Vodoz and F. Tarby (eds), Autour
d’Alain Badiou (Paris: Germina, 2011), as well as in such monographs as B. Baki, Badiou’s Being and
Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); S. Gillespie, The Mathematics
of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2008); P. Hallward, Badiou: A
Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); N. Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar,
Rancière: Re-thinking Emancipation (London/New York: Continuum, 2007); C. Norris, Derrida,
Badiou and the Formal Imperative (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2012); E. Pluth, Badiou: A
Philosophy of the New (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). I don’t mean to suggest that these texts are
in any way lacking as a result – only that Heidegger remains for all of them a minor or glancing
reference or, rather, an occasion for prosecuting a polemic. I must confess that my ignorance of the
German critical reception, in particular, possibly vitiates my claims here (my online searches turned
up few results), although (1) I still suspect that there is no extended study of the relation in question,
and (2) even if such exists, it is still noteworthy that the relation has not really proved a significant
focus of attention in the Anglo- and Francophone uptake, and, moreover, (3) in the German context
the question of Heidegger’s Nazism continues to impact seriously upon academic debates in a way
that, for obvious reasons, goes beyond even the controversies in the United States. It is further worth
noting that, as the number of books treating ‘Badiou and X’ multiplies – for example, J. Vernon and
A. Calcagno (eds), Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity (Lanham: Lexington Books,
2015) – none that I know of exist for ‘Badiou and Heidegger’.
9 Hewson, ‘Heidegger’, 140.
title is a publisher’s traducing of the original French Heidegger. Les femmes, le

nazisme et la philosophie) – it is significant that this is a very brief occasional
text co-authored with Barbara Cassin.10 Moreover, as one scathing reviewer
commented: ‘The title of this book is highly misleading . . . Perhaps the most
important point to make about this book . . . is that it offers nothing of interest
to scholars or philosophers studying the works of Heidegger.’11 The same could
certainly not be said for Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, or even Deleuze,
whose Difference and Repetition is utterly saturated with the influence of the
German thinker.12
And yet there are always exceptions to any rule. We should above all
remember that the course of true influence never runs smoothly – not in
philosophy, nor indeed anywhere else. Which leads me to my central thesis
here: that Heidegger is in fact the most crucial of philosophers for Badiou, if in
a modality of polarization. In fact, Badiou only becomes ‘Badiou’ – that is, an
indispensable philosopher – through reuptaking the Heideggerian project in a
radical and absolutely singular fashion. If it remains true that Badiou repudiates
Heidegger on almost every point (although not all, as we shall soon see), he
takes the bulk of his primary bearings from the latter. It is in Being and Event that
this rupture and the contestation emerges in its most fulsome way.13
Indeed, this influence is at once so shocking and so profound that it comes as
self-confessedly a surprise to Badiou himself. As he puts it in a recent interview,
which is worth quoting at length:
Being and Event is, frankly, against the idea of the poetical nature of ontology –
something like that. So it’s a book against Heidegger . . . Now the text of my 1986
seminar on Heidegger, my habilitation, is coming out in Spring and so I re-read
my seminar with many surprises [laughter].14 My most important surprise was
that all that, subjectively, was in fact an explanation with Heidegger, and so an
10 A. Badiou and B. Cassin, Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy, introduction by K. Reinhard, trans.
S. Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). The German edition does a much better
job of calquing the original, Heidegger: Der Nationalsozialismus, die Frauen, die Philosophie, but
which, with a certain je ne sais quoi, has somehow managed to slip the Nazis in front of the women.
Luckily, in all three versions, philosophy brings up the rear or, alternatively, comes in last place.
One suspects that, in a German context, the ‘women’ being placed before ‘Nazism’ would give a
misleading impression of the subject of the book.
11 B. Harding, ‘Review of Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy’, Heythrop Journal, 58.4 (2017): 726–7.
12 As Deleuze himself puts it regarding his bibliographic strategy: ‘For a certain number of authors
(Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Hegel, Freud and Heidegger) we have put only passim in the column for
works. This is because the themes of difference or repetition are really present throughout all their
work’: Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 334.
13 A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2005).
This text has now been published as A. Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, L’être 3 – Figure du retrait
14
(Paris: Fayard, 2015).
explanation not only with Heidegger but across Heidegger with the French
Heideggerian current . . . And you know that during practically thirty years
from Being and Nothingness of Sartre to Nancy, French philosophy has been
Heideggerian, largely. And retrospectively, it was clear for me that I was also
Heideggerian in some sense, because of Sartre and so on.15
My task in this chapter is therefore to provide an elucidation of some of the

precise ways in which Badiou is indeed ‘also Heideggerian in some sense’. The
key themes will be: ontology and metaphysics, mathematics and technology,
poetry and the event. Permit me, however, one last underlining of the first
movement of this chapter: the relation of Badiou to Heidegger is so crucial that
it cannot not be ‘forgotten’, even by Badiou himself. It is not a pleasant, friendly
or comfortable relationship, but a relationship that is rather of the order of a real.
I will return briefly to this question of the real in the conclusion to this chapter.
As I have already remarked, Heidegger is almost altogether absent from
Badiou’s work before Being and Event. Yet, in Badiou’s own self-nominated return
from his predominant commitment to political activism back to philosophy
in the early 1980s, Heidegger is instrumental. As aforementioned, Badiou’s
Habilitation was a seminar dedicated specifically to Heidegger, and Badiou’s own
cover notes to the published text read: ‘In the year of this Seminar (1986), I was
finishing Being and Event, which constitutes the base [socle] of the ensemble
of my philosophical oeuvre. It proposes in effect a contemporary metaphysics,
where all the classic concepts are redefined and reordered. Centrally, the
fundamental triptych: being, truth, subject.’16 Indeed, it is this triptych we find at
work throughout Being and Event.
The very opening of Being and Event lays out the stakes of the treatise with
Badiou’s characteristic clarity:
Let’s premise the analysis of the current global state of philosophy on the
following three assumptions:
1. Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher.

2. Those programmes of thought – especially the American – which have
followed the developments in mathematics, in logic and in the work of
the Vienna circle have succeeded in conserving the figure of scientific
rationality as a paradigm for thought.
15 A. Badiou et al., ‘“The Movement of Emancipation”: Round Table Interview with Alain Badiou’. In
Badiou and His Interlocutors: Lectures, Interviews and Responses, ed. A. J. Bartlett and J. Clemens
(London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 221. The interview took place in November 2014.
16 Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, back cover.
3. A post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject is unfolding: its origin can be

traced to non-philosophical practices (whether those practices be political,
or relating to ‘mental illness’); and its regime of interpretation, marked by
the names of Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan, is complicated by clinical
or militant operations which go beyond transmissible discourse.17
As Oliver Feltham, one of the few commentators to take the relation between
Badiou and Heidegger very seriously (if, for topical reasons, perhaps too
briefly), sums up this shift: ‘no longer is the domain of Badiou’s discourse the
dialectic of revolutionary knowledge; now it is a question of philosophy and its
transformation. Badiou’s interlocutor or stalking horse is no longer Hegel and
the structural dialectic but Heidegger and the philosophies of finitude.’18 Feltham
proceeds to comment that Badiou’s claims for Heidegger are ‘highly contestable’,
but more fully comprehensible in the context of specifically French philosophy,
and, above all, that of the ‘Left Heideggerians’ Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.
I am perhaps more sanguine than Feltham about Badiou’s claims regarding
Heidegger here. For much the same reasons as I have been indicating regarding
attributions of influence above, I believe it would be possible to show how
analytic philosophy is itself polarized in its inquiries by Heidegger – and not just
via the famous anathemas of Rudolf Carnap – who it wishes to condemn and
dismiss, if not to ignore entirely.19 This is itself a fundamental ‘polemical’ point,
which perhaps Heidegger and Badiou share: it is essential in philosophy to orient
oneself with respect to one’s enemies; or, alternatively, that a philosophy essentially
orients itself with respect to other philosophical enemies whether it knows it or not.20
As the Platonic dialogues both show and embody from beginning to end, it is
through a conflict with the sophists that one at once establishes the situation, the
operative antagonisms within it, the personnel that flourish in it, the arguments
that can be drawn on and made to transform it. In one sense, in philosophy,
given that one is already fighting on the enemy’s terrain, it is necessary to take up
the enemy’s weapons against them. Moreover, in philosophy, one attacks one’s
enemy at their strongest point in order to reduce them, at the very least, to an
aporia or standstill; there is no real philosophical good to be gained by simply

18 O. Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 88.
19 In his monograph on Badiou, Christopher Norris also mentions that Badiou takes Heidegger
‘seriously’, but primarily as an indication of Badiou’s ‘continental’ affiliations. See C. Norris, Badiou’s
Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
And, in passing, let’s note that Heidegger himself shares a comparable doctrine in his discussions of
20
Auseinandersetzung.
denouncing a philosophy’s allegedly ‘weak’ points. Finally, if one mistakes one’s

enemy, then one’s attacks are pointless or vain; you must locate the proper
antagonism or go terribly awry.
So the opening of Being and Event has as its very first key claim in the
establishment of situation the proposition that ‘Heidegger is the last universally
recognized philosopher’, followed by the analytic focus on science, and then the
extra-philosophical revolutionary practices of subjects. In terms of the triptych
already introduced, we will say that the three opening propositions correspond
to the concepts: truth, being, subject. But hang on! – hasn’t Heidegger’s
contribution, whether universally recognized or no, been to reintroduce the
centrality of the question of (the meaning of) being to philosophy as such? And
hasn’t the contribution of ‘analytic’ philosophy been to turn towards questions
of science, mathematics and logic as establishing the only truth worth the name,
that is, above all, epistemological questions?
This is the first great inversion or displacement that I want to suggest that
Badiou machinates in Being and Event. If Heidegger has reopened the ontological
question, he has also botched it. Heidegger’s topic is crucial, but his means
mislead. Moreover, as Heidegger’s work proceeds, he comes more and more to
question the subject: the eminently philosophical analytic of Dasein in Being
and Time gives way to a form of thinking that explicitly nominates ‘philosophy’
as a bad and muddled danger compared to the ‘good danger’ that is ‘poetry’, at
the same moment that the problematics of techne, aletheia and the event move
more and more to the fore; in this movement, the subject qua subiectum is itself
subjected to critique.21 Of this, more below.
As for analytic philosophy, it generally brackets off questions of being and the
subject in favour of rendering itself ancillary to the knowledge deriving from the
sciences. Meanwhile, Marx and Freud establish modes of action that explicitly
exceed the closure of philosophy qua knowledge – what Badiou telegraphically
nominates as ‘transmissible discourse’ in the pursuit of such a subject, which
can render such modes radically epistemologically insufficient from the point of
view of ‘philosophy proper’.
As A. J. Bartlett and I have examined elsewhere, this initial triple establishment
of situation is a fundamental strategy of Badiou’s method.22 In presentation
after presentation, Badiou typically lays out three incommensurable elements
21 See, e.g., ‘The Thinker as Poet’ (1947). In Poetry Language Thought, trans. and introduction by
A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
22 See A. J. Bartlett and J. Clemens, ‘Polemic as Logic in the Work of Alain Badiou’, Parrhesia, 23
(2016): 62–85.
of a situation, in order to show, first, that these elements, in their very

incommensurability, are nonetheless contemporaneous with one another;
second, that, in their contemporaneity and despite their incommensurability,
they share an unconfessed complicity, which itself has a double aspect; third,
that, on the basis of these features, one can rearticulate their desiderata in such a
way as to construct a new, fourth position, one which would previously have been
impossible if one continued to work within any of the elements. This ‘impossible’
then names, to draw on an indispensable Lacanian concept, the ‘real’ of the
situation into which it is an intervention.
Badiou tends to effect this last operation by resplitting the elements of the
situation, that is, by pinpointing an immanent aporia within their projects;
showing how this aporia can be treated by an operation available from one
of the other elements in a way that would be impossible for that element (in
accordance with basic psychoanalytical doctrine, no element can treat its own
split, its symptom, by itself); finally, reknotting the elements to produce a new
weave. Badiou’s favoured metaphor for this procedure, picking up on the most
ancient Pythagorean references as well as on set theoretical proofs, is to ‘draw a
diagonal’ through the situation.23
With respect to Heidegger, then, Badiou certainly begins by affirming
Heidegger’s reintroduction of Being as a key requisite for contemporary
philosophy: ‘Along with Heidegger, it will be maintained that philosophy as such
can only be re-assigned on the basis of the ontological question.’24 As I have said,
however, this affirmation proves to be eminently counter-Heideggerian. Indeed,
we are quickly confronted by the thesis which has proved the most controversial
and notorious of Being and Event, that mathematics is ontology.25
For Heidegger, such a claim would be a travesty. As he puts it in ‘The Age of
the World Picture’:
One of the essential phenomena of modernity is its science. Of equal importance

is machine technology. One should not, however, misconstrue this as the mere
application of modern mathematical science to praxis. Machine technology
is itself an autonomous transformation of praxis, a transformation which first
demands the employment of mathematical science. Machine technology still
23 See, e.g., Badiou, Being and Event, 2.

24 Ibid.
25 For a different examination of Badiou’s equation from the one I offer here, see the very interesting
essay by B. Baki, ‘Notes on the Equivalence between Ontology and Mathematics’, Crisis and Critique,
5.1 (2018): 36–55.
remains the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern technology, an

essence which is identical with the essence of modern metaphysics.26
For Heidegger, the ‘mathematics’ of such a science is a specific deployment

which entails the guarantee of the ‘always-already-known’ and, in its submission
of nature to physics qua mathematics alongside the experimental expressions of
research – ‘being’ or ‘nature’ thereby becoming secondary to methodology – is
integrally bonded with a process of mechanization, which places the subject of
representation as the norm of being and beings. Modern science and modern
technology are thus inseparable, that is, they are not simply related as ‘pure’ to
‘applied’, but ensure their reign over the totality of beings by disappearing, in
the most absolute way, the question of being itself. And that, finally, is what
renders their essence ‘identical’ with ‘metaphysics’. These are then the three
indissociable Ms of the modern age: mathematized physics, mechanized
technology, metaphysics.
Heidegger’s thinking regarding modern mathematics therefore refuses to
distinguish it from science and technology, for what he would propose to be
essential ‘historial’ reasons. The event of modernity, the advent of the world
picture, is precisely the unprecedented fusion of these phenomena as establishing
the ‘new’ itself. In Being and Time, the thinking of technology was restricted
(although not entirely) to the famous analysis of the broken tool, which, in its
very disturbance of reference, or its becoming unhandy, suddenly and rudely
interrupts our actions to reveal a net of unthematized, presupposed expectations
that we had about the world and, thereby, allows something like a ‘world’ to
emerge thetically for us at all. But as Heidegger’s work proceeds, ‘the question
concerning technology’ becomes more and more pressing. Heidegger moves
away from such phenomenological descriptions of the experience of tools and
fundamental affects towards the historicity of the revealings that establish beings
as totality.27
In ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Heidegger drills further down
into the peculiar event that founds the modern world. This essay, which one
might even nominate as one of the most important single essays on technology
of the twentieth century, redescribes the paradoxical concatenation of events
26 M. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge
27 As Reiner Schürmann notes, promulgating a ‘retrospective’ reading of Heidegger’s piste, ‘Only
restrospectively can it be held that the descriptions of the “mathematical project” as an existentiell
a priori contain in germ the later descriptions of technology as Gestell, enframing, and of the total
control it exercises over the modern world’: Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to
Anarchy, trans. C.-M. Gros with the author (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 15.
that established the modern regime of technology as Gestell. In Heidegger’s

account, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century could never have
gotten going without the prior development, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, of mathematized physics. Yet such mathematized physics, if it still to
some extent concealed its essential solidarity with industrial technology, must
already been animated by the very essence of technology from the first.
There is therefore a kind of triple or even quadruple fold in Heidegger’s
account here: in post-World War II cybernetic technology patently establishing
its dominion over the entirety of the earth, the time in which Heidegger is
writing the essay, we are sent back to its origins in the industrial revolution;
from that revolution, we are returned to the emergence of mathematized physics
a century or so earlier, without which the revolution could not have taken place;
in being so, we are thereby led to an apprehension that such mathematized
physics was already an expression of the essence of technology. Such an epochal
‘event’ for Heidegger is thus of an extreme complexity: it is not simply a puncture
in the flow of time, nor a discrete ensemble, but a ramifying concatenation of
disjoint phenomena whose immanent logic necessarily emerges belatedly, and
that belatedness is integral to the contingent fatality of destiny itself. What was
unthought in Galileo is only thought in Heidegger, but too late. Thought always
comes too late, whereas technology – like Zarathustra – always comes too soon.
After all, ‘to be “new” belongs to a world that has become picture’.28 Heidegger,
as a preeminent thinker of the complex destining of times of the sense of time,
gives here an incomparable description of the ‘necessity’ of the ‘new’ as a driver
of modern research.
Indeed, dare I say, Heidegger’s thought effects here a quintuple fold: for,
whatever its differences from the mediaeval and Greek epochs of being – and
Heidegger is extremely careful and explicit about the genuinely irreducible
differences that mark out each epoch – there is still an attenuated but real bond
to the Greek origins of metaphysics. This recognition forces Heidegger back to
‘the origin’ again – which, from his perspective, does not simply lie ‘behind’
us, but ‘before’ us. As is well known, he regularly identifies Plato as one of the
key culprits in the concealment of the eclosion of Being more primordially
apprehended by the pre-Socratics, insofar as Plato reconceives Being under the
heading of eidos, and, in so doing, fixes the thinking of being according to a
kind of formal transcendence.29 This is why Badiou remarks that, ‘for Heidegger,
28 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 69.

29 See, e.g., Heidegger’s absolutely magnificent interpretation of Plato in The Essence of Truth, trans. T.
Sadler (London/New York: Continuum, 2002).
science, from which mathematics is not distinguished, constitutes the hard

kernel of metaphysics, inasmuch as it annuls the latter in the very loss of that
forgetting in which metaphysics, since Plato, has founded the guarantee of its
objects: the forgetting of beings’.30 The long metaphysical march has begun.
So: how to get out of it? Metaphysics, that is. For Heidegger, it is impossible
to simply wrench oneself outside of one’s historical situation by an effort of will
or thought, no matter how violent or imaginative. On the contrary, if there is
any potential ‘outside’ to the total epoch of enframing, this outside must come
from ‘within’. This is where the readings of poetry become so important. If poesis
was for the Ancient Greeks a matter of techne, for Heidegger it is a founding
aspect of such techne that has been, well, technicized in the modern age. But,
because qua poetry it necessarily precedes, subsists in, and is not entirely in
solidarity with the Triple M of modernity, it remains as a fundamental-if-infirm
resource that, if carefully attended to, may yet offer glimmers of another way
beyond metaphysics despite the metaphysical death-grip on the present. (Hence,
too, the charge of ‘melancholia’ that critics, including Badiou, regularly level at
Heidegger.)
Yet it is also through attending to the poets that we move beyond ontology in
Heidegger’s later work towards a kind of ontology-beyond-ontology – given that
the word ‘ontology’ is itself a seventeenth-century coinage tributary to the fixing
of being-as-idea – and yet this ontology-beyond-ontology is placed at the heart
of a thinking that can no longer be, strictly speaking, philosophical, but rather
poetic. Or which at least attempts to listen to poetry, to be guided by poetry,
as Dante is guided by Virgil. Poetry, as a techne-with-in-techne-with-out-Gestell,
enables the breaching of the means of revealing in an ‘act’ that perhaps opens
onto the otherness of ‘being’ with which poetry silently trembles. Poetry thus
becomes a kind of eventing, or, at least, more attuned to the eventing of beings
than any other discourse. This is why ‘poetry that thinks is in truth the topology
of being’.31 Poetry cracks open the languages necessary to any revealing, in order
to reopen the problem of revealing itself anew: the a-letheia of ‘a non-violent
power’ of event.32
Badiou’s position, obviously, could not be more different. As I have been
saying, Being and Event is in a fundamental way a deliberate confrontation with
and reversal of Heidegger’s doctrines, and bears explicitly upon the essence of

31 Heidegger, Poetry Language Thought, 12.
32 Heidegger uses this phrase in the Spiegel interview, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, as a paraphrase of René
Char, in Heidegger, The Man and the Thinker, ed. T. Sheehan (New Jersey: Transaction, 1981), 56.
mathematics, on ontology and on their original apprehension in Ancient Greece.

If Heidegger doesn’t have a single one of the book’s thirty-seven ‘meditations’
dedicated to him, he does, nonetheless orient it in its entirety, as well as leaving
his mark – in a variety of modalities, some negative – scattered throughout the
text itself. The second meditation, on Plato, is a direct riposte to Heidegger’s
position; the whole of ‘Part III Being: Nature and Infinity’ is marked as a
dispute regarding ‘Heidegger/Galileo’; the meditation on ‘Hölderlin’ expressly
announces its debt to Heidegger; and so on.
But it is section 4 of the introduction to Being and Event that is decisive
here. Badiou himself sums up the dispute in three key points, which are worth
quoting at length for both their incisiveness and indicative rhetoric: ‘Heidegger
still remains enslaved, even in the doctrine of the withdrawal and the un-veiling,
to what I consider, for my part, to be the essence of metaphysics: that is, the
figure of being as endowment and gift, as presence and opening, and the figure
of ontology as the offering of a trajectory of proximity.’33 Badiou nominates
this as a poetic ontology. Second, the claims of such poetry must be curbed if a
‘subtractive ontology’ is to be effected: such an ontology attends to ‘the radically
subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed not only from representation but
from all presentation’.34 Third, given that mathematics is essential for this task,
the Ancient Greek philosophers were indeed the first philosophers, insofar as
they ‘established, with the first deductive mathematics, the necessary form of its
discourse’.35 Plato is a villain for Heidegger, but a hero to Badiou – and this not
only because of his deployment of mathematics.36 Let us now turn to this last
problematic in a little more detail.
For Badiou, if mathematics is ontology, set theory fulfils this role for our
time. Set theory, developing out of Georg Cantor’s researches into infinity in
the late nineteenth century, immediately created an extraordinary international
mathematical controversy which was somewhat – if not entirely – pacified by
the axiomatization of the theory in the early twentieth century. As Badiou puts
it, ‘isolated and extracted between 1880 and 1930, these statements are, in the
presentation charged with the most sense, nine in number’.37 Much of the bulk
of the first half of Being and Event is taken up with an astonishing explication of
the details of these axioms and their philosophical import, at least as attentive in

34 Ibid., 10.
35 Ibid.
36 On which point, see A. J. Bartlett, ‘Plato’, in Key Concepts, 101–11.
37 Badiou, Being and Event, 499. He continues: ‘They concentrate the greatest effort of thought ever
accomplished to this day by humanity.’
its own manner as any reading of a poet by Heidegger or Derrida. For Badiou,
set theory is not founded on any thing or number or idea, but on the mark of the
empty set; the empty set, a kind of avatar of zero in the system, thereby undoes
the ‘one’ as foundation, which becomes merely a result; set theory thereafter
formally and consistently constructs infinite infinities as a banal feature of
its operations, giving the ancient concept of ‘infinity’ a rigorous conceptual
consistency for the first time.
What, however, is perhaps more important to note in the current context is
that the statement ‘mathematics is ontology’ is a meta-ontological statement, that
is, it necessarily issues from a point external to mathematics itself. Badiou is not
engaging in an epistemology, a philosophy of mathematics, nor a foundational
enterprise. For Badiou, mathematics is certainly not the regime of the ‘always-
already-known’; on the contrary, it is a practice quite as inventive as poetry or
politics. Moreover, it takes place outside metaphysics and philosophy. Rather
than contributing to the forgetting of Being, it is the only discourse that enables
the restitution of the thinking of Being. Into the bargain, it must therefore be
separated from modern science and technology. If there is no question that they
are empirically bound together, pure mathematics radically exceeds all and any
empirical, sociological or historical closure. Language is not primary for Badiou,
it is not ‘the house of Being’. Instead, it is the rupture with language effected by
the little letters of mathematics that enables the inscription of Being.
Let us underline just how subtle Badiou’s position is. Despite all the
ongoing virulent controversy over the sense and reference of the equation
‘mathematics = ontology’, Badiou really could not have more clearly asserted
that this is not the centrepiece of his enterprise. Badiou: ‘If one category had to
be designated as an emblem of my thought, it would be neither Cantor’s pure
multiple, nor Gödel’s constructible, nor the void, by which being is named,
nor even the event, in which the supplement of what-is-not-being-qua-being
originates. It would be the generic.’38 Why is the generic so important? Because it
enables the demonstration that truth and being are compatible but non-reducible.
The generic supplies the and of Being and Event.
In so doing, it enables the articulation of the discourse of ontology
(mathematics) together with the nomination of events (poetry) addressed to
the essentially collective aspects of a situation (politics) by means of an infinite
inquiry regarding conditions (love). As Badiou puts it: ‘What happens in art, in
science, in true (rare) politics, and in love (if it exists), is the coming to light of
38 Ibid., 15.
an indiscernible of the times, which, as such, is neither a known or recognized

multiple, nor an ineffable singularity, but that which detains in its multiple-being
all the common traits of the collective in question: in this sense, it is the truth of
the collective’s being.’39 The truth is at once not a known multiple nor an ineffable
singularity, but a practice which, on the basis of an event, works to transform
faith into knowledge through operating on the pure belonging of materiality.
So set theory for Badiou is not at all the be-all-and-end-all of his enterprise.
Yes, it has rigorously assumed the burden of formalizing and thereby banalizing
the infinite; yes, it has become a ‘foundational language’ for the rewriting of many
other mathematical operations; yes, it defines the consistency of absolute (if not
total) knowledge in our situation. But what makes its enterprise so incredible
for Badiou is that, with Paul Cohen’s demonstration of the independence of
the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis from the other axioms of
Zermelo-Fraenkel, set theory has proven that it is incapable of resolving its own
central animating problem. Cohen completes set theory insofar as he has shown
that it cannot be totalized, and that, even at the heart of the most rigorous formal
proofs, there must be a point of decision that formal proofs cannot themselves
decide. The choice of set theory as meta-ontology for Badiou is because it
attempts to seize the eventual occurrence of being in the discourse concerning
being itself, and proves that this cannot be done.
Yet forcing furthermore shows that what cannot be known is nonetheless
capable of being thought. As for Heidegger, for Badiou: truth is separated from
knowledge; the question of being is central, but only insofar as the primacy of
epistemology is evaded; the question of the inconsistency of the event must be
integrated into the inquiry; and so on. With the proof of an immanent aporia of
set theory itself, the techniques of that proof thereafter enable a formalization
of truth that binds the foreclosed void of being to the vanished fragment of the
event. Perhaps this is the weirdest aspect of the relationship between Badiou and
Heidegger that I am trying to trace here: even as Badiou reverses and displaces
all of Heidegger’s key thematics, he himself mimes and completes the itinerary of
the Heideggerian project in an anti-Heideggerian way.
In a sequence of writings published in the immediate aftermath of Being and
Event, Badiou pursues his polemic with Heidegger. This polemic takes two major
routes: (1) a direct assault on Heidegger’s propositions regarding the alleged
‘planetary reign of technique’, in which he repeats, in a clarified fashion, many of
the criticisms broached in Being and Event; (2) an indirect critique of the grounds
39 Ibid., 17.
of Heidegger’s rejection of mathematics as, first, unexpectedly consonant with

the analytical affirmation of mathematics and, second, both as downstream of
the ‘Romantic gesture of disintrication’ of philosophy and mathematics.
The first of these is most evident in Manifesto for Philosophy, where Badiou
reasserts that mathematics, metaphysics, and technology must be separated at
the level of the concept. As he puts it in a chapter titled ‘Nihilism?’
We shall not accept that the word ‘technology’ – even were we to resonate the
Greek tekhnè within it – is apt to designate the essence of our time, nor that
there be any relation useful to thought between ‘technology’s planetary reign’
and ‘nihilism’. The meditations, calculations and diatribes about technology,
widespread though they are, are nonetheless uniformly ridiculous.40
While Badiou’s separation of this triplet is indisputably justifiable, it is not prima

facie self-evident that his nomination of Heidegger’s position can be so simply
dismissed as ‘uniformly ridiculous’. Even given the self-professedly polemical
context of a manifesto – assertoric, divisive, hyperbolic – such remarks do not
really touch at all upon the details of Heidegger’s analyses of technology, even
in the truncated form that I have supplied above. And even if one accepts that
Heidegger is indeed ‘nostalgic’, ‘melancholic’ and ‘reactionary’, one has not
effectively refuted his claims nor deconstructed his demonstrations through
casting such adjectival aspersions. Indeed, Badiou seems not to think that the
thinking of technology is an especially pressing concern for philosophy today: ‘If
I had to give my opinion on technology, whose relation to the contemporary
demands of philosophy is fairly scant, it would much rather be to regret that it
is still so mediocre, so timid.’41 Even if one agrees with such a statement – and
it is by no means entirely implausible – this is hardly to give any concept at all
to the matter. One is almost reminded of the Platonic disdain for the workers
in arts and crafts, as well as their sophistic theorists, for being unable to give
any consistent rational account or true idea for their practices and products –
other than time and money, of course. The Platonic identification of technical
knowhow with established and unjust powers is presumably still at work in
Badiou’s thinking.
What is slightly more persuasive, however, is Badiou’s reassignation of
the predicates Heidegger assigns to the modern epoch to the operations of
capitalism itself, and here Badiou provides much stronger indications. This
40 A. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. N. Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 1999), 53.

41 Ibid., 53–4.
reassignation, moreover, can be immediately coupled with Badiou’s useful and

incisive comments regarding the decoupling of mathematics and philosophy at
the moment of Romanticism – itself of course almost strictly coterminous with
the Industrial Revolution. As Badiou writes in an essay in Conditions, having
first demonstrated how Hegel, above all, was crucial in the severance of the
ancient bond between mathematics and philosophy, which was nonnegotiable
for almost all his major predecessors in modern philosophy, including Descartes,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and, to some extent, even Kant: ‘Romantic speculation
opposes time and life as temporal ecstasies to the abstract and empty eternity of
mathematics.’42 As a result of this definitive Hegelian disintrication,
Empiricist and positivist attitudes, which have been highly influential for
the last two centuries, merely invert the Romantic speculative gesture. The
claim that science constitutes the one and only paradigm of the positivity of
knowledge can only be made from within a complete disentwining of science
and philosophy. The anti-philosophical verdict of positivisms reverse the anti-
scientific verdict of romantic philosophy, but without altering its fundamental
principles. It is striking that Heidegger and Carnap disagreed about everything,
except about the idea that it is incumbent upon us to inhabit and practise the
end of Metaphysics.43
This brilliant analysis again stages some of the difficulties of assigning

philosophical influence: Carnap and Heidegger’s irresolvable antagonism finds a
zone of indistinction which, unbeknownst to its participants, is itself a historical
symptom of the Romantic quarrel between philosophy and mathematics. The
displacements, rejections, inversions and subversions of twentieth-century
philosophy share a common, unknown and unthought origin in Hegel’s
philosophy – an origin that almost all would, moreover, repudiate!
Badiou conclusively demonstrates here that the fundamental reason for the
Hegelian banishment of mathematics from the field of proper philosophical
conceptuality is due to a new rivalry over a very particular concept: that of the
infinite.44 Time entails finitude; mathematics projects eternality and infinity. If
there is not the space to discuss the details of this polemic in further detail here,
what can be again underlined for the purposes of this chapter is simply how
42 A. Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 97.

43 Ibid., 95.
44 On this point, see my own entry under ‘Romanticism’. In The Badiou Dictionary, ed. S. Corcoran
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and my chapter ‘Sublime or Infinite?’ in The
Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003),
192–215.
directly, explicitly and extensively Badiou’s Being and Event and its spin-offs are
committed to, even constituted by, the confrontation with Heidegger.
To sum up: Badiou’s entire later work, from Being and Event onwards, is
polarized by Heidegger, a philosophical polarization that orients, in a negative
vein, all of the key constructions of Being and Event and, hence, all Badiou’s
development since. Taking up the Heideggerian return to Being, as well as the
German’s crucial distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, Badiou revisions
both by arguing that, contra Heidegger, ontology is not ‘the fundamental
question’ of Western philosophy; ontology is rather external to philosophy;
yet, in its irreducible externality, it nonetheless functions as one indispensable
condition of philosophy. Mathematics is ontology. Such mathematics has almost
none of the characteristics that Heidegger assigns it: it is pure, void, inventive
and constitutively exceeds any particular technical application. Moreover,
contemporary set theoretical mathematics as the contemporary form of the
discourse on Being enables us to affirm the banal infinity of Being, against the
finitude assigned it by Heidegger; it also provides us with a motif, the generic,
that proves truth and being are compatible, while retaining the necessity for a
subject (of decision).
Yet we also find that Badiou’s thought, however inventive and persuasive, also
fails to deal seriously with something that Heidegger thought about more deeply
and originally than perhaps any other twentieth-century philosopher: the
question concerning technology. Even today, across a wide slew of studies into
technology, both present and historical, Heidegger is omnipresent, if often
obscured. He was perhaps the most significant influence over such thinkers
of technology as Hubert Dreyfus, Friedrich Kittler and Bernard Stiegler and,
through them, to a contemporary range of thinkers such as Yuk Hui and
Benjamin Bratton. As I have noted, Badiou’s theses regarding technology (and,
significantly, his remarks concerning biology, too) are, by comparison, marginal
and weak: it is currently difficult to see any significant work in this area deriving
from him.45 The consequences of this paradoxical situation currently remain
obscure. If, as Badiou himself would say, no philosophy can think the totality
of being because there is no such thing, it is bracing to consider that Heidegger
can only establish his non-metaphysical thinking of technology on the basis of
what now appears an exemplary metaphysical error, while Badiou can ‘correct’
45 See J. Clemens and A. Nash, ‘Irremediability: On the Very Concept of Digital Ontology’. In Digital
Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture, ed. A. Lagerkvist (London/
New York: Routledge, 2018) for a more extended account of Heidegger and Badiou’s contributions
in this regard.
Heidegger only at the price of losing the capacity to intervene seriously in the
regime of technology. Badiou provides us with an ‘advance’ in the thinking of
being and truth – that is, in the creation of new propositions that, as they take
into account the Heideggerian intervention, cannot be easily recouped by it – at
the cost of a ‘regression’ in his thinking of technology.
Badiou also shares several points of agreement with Heidegger, with
the appropriate nuances. The first is that philosophy does indeed begin in
earnest in Ancient Greece. Second, if they differ in their evaluation of the key
philosophical figures, they both agree that the same figures are crucial, above
all, that the Greek and German sites of philosophy are decisive. Third, if they
differ in their respective evaluations of poetry and mathematics, both agree that
poetry provides a kind of matrix of the event itself; in fact, Badiou, in the wake of
Heidegger, retains a concept of the poem as the matrix of the nomination of an
event to which it itself belongs. There is thus a kind of ‘integration’ of Heidegger’s
crucial theses, at the very moment that Badiou machinates a displacement.
Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Badiou completes and transcends the
Heideggerian program by justifying a new way of knotting together truth-event,
being and the subject.
In doing so, however, Badiou perhaps forces us into a new epoch of thinking,
one in which he – as well as we – find ourselves lost in una selva oscura. We
live in obscure times, Badiou frequently asserts, invariably quoting Stéphane
Mallarmé’s great sonnet on Edgar Allan Poe as he does so:
chu d’un désastre obscur . . .
Beyond the intra-philosophical allusions here to Heraclitus the Obscure and

despite several of his own declarations to the contrary, Badiou’s procedure at
such moments suggests a final analogy: Badiou cites Mallarmé just as Heidegger
cites Hölderlin, as a guide, a Weise, for his own thought. But, unlike Heidegger,
poetry is not his only guide. For as Badiou also says, ‘Just as the ontologies of
Presence [i.e. Heidegger!] cite and comment upon the great poems of Hölderlin,
Trakl and Celan . . . here one must allow me . . . the right to cite and dissect the
mathematical text.’ More pointedly yet: ‘These citations, all things considered,
are more universally accessible and univocal than those of the poets.’46
These differences, however, are only preliminary indications. The
consequences of the paradoxical and polemical relationship between Badiou
and Heidegger still remain substantially undrawn.

8
Can a Philosopher Have Dirty Hands? What

Adorno Has to Say about Badiou
Alexander García Düttmann
Adorno and Badiou are both concerned with the question of praxis, of
intervening in the world so as to change it, not partially but radically. They differ
when it comes to conceiving of the manner in which this should be achieved. For
Badiou, it is a matter of making coherent and consistent decisions in particular
setups. For Adorno, it is a matter of destabilizing the decision-making process
itself since, for him, the need to choose between options prevents radical change
from taking place. But what does this mean for the philosopher, for Adorno and
Badiou as philosophers? Is the insistence on practical and political interventions,
the holding fast to a revolutionary perspective, as remote as the transition from
theory to praxis may prove, compatible with a philosophical vocation? How
must the philosopher face, if at all, the so-called problem of dirty hands? And is
there something in this context that Adorno may have to say about Badiou, or
even to Badiou, who is critical of negative dialectics since he considers it to be an
antiphilosophical endeavour?
Let’s rehearse a few general answers to the question whether a philosopher
can have dirty hands. Here is a first answer. A philosopher cannot have dirty
hands since he is concerned with the good or with truth. The moment his hands
get dirty, the moment he allows himself to be corrupted by worldly matters,
matters that carry corruption by the fact of being worldly – though such matters
are not the only possible corrupting source as there may also exist a corruption
of the mind – he ceases to be a philosopher, and it is uncertain whether he will
ever be a philosopher again. What would purify him? The rigorism implied in
this first answer is denied by those who give it. In their eyes, a philosopher who is
really concerned with the good or with truth will never be tempted by anything
that could corrupt him; hence his concern cannot be considered a form of
rigorism. Sartre, in an interview with Paolo Caruso that addresses the problems
thematized and presented by his play Dirty Hands, denounces the rigorism that
lies in the Stalinist version of what he calls the ‘demand of praxis’.1 Such rigorism
comes with a totalizing effect, he says – if someone turns out to be a traitor, or
is accused of treachery, he must always have been a traitor, and will probably
remain one unless he undergoes a radical change. So we find the same argument
on both sides, on the side of the ‘demand of praxis’ and on the side of what could
be termed the ‘demand of theory’, or the ‘demand of philosophy’.
There is a second answer to the question whether a philosopher can have dirty
hands. A philosopher must have dirty hands; he must compromise his means if
he is to achieve his ends, namely rendering truth effective. Why? Because there
is a ‘demand of praxis’ inscribed in the ‘demand of philosophy’. Philosophy
must position itself under the condition of politics. The good, or truth, must
acquire a reality in the world if it is to be rescued from the kind of corruption
that threatens purism, the corruption lurking in an ideality all the more exposed
to the vicissitudes of the world the more it seeks to keep apart, to keep to itself,
unperturbed by what it takes to be mere shadows and illusions. In Dirty Hands,
the play, Hoederer, a revolutionary leader whose murder the Communist Party
has ordered because of his willingness to collaborate with reactionary political
forces who do not aim for the revolution, tells Hugo, his idealist assassin:
How you cling to your purity, my dear boy! How you are afraid of besmirching
your hands. Well then, stay pure! Whom will your purity serve and why do you
come to us? Purity is an idea that belongs to fakirs and monks. You, intellectuals
and bourgeois anarchists, turn it into a pretext so as not to engage with this or
that. Not to do anything, to remain unmoved, to press one’s elbows against one’s
body, to wear gloves. I have got dirty hands. Up to the elbows. I have plunged
them into shit and blood. And then what? Do you assume that one can govern
innocently?2
In his translation, or rewriting, of Plato’s Republic, Alain Badiou has Socrates

warn Glaucus against an ‘aristocratic minority’3 that reaches the mind’s heights
and enjoys the ‘Idea of Truth’ without showing an interest in politics, in the fact
that historical and social conditions must be established that allow everyone
to participate equally in this idea, in an idea that is not an idea since truth
1 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Entretien avec Paolo Caruso’ (1964, excerpt), in Théâtre complet (La Pléiade,
Paris: Gallimard 2005), 370. (All references are to the French and German originals, and the
translations herein are the author’s own.)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mains sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 198.
2
3 Alain Badiou, La République de Platon (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 375.

Can a Philosopher Have Dirty Hands? 133
‘supports the ideality of all ideas’4 and rather than pertaining to the ‘order of
what offers itself to thought’5 releases, or sublates, it. What the contemplation
of the scholarly lucky few misses, then, is the link between the ‘Idea of Truth’
and the ‘Communist Idea’.6 Obviously it could be argued that the ‘Communist
Idea’ needs to be situated beyond the realm of ideas, too, or beyond ‘what offers
itself to thought’, it being only the practical aspect of philosophy’s claim to truth.
Hence the corruption lurking in a self-sufficient ideality is the corruption of
nihilism. Unable to conceive of a relationship between truth and semblance,
unable to descend into the cavern or the cinema of shadows, the purism of the
good, or truth, the defence of an untouched ideality, must advocate an elitist
nihilism of the world, of appearance, and fall prey to semblance, to illusion.
What is it that one may find striking about these two prototypical answers
to the question of the philosopher’s possible or necessary corruption? One may
find striking that the same conclusion can be drawn from both, namely that
no matter how different and even opposed the answers may seem, the hands
of the philosopher end up clean – dirt proves incapable of sticking to them.
The philosopher may have plunged his hands into ‘shit and blood’. But once
reality will have touched upon the ‘Communist idea’, once each and every
individual will have become a philosopher, once each and every individual will
have been capable of following the injunction ‘all philosophers!’ that Badiou
attributes to Socrates but also repeats in his own name at the end of his paper
on the ‘enigmatic relationship between philosophy and politics’,7 ‘shit and blood’
will have been washed away, corruption and violence will have been justified
and thereby turned into agents of integrity, rectitude, clarity and distinction.
Whether or not ‘hybrid and doubtlessly violent’8 circumstances may allow for
‘the possibility of a politics aligned with the Communist hypothesis’ to emerge,
as Badiou’s Socrates contends, whether or not, in a period of clandestine
armed resistance, the terrible menace of an overpowering enemy may reveal
as ‘inevitable’ the ‘physical suppression’9 of single individuals who oppose the
party line, as Sartre contends, whether or not placing philosophy under the
condition of political ideas or truths may end up inscribing it in a situation of
4 Ibid., 370.
5 Ibid., 357.
6 Ibid., 378.
7 ‘From the moment the existence of philosophy, placed under the condition of politics, will be
democratic in the communist sense of the word, retrospectively as well as prospectively, it will
be possible to define it as stemming from all and directed at all.’ See Alain Badiou, La relation
énigmatique entre philosophie et politique (Paris: Éditions Germina, 2011), 46.
Badiou, La République de Platon, 336.
8
9 Sartre, ‘Entretien avec Paolo Caruso’, 367.

‘absolute antagonism’10 that combines ‘terror’, ‘absolute authoritarianism’ and

‘fundamental equality’ by forcing each individual to make a choice, and calls
for the ‘substitutability’ of all individuals located in a ‘specific political camp’, as
Badiou contends – eventually the philosopher will come out clean and proper
from the succession of compromising struggles into which he will have been
enmeshed. Philosophers are the only beings who do not know what it means to
have dirty hands. Their hands never get stuck in ‘shit and blood’, regardless of
how deeply they have plunged them into the mess of the world. Ultimately, there
is no problem of dirty hands for the philosopher.
Or if there is, it is the problem of what ceasing to be a philosopher means.
Must I cease to be a philosopher, heed the ‘demand of praxis’, so that, once my
practical engagement will have paid off at the cost of my hands having been
stained I will be able to become a philosopher again, a philosopher who will
have contributed to bringing about a practical totality of philosophy and turning
every single individual into a philosopher with clean hands, myself included? In
this case, the ‘demand of praxis’ would either be understood as a philosophical
demand, as a demand that cannot be corrupted in any serious manner, or else it
would indicate a resistance to philosophy that seriously threatens to compromise
its ambition to accomplish the totality intended by Socrates’s and Badiou’s
injunction, ‘all philosophers!’ Hoederer at one point in the play tells Hugo that
‘intellectuals’ cannot really act, that they must think, consider the consequences
of an act and thereby condemn themselves to inactivity. The word ‘intellectuals’
targets philosophers, especially. Will there not always be an unwanted or
unforeseen and unforeseeable consequence that, for philosophers, will stand in
the way of ‘efficiency’? Two incompatible automatisms seem to clash here, the
automatism of a mind that cannot help but think – ‘il faut que ça pense’11 – and
the automatism of hands that cannot help but put themselves to work, because
the revolution is not a question of meritoriousness but of successful outcomes –
‘il y a du travail à faire, c’est tout’.12
Philosophers, then, may be regarded as exceptional beings. Their hands
are impervious to dirt. Unless, of course, no one has dirty hands because we
are all innocents with dirty hands. From the perspective opened up by this
hypothesis, evil, the power of corruption, is so much stronger than us, or than
anything to do with our nature, that, when corrupted, we remain untouched,
10 Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 34.

11 Sartre, Les mains sales, 218.
12 Ibid., 222.
forever shielded because of our weakness, our fundamental exposure. There is

always innocence within us that evil cannot reach, not because of evil’s lack of
power but precisely because of its overpowering essence. Innocence does not
need to resist evil. Entirely at the mercy of evil and its insidious, rebellious, and
contagious violence, it restores itself before evil can corrupt it. Our hands are so
dirty that dirt falls off them.
There is, however, a philosophical exception to the rule that states the
incompatibility of philosophy with worldly corruption, whether on account of
its ideality or on account of its efficiency. It can be encountered in Heidegger’s
conception of truth as untruth. Truth, this conception claims, harbours error
and erring within itself, yet does not put them to work in the guise of negativity,
of speculative self-recognition. In his famous essay on the essence of truth,
Heidegger writes that truth and untruth are not ‘indifferent’13 towards each
other but ‘belong to one another essentially’; accordingly, erring is the ‘essential
counter-essence’14 to the ‘primordial essence of truth’. To the extent that the
decision to support National Socialism militantly, and to do so as a philosopher
who wishes to distinguish between true and untrue forms of National Socialism,
is an expression of Heidegger giving the ‘demand of praxis’ all the weight
philosophy requires it to carry, an expression of Heidegger’s appropriation of
the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, as it were, it is not possible to regard such
political engagement as external to the philosophical work itself, just as it appears
impossible to reduce the philosophical work to it and to its consequences, two
approaches represented, on the one hand, by the separatism Badiou and Cassin
stipulate in their essay on Heidegger, Nazism, women, and philosophy, and,
on the other hand, by the extremism Adorno pursues when claiming that the
13 Martin Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’, in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,

1978, 2nd rev. edn), 188. Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, posits that
there is no relation between truth and the most extreme form of untruth he knows: the obfuscation
triggered by myth, which he distinguishes from the untruth of mere error. Myth is utterly indifferent
to truth, and this is why it can be so destructive, or why one’s hands must get dirty when our minds
are mythically clouded. There is no truth of myth. Only cognition, as a third term not to be conflated
with truth, can relate to both, truth and myth. While cognition is something we may possess, truth
seems to be something in which we can dwell, and in which everything appears to be just as it is.
Despite the apparent incompatibility in their respective conceptions of truth and untruth, there is
an affinity between Heidegger and Benjamin when it comes to conceiving of truth as a dwelling
place (Walter Benjamin, Goethes Wahlverwandschaften, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. I.1 [Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974], 162). Peter Trawny, in his essay on erring in Heidegger, asks: ‘What
happens to philosophy when we separate it from errance? Is it possible to separate it from errance?
Would such an attempt at immunisation not be the worst kind of errance?’ See Peter Trawny,
Irrnisfuge (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2014), 19. Further on in the text he writes: ‘The most terrifying
thing, according to Heidegger, is not that we kill but that we do not pay any attention to the origin
of our freedom to kill’ (57).
14 Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’, 194.
‘innermost cells’ of Heidegger’s philosophy are imbued with ‘fascism’.15 Rather,

one would need to risk the hypothesis that the German philosopher’s political
commitment, which prolongs, and extends into, his philosophical meditations,
stuffing the history of being with anti-Semitic and racist elements, produces an
aporia that exposes the essence of truth as he conceives of it, an essence that,
split into an essence and a counter-essence, escapes the philosopher’s mastery.
Precisely because it is always possible to make the wrong choice and because,
even when one makes the right choice, no crime and no criminal complicity can
be made light of and forgotten if the good is to prevail, it exposes the unresolvable
tension between probity and corruption that expresses the problem, or the
dilemma, of dirty hands when applied to philosophy. Can a philosopher have
dirty hands? The answer now is: yes, he can, and that’s why one never knows
what it actually means to be a philosopher; that’s why the philosopher, once he
acknowledges the ‘demand of praxis’ as a demand of philosophy itself, generates
both separatism and extremism as reactions to his thought.
An unresolvable tension between probity and corruption expresses the
problem of dirty hands when applied to philosophy. Yet is the problem or the
dilemma of dirty hands ever applied to philosophy? Is it not a philosophical
dilemma to the extent that some notion of the good is at stake – a notion of the
good that no longer figures in Badiou’s active translation of Plato’s Republic, at
least not explicitly, because he replaces it with the notion of truth? A shift from
truth to the good,16 from the abolition of untruth to the historical, social and
political realization of the good, can be detected in one of Hoederer’s replies in
Dirty Hands. It is with Hoederer, who pretends to ‘make a politics of the living,
for the living’,17 that Sartre, the self-professed critical companion of communism,
identifies when pressed to identify with a figure in his play: ‘We shall not abolish
lying by refusing to tell lies but by using every means at hand to abolish social
classes’,18 Hoederer states. Michael Walzer, in the final paragraph of his essay on
the problem of dirty hands, comments upon this statement as follows:
I suspect we shall not abolish lying at all, but we might see to it that fewer lies
were told if we contrived to deny power and glory to the greatest liars – except, of
15 See Alexander García Düttmann, ‘Das Ungedachte’, in Gegen die Selbsterhaltung. Ernst und Unernst
des Denkens (Berlin: August Verlag, 2016).
16 ‘The “good” here does not mean what is orderly in the moral sense, but the valiant, which achieves
and can achieve what is proper to it. The agathon is the standard as such, what first grants Being
the potency to unfold essentially as idea, as prototype.’ See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to
Metaphysics (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2014), 210f.
Sartre, Les mains sales, 195.
17
18 Ibid., 197.
course, in the case of those lucky few whose extraordinary achievements make
us forget the lies they told. If Hoederer succeeds in abolishing social classes,
perhaps he will join the lucky few. Meanwhile, he lies, manipulates, and kills,
and we must make sure he pays the price. We won’t be able to do that, however,
without getting our own hands dirty, and then we must find some way of paying
the price ourselves.19
If one assumes that it is not merely by choice that philosophy meets the ‘demand
of praxis’, as if it could just as well refuse to do so, the philosopher can still make
wrong choices, as the case of Heidegger shows. Is he less of a philosopher for
that? What choices will Socrates have to make after choosing ‘true politics’,20
the politics that does not discard philosophy, and recognizing that one can
never ‘do exactly as one says’,21 given that, when measured against the desired
participation in truth, ‘nature’ always imposes moments of inertia and resistance
to action and prevents it from matching discourse, true discourse? It is a this
point that it may prove helpful to turn to Badiou’s theory of points in his Logics
of the Worlds, which comprises a reference to Sartre’s Dirty Hands, to a ‘theatre of
points’,22 and to confront it with Adorno’s critique of decision making and choice
in his Negative Dialectics, which also refers to Sartrean drama. In his radio talk
on political engagement and art, Adorno mentions Dirty Hands and calls it one
of its author’s finest achievements.
The relevance of the point for Badiou resides, on the one hand, in the crucial
role it plays when change is to occur, or when a point of inexistence allows for
the radical transformation of existence, while, on the other hand, it resides in the
disclosure of a world in which a truth appears. For change to occur, an element
needs to be distinguished that is part of being, of a pure multiple appearing in
and as a world but that, in this world, exists as little as possible and hence can be
said to have a value of zero. It denotes a withdrawal of being, the possibility for a
pure multiple to appear in another world, and to do so differently. There is always
only one such element or point for every object that appears in a world. When
the necessary inexistence of such an element or point ceases to have a value of
zero, when value is attributed to it because it comes into existence, an event
has taken place that has destroyed the cohesion of an existing world and that
modifies its basis, the transcendental indexation of its beings, as Badiou writes
19 Michael Walzer, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2.2
(Winter 1973): 180.
20 Badiou, La République de Platon, 291.
Ibid., 287.
21
22 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 426.

using a term from Kantian philosophy. Seizing this reminiscence as a pretext,

one could quote the French writer Charles Péguy, who observes that Kantian
philosophy has ‘pure hands’23 and yet has ‘no hands at all’, as if having hands
meant always having ‘calloused’, ‘gnarled’, even ‘sinful’ hands, and sometimes
also ‘full hands’, the hands of a fortunate because innocent person. Socrates, in
Badiou’s rendering of the Republic, captures the idea of inexistence coming into
existence in simple terms: ‘What we require is a unique and inexisting, yet real
point that must be identified and drawn out for everything to change. Then, the
truth of the political body will transpire. Yes indeed! Let’s change this one point
at the edge of nothingness and we will be able to show that the totality of the
State in question changes entirely.’24
It is here, at the point where a point is changed by lifting it from its inexistence,
and where such change induces a revolutionary change, a change that concerns
a world or a political State, that Badiou differs from deconstructive thought
for, in his late homage to Derrida, he charges him with not recognizing that a
point of inexistence in a world in which a multiple appears indicates not only
the contingency of this world but also the possibility of another world, or the
‘possibility of a full existence elsewhere’,25 for example, the full existence of a
communist political body in which all individuals will have become philosophers.
But does not such a body itself conceal an element, or a point, of inexistence,
a further withdrawal of being, as one might be led to assume in the wake of
Badiou? If so, ‘full existence’ must always be ‘elsewhere’, the revolution must
always be a permanent one,26 and Badiou would come rather close to Derrida,
though a deconstructionist might infer from such constitutive delay, from the
fact that ‘full existence’ can only be had at the expense of its dependence on
an ‘elsewhere’, that the identification of a point of inexistence must also remain
uncertain. This uncertainty would highlight the inevitability of contamination
between objects and between worlds, the unavoidability of corruption and dirty
hands. Writing ‘inexistance’ with an ‘a’, as Badiou pledges to do, would not be
merely a tribute paid to the forcefulness of the thought of ‘différance’, or to the
‘passion of Inexistance’. Is some of this forcefulness not equally distinctive of
23 Charles Péguy, ‘Victor Marie, comte Hugo’, in Oeuvres en prose completes, La Pléiade, vol. III
(Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 331. I am grateful to Jean-Luc Nancy for alerting me to this passage.
24 Badiou, La République de Platon, 288.
Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 571.
25
26 Even if one were to say that in a communist society the point of inexistence would no longer concern
the revolutionary passage from capitalism to communism, whatever its instances and intermediary
stages, each transformation of the world as a whole induced by the coming-into-existence of a point
of inexistence must amount to a revolution, whether it concerns the relationship between society
and nature or some other aspect of its organization.
what one could term the ‘passion of non-identity’ in Adorno’s thought, the
constant quest for a ‘no man’s land between the boundary-posts of being and
nothingness’?27
It is ‘point by point’ that a world is disclosed, that it ceases to be lifeless, a
world without stress and tension, a world in which everything communicates
infinitely, and in which intensity, always conditional on some isolation and
solitude, on the interruption effected by a halt, on the concentration that the
creation of a place entails, is reduced to a minimum. For Badiou, disclosing a
world ‘point by point’, and doing so each time at the point where the subjective,
or a truth procedure, and the objective, or a multiple that appears in the world,
differ and touch, is tantamount to making decisions and choices. A decision has
a double aspect, then: it has the subjective aspect of a course of action whose
choice may alter the course of things and the objective aspect of a contraction
whose result is the unavoidable limitation to two, and only two, possible ways
for things to continue in the world. Points take on the form of alternatives. They
resemble knots binding the world to the world, so that it can generate binding
relationships, affirmations, instead of drowning in the endless variations of mere
occasions that define ordinary action. When one has a point, one has two clean
and pure hands – on the one hand, on the other hand – while when one inhabits
a world without points one remains enmeshed in a ‘many-sided impurity’.28
Points are narrow gates29 and tribunals, strictures which turn the world into
a place of situations, or into a site of stakes, risks, efforts and commitments.
They operate, in a worldly situation, as testing schemes for the ‘appearance of a
truth’, as schemes which locate the transcendental topologically and bodily by
placing the world in its infinity and variety before the ‘instance of the Two’,30 of
the option between yes and no, truth and opinion, pledge and indifference.
With every single point and the act, the choice, it imposes, the totality of the
world is at stake. There is a correlation between, on the one hand, the idea of
27 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1970), 374.
29 André Gide’s novel La porte étroite – a title that alludes to the Gospels, to Luke and Matthew –
features a journal written by its main female character, Alissa. One can gauge from this journal that
the passage through the ‘narrow’ or ‘strait’ gate, when understood spiritually, is also a progressive
one, one that occurs step by step: ‘I imagine heavenly joy, not as a confounding of the spirit with
God, but as an infinite, a perpetual drawing near to Him . . . and if I were not afraid of playing upon
words I should say that I did not care for any joy that was not progressive.’ See André Gide, La porte
étroite (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 163. How extensive is the intensive totality intended by Badiou’s
injunction ‘all philosophers’?
30 Ibid., 421. Peter Szendy briefly discusses Badiou’s ‘theory of points’ and stresses that a ‘dual decision’
always also chooses the ‘form of the alternative itself ’, not only one of two options. See Peter Szendy,
À coups de points (Paris: Minuit, 2013), 145.
the world as a totality that is at stake in a decision and, on the other hand, the
constitution of a subject in the decision-making process, since such a subject
has decided to acknowledge, or not, a political, artistic, amorous, or scientific
truth, to adhere faithfully to, or to betray, a truth that forces the world to appear
differently on account of a coming into existence of a point of inexistence. It
is for a subject that constitutes itself as it makes decisions and choices that the
world as a totality is at stake, the world that intensifies as a truth appears at
the site of a point. The totality implied in the injunction ‘all philosophers!’ is
the totality of a deciding subject, of a subject that decides in favour of viewing
the world as totality, no matter which choice or decision it makes, and of
viewing it as the totality of the ‘Communist Idea’ or ‘Communist hypothesis’
which alone allows individuals to participate in truth equally, as if only the
totality of an equal participation in truth could be a true totality. Hence, for the
philosopher as Badiou conceives of him, the problem of dirty hands is not so
much the problem of a demand of praxis in general, or in the abstract, but of
a demand that reveals itself to be the demand of passing through the gates of
points in particular situations and in so doing appearing before the tribunal of
an appearing truth. The problem of dirty hands is not the problem of a praxis
that cannot but put an ideal at risk by forcing the individual idealist to become
a realist, to compromise, or even to act as a criminal. Rather, it is the problem
of making a decision that permits a truth procedure to persevere and continue
in the world. It is the problem of resisting betrayal, the ‘sacrifice’31 of a truth
induced by a refusal to decide and choose. It is the problem of making the right
choice and decision, the choice and decision that do not cause disaster, or a
cessation, a reflux, destruction. Having had to sacrifice so much for the sake of
discipline, or for the sake of the strict and predictable organization of the Party’s
revolutionary activities, Hugo asks Hoederer not to ‘sacrifice’ these ‘sacrifices’
with his ‘own hands’,32 not to make the wrong decision, not to get his hands
dirty so as to attain an ideal through efficient action, even though, in the play,
this action, Hoederer’s readiness to collaborate with the enemy, is designed to
prevent further ‘sacrifices’33 of human lives.
A situation is always a situation of solitude. It is so by definition, for it is
a break with ‘universal communication’ that produces it. Hence the problem
of dirty hands, the problem of how to sacrifice and how not to sacrifice, the
31 Ibid., 422.
33 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Entretien avec J. B. Jeener’ (1948, excerpt), in Théâtre complet, 364.
problem of how to maintain a purity without abandoning it to an impure ‘suicidal

propensity’,34 which the philosopher, the one who seeks to transform everybody
else into a philosopher, must feel more intensely and unsparingly, is a problem
that poses itself as the result and in view of a situation of solitude. Yet there is
also a solitude that the prospect of the point, the necessity of choosing between
two options, thrusts upon the subject. The subject confronted with the purifying
simplification of an ‘implacable duality’35 – in Sartre’s play, Hugo the idealist –
the subject that projects the many worldly facets into a binary respectful of the
conjunctions and infoldings that are typical of the transcendental configuration
of a world, is a solitary subject, a subject that undergoes an ‘existential gathering’,
a subject that cannot turn elsewhere for help and support, whether it is a group
of individuals who must come up with a decision or an individual left to his own
devices. Is there not also a third form of solitude involved in making a choice
or a decision at the point where a truth is to appear and proliferate in the world,
namely the solitude of the act itself, of the demand of praxis that manifests itself
first as a demand to make choices and decisions? After receiving the order to kill
Hoederer, whom the Party sees now as a treacherous dissident, Hugo reflects
on what acting means: ‘I left the order behind and moved forward all by myself
and . . . I no longer even know why.’36 When one acts, one is alone since acting
always relies on someone actually doing the act, on someone practically holding
on to his or her freedom and taking on the freedom of others, or relinquishing
it, regardless of how replaceable the acting agent may be according to the logic
of the Party, the organization’s sacrificial economy of life and death. This solitude
is especially dangerous as it threatens the agent with forgetfulness. To the extent
that the automatism designated by the locution ‘it thinks’ conflicts with the
automatism designated by the locution ‘it acts’, or ‘it works’, to the extent that
the making of a decision is not enshrined by a set of given criteria that revoke
the decision as it is made, to the extent that one can make the wrong decision
and therefore acts alone, spontaneously, freely, and yet strangely coerced, there
is a moment in the act when reasons don’t apply, when one feels abandoned by
deliberation, reflection and calculus, by the principle of reason, and when one
cannot know whether one’s hands are clean or dirty. ‘I no longer even know why.’
Badiou underlines the relation between decision and freedom when he
investigates the ambiguous nature of the point and refers to the ‘subjective’37

35 Ibid., 426.
metaphors in which decisions tend to be cast. They all convey the following
message: ‘to do it or not to do it, all depends on me’. These metaphors collide
with ‘objective’ ones that indicate a necessity rather than the deciding subject’s
freedom. They all convey a different message: ‘Here, there are only two
possibilities for pressing forward, nothing can be done about that.’ Ultimately,
though, it is obvious that, if a decision’s dimension of necessity, its topological
rootedness in a situation of duality, renders its experience more intense and
more urgent, a decision from which all freedom would have been excised would
not be able to fulfil the task Badiou ascribes to it, namely the task of militant
faithfulness to the event of an appearing truth. Without the decision’s dimension
of freedom, truths would not appear in the world and the world would be, at best,
a more or less functioning machine. In the chapter on Kant that provides one
of the so-called models of his Negative Dialectics, Adorno, after referring to the
familiarity he detects between Kant’s examples, or moral ‘thought experiments’,
in the Critique of Practical Reason, and Sartre’s ‘existential ethics’, points out that
freedom is irreconcilable with alternatives. Only the individual who does not
have to yield to an alternative, whether he does occasionally or ‘point by point’,
can be said to be free:
Kant knew well that good will is conveyed in the continuity of a lifetime rather
than in isolated acts; but in the experiment, to make it prove what it should, he
exacerbates good will into a choice between two alternatives. That continuity
hardly exists anymore – which is why Sartre, in a kind of regression to the
eighteenth century, clings to the decision alone. Yet the alternative situation,
which is supposed to demonstrate autonomy, is heteronomous before it is filled
with a specific content [. . .] A free man would only be one who need not bow to
any alternatives, and under existing circumstances there is a touch of freedom
in refusing to accept the alternatives. Freedom means to criticise and change
situations, not to confirm them by deciding within their coercive structure.38
A previous passage from the same book denounces ‘given alternatives’ as

heteronomous impositions that stem from ‘prevailing opinion’, which requires
the ticking off of chosen options, and from the sphere of ‘administration’, or
‘bureaucracy’, which elicits ‘yes or no’ decisions in relation to ‘submitted drafts’.
‘The bureaucratic way of thinking’, Adorno states, ‘has become the secret model
for a thought allegedly still free.’39 In the choosing of an option, of one alternative
over the other, of a position opposed to another position, Adorno recognizes
38 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 225f.

39 Ibid., 42.
an ‘extension of the coercion of conscience’ that triggers not simplification

but oversimplification, a ‘coarsening process’ that renounces truth. Against
such renunciation Adorno advocates the experience of vertiginousness as an
experience of thought40, a ‘surrendering’ to the object that, unable to ‘hold on’ to
something, arises the suspicion of lacking an ‘unequivocal position’.
What holds for philosophical thought holds equally for art. When Adorno
acknowledges that the controversy between committed and autonomous art is of
the highest relevance for spirit, for the ‘possibility of spirit’,41 and hence for truth,
this controversy should be understood as presenting the artist, in Badiouan
language the one who engages in a truth procedure, with an alternative, an
option, a choice, a decision to be made. Committed art does not lend itself to such
an understanding because art vertiginously undoes the alternatives to which it
seems to give rise. In fact, commitment itself does not have the consistency and
the coherence necessary for it to form one side of an alternative, for example, in
the guise of committed art opposed to autonomous, or formalist, or aesthetic,
art. Adorno declares that it remains ‘politically ambiguous’,42 at least ‘for as long
as it does not reduce itself to propaganda’, to a mockery of its very idea, of the
freedom the concept of decision entails. The ambiguity of commitment becomes
manifest in art when art unravels the dialectics that destabilize alternatives,
something Adorno credits Sartre’s plays with achieving.43 For if alternatives can
only appear as alternatives by acquiring a ‘prescribed form’,44 the form of duality,
they suspend the freedom that the choice of one side of an alternative, or the
decision in support of one option, should ascertain. Choice ceases to be choice
and collapses into ‘choice enjoined’.45 Freedom, then, is associated by Adorno
not with the subjective metaphors of dual choice in a situation but with the
deforming intensity that lies in the vertiginousness of thought and that renders
commitment, in art and in politics, unfit for the univocity its alternatives are
supposed to promote, unfit for the univocity and the recognizability of the right
40 Adorno relates the experience of thought as experience of vertiginousness to an experience of the

open. Badiou’s critique of openness as an ‘ideal’, which challenges the ‘matheme’, targets a ‘formal
transformation’ that must always tend towards the ‘limit of non-form’ and therefore remains caught
up in ‘idle waiting’. See Alain Badiou, Cinq lessons sur le ‘cas’ Wagner (Condé sur Noireau: Nous,
2010), 60. In Badiou’s seminar on Heidegger, which dates from 1986 to 1987, the wait implicit in
Heidegger’s hope for a rescuing god is said to be a recipe for disaster: ‘Disaster, the abyss of death, is
the only God we know’, in Heidegger. L’être 3 – Figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 27.
41 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Engagement’, in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1965), 109.
42 Ibid., 110.
43 It honours Sartre, one reads in Negative Dialectics, that his plays ‘disavow the philosophy with whose
theses they deal’. See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 60.
44 Adorno, ‘Engagement’, 113.
45 Ibid.
choice or the good intention: ‘What weighs heaviest against commitment in art

is that even good intentions sound a false note when they are noticeable; they do
so all the more when they disguise themselves because of that.’46
For Adorno, as one may gauge, a theory of points that operate as schemes
and mediate between the transcendental and the appearance of a world, or a
theory of decision making and commitment to a truth that appears in the world
and frees it from numbing and lifeless neutrality, from being a worldless world,
a world of neutral spectatorship, a world bereft of situations, will always be a
theory of dirty hands, a practice that cannot touch the world without corrupting
and falsifying it, without legitimizing the sacrifice of thought.
There are two main reasons for such a conclusion, a more general one and
one that concerns art more specifically.
1. The world disclosed, or intensified, on the grounds of the figure (of the) two is
a world of untruth and unfreedom, given that two is a figure of worldly coercion,
of coercion resulting from a particular world, a ‘mythical’ world, a world split
by power, by social antagonism and exploitation. The object of such coercion
is the vertiginousness that belongs to unbiased thought and comportment, or
action. For free thought and comportment, or action, the figure (of the) two is
not a neutral, innocent logical entity, a mathematical number that allows for
‘portentous, or fateful, possibilities of a world’47 to constitute themselves.
2. Art, if it is not to surrender to the coercion of the world, to a ‘prescribed form’,
and if it is to preserve both its quality of thought and its quality of commitment,
of active comportment towards the world, must endorse a ‘thoroughgoing
articulation’48 that pushes the world to the ‘point of worldlessness’, even
independently of the kind of world in which its truth appears. Adorno puts
it like this: ‘All commitment to the world has to be canceled if the idea of the
committed work of art is to be fulfilled.’ When one identifies the appeal that
may originate in an artwork with its ‘thematic commitment’,49 in Dirty Hands
with the question whether Hugo can be recovered for party politics despite his
doubts, his detachment and his disenchantment, when one thereby subordinates
the artwork to a ‘gesture of addressing’50 and encourages a ‘secret complicity’
between the artwork and its beholders, readers, listeners, or spectators, one
46 Ibid., 124.
48 Adorno, ‘Engagement’, 129.
49 Ibid., 128.
50 Ibid., 133.
subscribes to the ‘friendly approach to the world’ that such identification

comprises and deserts the truth supposed to appear in the world.
It can be gauged from what precedes that the point of contention between
Adorno and Badiou in relation to the problem of dirty hands, of the philosopher’s
dirty hands, is the point itself, and that what would need to be developed at
this stage is a twofold question, the question of the experience of thought as
experience of vertiginousness, and the question of a mediator that would not
be a point established as duality. Let’s then add a few hints intended as closing
remarks on the French–German border.
1. Thought as an experience of vertiginousness, as what Hegel, in his
determination of truth, calls a Bacchanalian rapture, or frenzy, or revel, ‘in which
no member is not drunk’,51 dissolves the object to which it surrenders. It discovers,
it invents, it uncovers the object’s dissolution as its own movement, though not
with the aim of appropriating this movement as a movement that would confer
an intelligible identity to the object and to itself. Thought exaggerates, it keeps
pushing the Dionysian reeling and transport of truth, the intensity of its ‘Taumel’
to the point where it begins to differ from theory and opinion because it reveals
itself not to have, and not to be, an object, an option.52 Thought is anarchic.
There is no philosophical position, no recognizable thought, just as there is no
definite work of art.
2. For Adorno, what prompts action, practical or political interventions, and
also the act of thinking itself, is less the detection of a gathering point, the making
of a choice or a decision in a situation dominated by the tantalizing power of the
two, than an uncontrollable ‘addendum’ that is neither extra- nor intra-mental,
an undecidable ‘supplement’ that underlies the subject’s decisions, a ‘jolt’, a ‘jerk’,
a ‘twitch’, an ‘impulse’, a ‘heartbeat’,53 a ‘spontaneity’, an ‘arbitrariness’ that affects
thought, overcomes and interrupts it where it seeks ‘unflinching theoretical
awareness’54 so as to attend to the needs of ‘true praxis’, to the ‘totality of acts
that would satisfy the idea of freedom’ and that Badiou might consider as a
51 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1970), 46.
52 This is also the point where the ‘Taumel’ of truth touches upon another ‘Taumel’, both a- and pre-
philosophical, that Derrida discusses in the context of a quasi-transcendental ‘stricture’ from which
philosophy has always already arisen; philosophy as a formally organized, methodic, determining
and justifying inquiry into truth; philosophy as speculative dialectics. See Jacques Derrida, Glas
(Paris: Galilée, 1974), 270.
53 Adorno speaks of a ‘heartbeat’ within and ‘yet beyond’ the res cogitans (Adorno, Negative Dialektik,
229). Against the spiritualization and rational assimilation of the will he also claims that there would
be no will ‘if the hand no longer twitched’ (229).
54 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 228.
philosophical totality, as a totality in which all agents would be philosophers. In

the wake of Adorno, acts are in excess of the order and the continuity suggested
by the following up of a truth procedure ‘point by point’,55 and this excess is
their vertiginousness. In the wake of Adorno, the question ‘can a philosopher
have dirty hands?’, the question of commitment, must be completed by adding a
further qualification: ‘can the philosopher as anarchist have dirty hands?’ After
all, the philosopher, no matter how much he may side with ‘true praxis’, cannot
know what his jerking hand will do. Either he has a hand or he does not.

9
Yes and No, Adorno or Badiou: The

Negativity of the Subject
Christoph Menke
Translated by Roland Végső
Does freedom consist in saying yes or no? How are we supposed to understand
this choice between yes and no? Is freedom the power to say no or the power to
say yes? Is freedom negativity or affirmation?
A common answer to these questions holds that freedom is neither the one
nor the other but the power to say yes or no – that is to say, it is the power to
choose (or the power of indifference).1 This definition of freedom understands
the latter as a specific capacity of the subject (the ability to choose). It thereby
always already presupposes that there is a subject, that the agent of choice is a
subject, who also possesses (or lacks) a number of other capacities. The question
whether freedom is negativity or affirmation, however, concerns the being of the
subject. This question understands freedom not as a specific capacity that the
subject possesses but as something that the subject is.2 And the latter cannot be
the capacity to choose since every choice is in turn preceded by an act that does
not have the form of a choice. The subject produces itself through this act that
is presupposed by the capacity to choose between yes and no. The definition of
freedom as the being of the subject, therefore, implies that we understand the
being of the subject as its self-generation. If freedom is the being of the subject
(rather than one of its capacities or even one of its qualities), then the subject
is precisely nothing but its own becoming. The subject understood in terms of
freedom is a process and not a substance or an entity: the subject is ‘subjectivation’.
1 For a detailed genealogy and a critique of this concept of freedom, see Frank Ruda, Indifferenz und
Wiederholung. Freiheit in der Moderne (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2018).
2 See Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer, 1995), 10.
The question of freedom (whether freedom is negativity or affirmation) is,

therefore, the question concerning the process of the subject: What does it mean
to be a subject? Which means: what does it mean to proceed like a subject and,
thereby, to constitute oneself as a subject?
Alain Badiou describes the subject in terms of a ‘procedure, which is its
being’.3 But in contrast to (almost) all other philosophers who understand the
subject in terms of its own self-generation, Badiou does not rely on the concept
of freedom.4 He develops a theory of the subject as a procedure of subjectivation
that consistently avoids the concept of freedom (or, we could even say, he
circumvents the concept of freedom). Yet he does not do so merely for strategic
reasons – because the concept of freedom is supposedly already co-opted by
other positions that he aims to criticize. And he certainly does not do so out of
mere carelessness. Rather, I understand Badiou’s avoidance of the concept of
freedom to be a consequence of his rejection of a category that has played an
absolutely foundational role for modern philosophy: the category of negativity.
What Badiou says about Paul also applies to his own thinking of the subject
as procedure: ‘It eradicates negativity.’5 This is why, I assume, Badiou does not
speak about the freedom of the subject: to speak of its freedom means to define
the subject through the power of negativity (or, at least, this is what it meant
traditionally from Hegel all the way to Heidegger, Sartre and Adorno).
The decisive question for this interpretive hypothesis concerns a systematic
point: why would Badiou (like Paul or along with Paul) want to ‘eradicate’
negativity? The answer lies in his critique of the dialectic, that is to say, in his
critique of the theory of determination developed by Hegel’s (positive) dialectic.6
Understood in dialectical terms, determination must be thought as (the
negation of) negation, which means that (the true form of) determination must
be grasped as ‘self-determination’. In what follows, I reconstruct this interpretive
thesis about Hegel that forms the foundation of Badiou’s eradication of the
concept of negativity.
But here I will not pursue the question whether or not this is a good
interpretation of Hegel. The problem that interests me most is how Badiou’s
4 This applies to both of the books by Badiou that I use as my exclusive references in what follows: Being
and Event and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. They can be read as the esoteric and
exoteric versions of the same fundamental argument. For a helpful discussion, see Frank Ruda, For
Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015).
5 See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford
6 In accordance with Hegel, in what follows I use the concept of determination as equivalent with that
of ‘thought’.
Yes and No, Adorno or Badiou 149
critique of the Hegelian dialectic proceeds and what we can learn from it about
the theory of determination. Regardless of how we answer the question of
whether the model of self-determination is appropriate for the Hegelian system
or not, it is unquestionably the figure that stands at the centre of influential
(neo-)pragmatistic reconstructions of Hegel.7 This is why Badiou’s critique
of determination as self-determination is so significant from a systematic
perspective, independently of the question of interpretation.
For a better understanding of this critique, a comparison with Adorno will
be helpful – this exercise forms the centre of the following investigations (in
the second section of this essay). Badiou shares with Adorno the critique of the
Hegelian or positive dialectic. Adorno also criticizes the latter for its definition
of determination. Based on this critique, both of them come to the same
conclusion: namely, that true determination should not be understood as self-
determination but as a transcendence of the self. Badiou calls this understanding
of determination ‘affirmation’. But in contrast to Badiou, Adorno claims that true
determination can go beyond the subject only if it passes through the negativity
of the subject: the eradication of negativity would also abolish affirmation.
Adorno, therefore, draws the opposite conclusion from Badiou’s based on the
critique of Hegel’s concept of self-determination: the thought of affirmation
requires the negativity of the subject.
Determination as self-determination: Hegel’s concept
There are some very good reasons for Badiou’s decision to avoid the concept of
freedom. First among these is the fact that freedom functions as the foundational
concept of bourgeois society, which currently appears to be on its way to
becoming a global order without an outside or an alternative. But freedom is the
foundational concept of bourgeois society not only in the ideological sense, as
the justification of the current order of things. Rather, freedom founds bourgeois
society, since the latter builds its new forms of domination on freedom, since it
implements its rule through freedom: freedom is the medium and the means of
bourgeois rule. Freedom and domination coincide in bourgeois society.8
7 See, e.g., Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy. Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
8 See also Christoph Menke, Kritik der Rechte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), part III.
The definition of bourgeois freedom holds that freedom is the natural

ability to choose. Choice, therefore, means choosing or selecting from a given
set of possibilities. The ability to choose, therefore, presupposes that one has
possibilities. This holds true not only in the obvious sense that there must be
already given possibilities that are available for the subject so that the latter can
choose from them and, thereby, exercise its freedom. But also in the more general
sense that relating to properties and states as possibilities is itself an act of the
subject: having possibilities is also a capability. It presupposes that it is possible
not to be determined by properties and states, that it is possible to disregard
them, to abstract from them or to negate their power of determination. Only
one who is not determined by any specific determination, only one who can say
no to her own determinateness (by a specific need and an object that satisfies
this need) can choose among determinations. One who chooses must first say
no. She chooses a determination under the precondition of its negation (as a
determination that determines her). Bourgeois freedom, thus, consists of the
ability to disregard determinations and the ability to choose a determination.
Freedom is the unity of negation and determination.
Negative and positive freedom

The philosophical problem of freedom is, thus, located in the unity of negation
and determination. It is immediately obvious that the bourgeois notion of
freedom as the capability to choose cannot solve this problem. It connects the
two sides (the selection of one determination and the disregard of all other
determinations) only externally and, as a result, it oscillates between them. The
free individual, therefore, is just as empty as it is full. It is empty because, for it,
nothing carries absolute meaning. At the same time, however, it is filled with
the particular possibilities that are already given to it in the situation, which
it cannot escape. In order to think the unity of negation and determination, it
is then necessary to go beyond the bourgeois freedom of choice. To use Kant’s
formulation, we could say that we must move from a ‘negative’ to a ‘positive’
conception of freedom.9 The positive concept of freedom (which is its true
concept) conceives of freedom as the unity of negation and determination.
Its basic idea is that the unity of negation and determination can be thought
only if this unity is understood as a fundamental, categorical transformation of
determination – of the meaning of ‘determination’. In the bourgeois freedom of
9 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 318.

choice, determination remains the same. In the act of choosing, the individual
disregards the fact that it is determined by specific needs and then, based on
this absence of determination, it declares one of its needs or an ordered series
of needs (what John Rawls called a ‘life plan’) to be determinative. But here
determination remains unchanged. In Hegel’s language, we could say that
it remains mere ‘determinacy’ (Bestimmtheit). The freedom of choice is ‘the
transition from undifferentiated indeterminacy to differentiation, determination,
and the positing of a determinacy as a content and object’.10 In reality, therefore,
there is still no determination of the subject in the freedom of choice. Regardless
of whether they are ‘given by nature, or generated by the concept of spirit’,11 there
are only different determinacies from whose mere positivity or givenness, in a
first step, the subject abstracts and, then, in a second step chooses one or more
options. Determining givenness itself becomes something posited. But then
‘positing’ (Setzen) means only ‘imposition’ (Einsetzen): it is the preference for
determinacy or its imposition as binding in relation to others.
The transformation of determination in true freedom, on the contrary,
consists of grasping determination as the ‘self-determination’ of the subject.12
Its fundamental meaning is self-realization. The positive concept of freedom,
which Hegel borrows from Kant, is constituted in an expressivist manner.13 This
means that the subject in its free self-determination posits as its own not only
one of the given determinacies (whose determining power it negated in a first
step), but that at the same time it posits itself in it. Determinacy becomes (self-)
determination when it is not only the effect but the expression of its positing as
well as the expression of the positing subject. The claim that free determination
is the self-determination of the subject means that, as a determination by the
self, it is at the same time the self as determination: the self is there or it is real
in determination, or that in its determination it ‘remains with itself [ . . . ] and in
this determination, it joins together with itself alone’.14
Only this way can the requirement be fulfilled to think the unity of negation
and determination – while the freedom of choice is merely the external back
and forth between negation and determination (and remains in this dualism).
10 Hegel, Elements of a Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 39.
11 Ibid., 38.
12 Ibid., 41.
13 Christoph Menke, ‘Autonomy and Liberation: The Historicity of Freedom’. In Hegel on Philosophy
in History, ed. Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017),
159–76.
14 Hegel, Elements, 41.
According to the formal structure of this unity, the negation through which,
in a first step, the subject ruptures the positivity of the determinacies that
condition it, remains present and preserved in the second step of the positing
of determinations. The first step is the negation of givenness; the second step is
the negation of this negation in the positing of determinations – however, not as
the abstract other of the (first) negation, but in such a way that the self remains
by itself as negative in its determination (in the negation of its negativity).15 The
‘identity with itself ’ that the subject realizes in its self-determination is nothing
other than its negativity in relation to external determinacy. Conversely, free self-
determination is the kind of determination that is at the same time negation (as
the negation of every given determination) and not negation (as determination),
since in the negation of negation it is at once the overcoming and preservation
of negation.
In light of this explanation of the positive freedom of self-determination in
opposition to the negative freedom of choice, we can now form a more precise
understanding of the question why Badiou defines the subject without any
reference to the concept of freedom. In the case of negative freedom, the answer
is quite obvious: negative freedom is the foundational category of domination
in bourgeois society. Bourgeois society, however, is a society without subjects.16
Negative freedom, therefore, can and must be avoided when we try to think the
subject (in opposition to the citizen as bourgeois). But the question of the freedom
of self-determination is more important: why and how does positive freedom
miss the subject? The answer is that self-determination misses the meaning of
determination (the determination of determination) and, consequently, must be
avoided.
Determinate negation: Logical and ontological

Positive freedom is the unity of negation and determination. As such, positive
freedom is nothing other than the (dialectical) truth of determination in general.
Every determination is in truth (in its true form as determination) free or self-
determination. This is the lesson of Hegel’s theory of determinate negation,
15 The full definition of self-determination, therefore, is the following: ‘the self-determination of the

“I”, in that it posits itself as the negative of itself, that is, as determinate and limited, and at the same
time remains with itself [bei sich], that is, in its identity with itself and universality; and in this
determination, it joins together with itself alone’ (Hegel, Elements, 41).
16 I cannot go into detail about this diagnosis here. Among other places, Badiou describes the form of
thought that corresponds to this society in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter
Hallward (New York: Verso, 2013). See especially ch. 3, ‘Ethics as a Figure of Nihilism’ (30–39).
which states that determination is the negation of negation. At the centre of this
theory, we find ‘the recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally
positive’.17
On the first level, the concept of determinate negation serves to describe the way
the operation of negation proceeds in actuality, in the praxis of negation. In this
process, the negated ‘does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness,
but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; or that such a negation
is not just negation, but is the negation of the determined fact which is resolved, and is
therefore determinate negation’.18 Since negation is always the negation of something
determined, it does not stand in an external opposition to what it negates. Negation
is the ‘nothingness of that from which it results’.19 The negation of determination
is its ‘immanent movement’.20 Since negation itself is a result of a determination
that it negates (or that negates itself in it), negation itself has a result: ‘Looked at
as a result, what emerges from this process is the determinate negative which is
consequently a positive content as well.’21 Or: ‘Because the result, the negation, is a
determinate negation, it has a content.’22 If negation as such is ‘determinate negation’
(if every operation of negation in reality is always determined), then it is a negation
of a determination and, consequently, at the same time the production of another
determination.23
But this presentation describes negation merely as a logical operation – ‘logical’
in the classical and not in the Hegelian sense. This understanding of negation
as a logical operation defines it on the basis of its effects on the meaning and,
thereby, on the truth-value of a determination. Logically speaking, the negation
of a false thought produces its contradictory opposite as true; and the negation of
a true thought produces its contradictory opposite as false.24 Logical operations
17 Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 33.
18 Ibid.
19 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 51.
20 Ibid., 36.
21 Ibid.
23 To put it differently: negation is already a negation of negation. For if negation is to be understood
as determinate negation (the act of negation of a determination as the expressive realization of its
immanent or self-negation), then every act of negation is at the same time an act of determination
and, therefore, possesses a positive content since it is the negation of a self-negating determination,
and as such at the same time the negation of the self-negation of this determination.
‘Thus for every thought there is a contradictory thought; we acknowledge the falsity of a thought
24
by admitting the truth of its contradictory. The sentence that expresses the contradictory thought
is formed from the expression of the original thought by means of a negative word.’ See Gottlob
Frege, ‘Negation’. In Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. Brian McGuinness
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 385. Robert Brandom’s interpretation of determinate negation as ‘material
incompatibility’ corresponds to this logical concept of negation. See Robert Brandom, ‘Holism and
refer to relations among determinations. The dialectical concept of determinate

negation, on the contrary, refers to what a determination is: it applies to the
form of determination. The concept of determinate negation, therefore, is not
merely a logical concept (concerning judgments) but an ontological concept.
Hence the other side of ‘the recognition of the logical principle that negation is
equally positive’ is the insight that ‘determinateness [Bestimmtheit] is negation
posited as affirmative’.25 This is why ‘Spinoza’s proposition: omnis determinatio est
negatio, [is] a proposition of infinite importance’: it offers us another definition
of determination.26 Accordingly, being a determination now means being the
‘result’ of a negation.
The ontological meaning of determinate negation lies in the concept of the
‘result’: negation is an act directed at a first determination, which then produces
a second determination as a result. The second determination ‘contains’ in itself
the first determination and its negation: ‘In the result there is therefore contained
in essence that from which the result derives – a tautology indeed, since the result
would otherwise be something immediate and not a result.’27 Being a result,
the second determination is ‘richer’ than the first: ‘richer because it negates or
opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than
that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite’.28 The second determination,
however, is not ‘richer’ than the first in its content but in its form. It is richer
precisely because it comes second and, therefore, it has a history: the history of
being a result of a negation of a previous determination. Precisely because it has
a history and therefore a past, the second determination is a structurally ‘new’
determination: ‘But when [. . .] the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely,
as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in
the negation the transition is made.’29 Every determination that is understood
to be a result of a negation, that is, of its history is a new determination. To
understand determinations, that is to say, determination as such this way (as
a result and, therefore, as a new determination) is what ‘constitutes the truly
dialectical factor’.30
Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology’, in Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics
of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 180–82.
Hegel, Science of Logic, 87.
25
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 33.
28 Ibid.
29 Hegel, Phenomenology, 51.
The thesis of determinate negation claims that every determination is the

result of an act of negation directed at another determination. In a logical sense,
this mean that determinations are bound up with each other through their
negations: one determination is (nothing other) than the negation of another or
the negation of one determination is ‘immanent’ to the other. But while the logical
understanding makes it appear as if they were both of the same kind and form as
determinations bound by negation, the ontological understanding of determinate
negation makes it clear that they are fundamentally different: determinate
negation is the act of their formal differentiation, the production of a ‘new form’
(or the production of determination in a new form). Determinate negation is
not a relation of ‘material’ (Brandom) but of formal incompatibility. Determinate
negation produces a form in which determination and negation, the positing of
determinations and the cancellation of mere givenness are thought together.
An ontological impasse
Badiou’s case against Hegel is that the latter’s theory of determination leads to an
‘ontological impasse’.31 According to Badiou, the essence of this impasse is precisely
that the unity of negation and determination – that the concept of determinate
negation thinks – is nothing other than the figure of self-determination that
Hegel develops in his theory of freedom. To think determination as self-
determination – this is Hegel’s fundamental thesis and, simultaneously, his
ontological impasse. To think determination as self-determination in reality
means not to think determination at all.
The first step of this critique develops the thesis that the unity of negation and
determination is nothing other than the unity of the self of the determination,
that is, the unity of the subject. According to Badiou, this point is already
demonstrated by the first category that Hegel’s logic uses to develop the dialectic
of determination: the category of the ‘something’.32 The basic structure of the
something provides a prototype for the unity of negation and determination

32 See Meditation 15 in Badiou’s Being and Event (161–72). I follow here Badiou’s interpretation
without comparing it with Hegel’s text. Hegel, however, writes not only that the something is ‘first
negation of negation, as simple existent self-reference’ or ‘negative unity with itself ’ and, as such, it
is ‘the beginning of the subject’ (Hegel, Science of Logic, 89), but he also refers back to the category
of the something at the beginning of the doctrine of the concept where he describes the concept as
the ‘kingdom of freedom’ or as the ‘I’ (Being and Event, 513). For a discussion of this section, see
Thomas Hanke, ‘Das Wesen im Begriff: Über den Zusammenhang von objektiver und subjektiver
Logik in der Passage “Vom Begriff im allgemeinen”’. In Hegels Lehre vom Wesen, ed. Andreas Arndt
and Günter Kruck (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 159–79.
that, in a developed form, stands at the centre of the dialectical theory of

self-determination.
The starting point for this dialectic is the insight that the one is the negation
of the other: that a specific determination is the negation of every other
determination. The other is, therefore, the limit of the one, or the one exists only
through or as its limit (separating it from the other). At the same time, it is the
one (it is a determination that is other than the other) only if it is not its limit
separating it from the other. The one must, therefore, go beyond its negative
relation to the other in order to be the one; the one exists only as a crossing of
its limit (Grenze) (which, thereby, becomes its ‘frontier’ [Schranke]).33 To put it
differently, a determination is the negation of all other determinations and, at
the same time, it must be or strives to be more, it must be or strives to be itself.
It must be the negation of the negation of all other determinations. But this is
only a requirement or an ‘ought’. Thought this way, the one is not but ought to be
(it is a ‘having-to-be’).34
The dialectical solution for the problem of the existence of the one defined
through negation requires ‘that the passing-beyond [i.e., the negation of the
other] be passed beyond’.35 This becomes possible only if we redefine the relation
of the one (determination) to the negation of the other. The negation of the
negation of the other (through which the one produces itself) cannot mean
that the one is beyond negation. As such a beyond, it would remain forever
deferred as the goal of an endless ‘ought’ and, thus, as something unreal. Rather,
determination must be grasped as being itself the movement of the passing beyond
negation. Thus, the dialectical solution to the endless deferral of determination
in a mere ‘ought’ states the following: the one is itself (and nothing other than)
the present of its movement beyond the mere negation of the other. The negation
of negation remains a mere unrealizable ‘ought’ as long as it is supposed to be
beyond negation in relation to the positivity of the one. It becomes real only as
the movement of the passing-beyond that unfolds inside the one: as the one’s
own realization. The one produces its ‘presence’ as or through the ‘interiority of
the negative’.36
In a different formulation, we could say that this is the move from bad to true
infinity: from determination beyond the negation of determinacy to the infinite
33 In Oliver Feltham’s English translation, we read the following: ‘The passage from the pure limit
(Grenze) to the frontier (Schranke) forms the resource of an infinity directly required by the point of
being’ (Badiou, Being and Event, 162).
Ibid., 164.
35
36 Ibid., 162.
as ‘the contraction in virtuality of repetition in the presence’.37 The dialectical

answer to the bad infinity of the ‘ought’, in which determination exists only
in deferral, is the thought of a truly endless determination – of determination
as truly infinite. And determination is truly infinite when it is simultaneously
present and negative. But this is possible only if we understand these concepts
(the presence of a determination as the negation of all others) from the internal
perspective of its own realization (the having of a determination as the cancellation
of any determination). Infinite determination is, therefore, subjective or self-
determination; true infinity is ‘subjective virtuality’.38 Infinite determination is
the determination in which the subject ‘remains with itself [bei sich], that is, in
its identity with itself’,39 since its identity ‘as one’ consists of the negation of all
determinacy and in the realization of determination.
The concept of determinate negation, therefore, introduces an ontological
distinction between determinacy as something already given and determination
as a result. This also shows that determination is the result of a twofold act: just
as much a negation of merely given determinacy as the negation of this negation
as position (Position). The critique of the negative freedom of choice has already
shown us how position cannot be thought: it cannot be a mere ‘positing’ (Setzung)
(since the posited is either undistinguishable from mere determinacy or it is empty
and indeterminate).40 From this, the concept of true infinity draws the following
conclusion: infinite determination is not posited by the subject since the subject
is present in it. Position means the presence of the subject. And the presence – or,
more precisely, the realization – of the subject takes place in determinations in
which it presents its ‘identity’: in which it realizes what it is and what it is not as a
subject. What the subject is constitutes its inner or second nature; what it is not or
what it negates makes up its external or first nature. In infinite negation, the subject
realizes itself in its universality both negatively and positively: in the recognition of
the true determination and the cancellation of the merely given one.41
If, following Badiou, we accept that this is the goal of Hegel’s demonstration,
then the latter finds himself in a dead end from which there is no way out.
Badiou’s objection to the dialectical program holds that determination
cannot be transformed in self-determination: determination has a necessarily
37 Ibid., 167.
38 Ibid., 166.
39 Hegel, Elements, 41.
40 This is the so-called paradox of autonomy. See Menke, ‘Autonomy and Liberation’.
41 To put it simply, the introduction of the concept of true infinity explains the difference between
givenness and the result, between determinacy and (self-)determination as the difference between
nature and normativity.
indissoluable external moment. According to Badiou, this becomes apparent in

Hegel’s logic in that he must grant a quantitative dimension to the difference
between the one and the other. The difference falls within the dimension
of countability. The essential moment ‘of the quantitative something is the
externalization of identity’.42 The quantitative, as the countable, is essentially
‘external’: it ‘cannot be pure presence, interior virtuality, the subjective’.43 This
does not simply mean that the one can be distinguished from the other by way
of counting without qualitative determination, without referring this difference
to its identity. Rather, what is at stake is the definition of determination itself: all
determinations have an external side, through which they are distinguished
from each other quantitatively and, therefore, can be grasped in such a way that
they do not appear to be the ‘result’ of a determinate negation as the presence
of self-determination. All determinations (in order to be determinations) have a
side of immediacy that does not allow itself to be cancelled in the autonomous
operation of a negation directed at itself. There is no determination without
mere determinacy, the external other of negation. Hegel’s dialectical theory
‘fails’ because of the externality of determination: ‘However heroic the effort, it
is interrupted de facto by the exteriority itself of the pure multiple.’44
Affirmation and negativity: A critique of the dialectic
The alternative to the dialectical theory of determination as self-determination

is designated by Badiou’s concept of ‘affirmation’. The definition of affirmation
is also subjective (or ‘subjectal’): the subject is the realization of affirmation;
affirmation is tied to the subjective procedure. Hegel understands the
connection between determination and subjectivity in such a way that (the
true, correctly understood and accomplished) determination contains the
negativity of the subject in relation to every determining determinacy (so that
the subject, inasmuch as it determines itself and negates its own negativity, at
the same time remains ‘with itself ’ and, thus, remains negative): understood
dialectically, determination is self-determination since (or to the degree that)
it is the expression of the negativity of the subject. Understood as affirmation,
however, according to Badiou determination is constitutive of the subject

43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 169.
precisely because it is ‘without preliminary negation’.45 Badiou’s counterprogram

to Hegel consists of grasping determination (and the subjective procedure
that it constitutes) as the process of affirmation that is not mediated through a
subjective act of negation, as a yes without a preliminary no.
In what follows, I will first present my understanding of this program. I will
do so in reference to Adorno, whose critique of Hegel’s (positive) dialectic
begins in a similar fashion to Badiou’s. But based on this criticism, Adorno
draws a conclusion that is quite different from Badiou’s: negative dialectic is an
alternative to the alternative of the negation of negation and affirmation. The
contrast between Adorno and Badiou that thereby emerges can be sharpened
and resolved if we read their works as theories of (critical or subjective)
‘intervention’.
Rescue and fidelity

In my understanding, Badiou’s basic idea behind the concept of affirmation
corresponds to one of Adorno’s arguments in ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’.
There, Adorno calls the ‘flattening of the intelligible into the imaginary’46 the
fundamental mistake of all ‘phenomenological’ philosophies.47 Phenomenology
reduces the intelligible to acts – that is, subjective acts – of the imagination.
Adorno opposes to this mistake the following description of the essential
determination of the human spirit as mind (Geist): ‘To be a mind at all, it must
know that what it touches upon does not exhaust it, that the finiteness that is
its like does not exhaust it. The mind thinks what would be beyond it.’48 The
mind is only mind; it thinks only where it is not equal to itself, where it is more
or other than itself. Thinking means: to think more or differently than we can
think. True thought is not the product of the thinking subject. It is not exhausted
by the subjective act of thinking that produced it. Thinking is defined by its
‘moment of transcendent objectivity’.49 It is ‘the negation of the finite which
finiteness requires’ that defines the mind: ‘The concept of the intelligible is the
self-negation of the finite mind. In the mind, mere entity becomes aware of its

46 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 391.
47 For more on this question, see Christoph Menke, ‘Metaphysik und Erfahrung. Zu Adornos Begriff
der Philosophie’, in Spiegelungen der Gleichheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003), 184–99, as
well as ‘Subjektivität und Gelingen: Adorno – Derrida’, in Derrida und Adorno. Zur Aktualität von
Dekonstruktion und Frankfurter Schule, ed. Eva L. Waniek and Erik M. Vogt (Wien: Turia + Kant,
2008), 189–205.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 392.
48
49 Ibid.
deficiency.’50 The mind or thinking is ‘the departure from an existence obdurate

in itself ’: ‘in its self-negation, the mind transcends itself ’.51
This self-transcendence through ‘self-reflection’ is the opposite of the self-
realization that, according to Hegel, constitutes the freedom of spirit as mind.
The self-negation of the spirit is, therefore, not (positive) dialectical. It is not
sublated by the negation of negation (the negativity of the spirit in its self-
determination). Rather, it is the movement in which the spirit passes beyond
itself and its self-determination in the movement of thinking. Adorno calls this
movement of the spirit beyond itself ‘rescue’ (Rettung):
Nothing can be saved unchanged, nothing that has not passed through the
portal of its death. If rescue is the inmost impulse of any man’s spirit, there is no
hope but unreserved surrender: of that which is to be rescued as well as of the
hopeful spirit. The posture of hope is to hold lightly what the subject will hold
on to, what the subject expects to endure.52
Rescue is the rescue of phenomena: the rescue of the phenomena from the
spirit through the spirit (that flattens them into mere phenomena, appearances
for it). Rescue is the self-movement of the spirit in which it discloses itself: the
disclosure of the spirit that it alone can accomplish because otherwise it would
not be its disclosure to the intelligible and infinite (but to the existent as it is
there positively: the spirit that does not rescue phenomena through its own self-
disclosure but accepts them as they are perpetuates an ‘obstinate insistence on
existence, forms of a clutching’).53 The subject is free not in its self-determination
but in thinking as self-transcendence, in its redemptive relation to truth.
This argument parallels Badiou’s interpretation of Paul’s letters as attempts
‘to refound the connection between truth and the subject’.54 This connection is
‘paradoxical’: it is the connection between ‘a subject without identity and a law
without support’.55 To put it differently, we could say that the connection between
truth and the subject requires thought. According to Badiou, this is why Paul’s
‘unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth’ from what is constituted
by the subject.56 But this subtraction of truth from what the subject produces
is nothing other than the ‘procedure, which is its being’.57 The passing of truth
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 391–2.
53 Ibid., 391.
55 Ibid., 5.
56 Ibid.
beyond the subject is the realization of the subject. This is why the ‘sudden
appearance of the [. . .] subject is unconditioned’.58 The subject produces itself
only by reference to the unconditioned: it produces itself by producing truth as
the unconditioned; which means that the subject produces itself by producing
truth as that which it does not produce.
Discussing Paul, Badiou describes this unconditioned truth-relation that
constitutes the subject as the relation of love: ‘the subjective process of a truth is
one and the same thing as the love of that truth’.59 This means that the relation
to truth as the unconditioned cannot be a theoretical relation, a relation of
contemplation or cognition. If relating to a truth means producing oneself as
a subject by producing this truth as unconditioned and, thus, as something not
produced, then for a subject relating to a truth means to bear witness to this
truth. To witness a truth means to believe it; and to believe it means that truth
becomes a ‘power’ through our love for it.60 In Being and Event, Badiou calls
this the ‘procedure’ of ‘fidelity’ whose realization constitutes the subject: ‘Every
truth is transcendent to the subject, precisely because the latter’s entire being
resides in supporting the realisation of truth.’61 By the same token, conversely,
this also means that the being of the subject consists of the ‘local’ realization of
a truth that transcends it in this realization as the truth is ‘incommensurable’
with it ‘because the subject is finite, and the truth is infinite’.62 The subject is the
process of the infinite inside the finite. It is the paradoxical capability to realize
the incommensurable infinite in the finite itself. The process of the subject,
therefore, succeeds only when it fails.
This brief description already allows us to see the differences between
Adorno and Badiou. I will address this issue presently, but first I want to
acknowledge their agreements. The latter consists not only of the fact

59 Ibid., 92. This point should be compared to the way the theory of positive freedom as self-
determination evokes Paul. According to this theory, ‘the principle or law by which you determine
your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle
or way of choosing is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself ’. See Christine Korsgaard,
The Sources of Normativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 100. In his letter to
the Romans, Paul writes that ‘Gentiles, who do not possess the law’ (since it was not given and,
therefore, not revealed to them) are ‘a law to themselves’, and ‘they show that what the law requires
is written on their hearts’ (Rom. 12.14-15). See Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition with
Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159. For Korsgaard, the freedom of the subject
consists of realizing its own law. Subjectivation, therefore, means the realization of the law that is
already inscribed in the subject. For Badiou and Adorno, on the contrary, subjectivation means
the realization of the incommensurability of truth in relation to the subject within or as the subject
itself.
Badiou, Being and Event, 397.
61
62 Ibid., 396.
that both Badiou and Adorno reject the (positive) dialectical concept of
self-determination but also of the way they justify this rejection. Adorno
and Badiou conceive of the subject as the paradoxical movement of self-
transcendence through which the finite becomes infinite as intelligible idea
(Adorno’s ‘rescue’), or the equally paradoxical movement of intervention
as the declaration or demonstration of the infinite in the finite (Badiou’s
‘love’ and ‘fidelity’). These two movements – the infinitization of the finite
and the finitization of the infinite – are therefore not empty (or evacuating)
but the realizations of determination, about which Adorno and Badiou are
in agreement in that they both think that it takes place precisely where the
subject breaks with the logic of self-determination.
‘Rescue’ (Adorno) and ‘fidelity’ (Badiou) are concepts that supposedly describe
the connection between truth and the subject in terms of an infinite difference.
Here, the concept of truth is understood in an ontological sense. Truth means: the
true form of determination (or of thought). The concept of truth refers to the
way a determination should be in order to be a true determination. It must be
understood as something unconditioned or transcendent. True determination,
therefore, infinitely exceeds anything produced by the subject. Badiou and
Adorno understand this position to be the opposite of Hegel’s positive dialectic.
The latter’s main thesis is that true determination is the self-determination of
the subject. As a result, Hegel’s dialectic amounts to ‘the unrestrained expansion
of the subject’, since the ‘Hegelian subject-object is subject’.63 In contrast, both
Adorno and Badiou aim to think true determination as a passing beyond the
self-determination of the subject that is realized precisely and only in the
procedure of the subject. We can speak of true determination only when the
subject does not ‘remain with itself ’ (as Hegel put it) but transcends itself: when
it goes beyond itself in itself.
The move to negative dialectics

The opposition between Adorno and Badiou surfaces where the question of
negativity emerges.
Badiou’s critique of the positive dialectic inevitably leads to the (above-
quoted Pauline) demand to eradicate negativity, to think determination as
affirmation without a preliminary negation. This demand directed against Hegel,
63 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shiery Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1993), 5, 13.
however, presupposes his definition of free self-determination. According to

this definition, self-determination means the production of determination out
of the negativity of the subject. Since Hegel is right here, according to Badiou,
the critique of the dialectical concept of self-determination must also reject the
thesis of preliminary negation.
Adorno’s critique, by contrast, concerns Hegel’s definition of free self-
determination. His critique targets the connection between negativity and self-
determination, that is to say, Hegel’s thesis that the realization of the negativity
of the subject should be understood in such a way that, in its determination,
the subject remains with itself and merges itself only with itself. But, for
Adorno, the claim that there is true determination only through the negativity
of the subject does not mean that it is the subject’s self-determination. Self-
determination and negativity must be distinguished from each other. It is
precisely this critical differentiation that accounts for Adorno’s move to
negative dialectics.
The basic anti-Hegelian thesis of negative dialectics, therefore, holds that it
is incorrect ‘to equate the negation of negation with positivity’ since ‘what thus
wins out in the inmost core of dialectics is the anti-dialectical principle’.64 In
negative dialectics, on the contrary, ‘a negation of particularities [ . . . ] remains
negative’.65 It has no ‘circumventing result’ in which negation (as negated or
self-negated) would simultaneously sublate and preserve itself.66 But this
is not the case because for Adorno there is only (pure or mere) negativity
and no true determination, or because negativity is the whole. Quite the
contrary: negation does not have a determination as its ‘result’ because the
determination that is the result of a negation is not true; because there is
true determination only if the negation remains purely negative without a
result. The purity (i.e. the resultlessness) of negativity is the condition of true
determination. The ‘rescue’ of unconditioned truth leads through the ‘portal
of death’.67
64 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 158.

65 Ibid., emphasis added.
66 Ibid., 159.
67 As Ansgar Martins insists, this formulation should not be understood in a Christological sense.
Martins explains this point by reference to a similar passage from Gershom Scholem’s Die jüdische
Mystik: ‘Unlike the death of Jesus, Sabbatai Zevi does not transmit new, authentic revolutionary
values. His apostasy merely destroys the old ones’ (quoted in Ansgar Martins, Adorno und die
Kabbala [Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, 2016], 88). Therein lies the antinomian motif that brings
Adorno and Scholem together: ‘The path into the abyss precedes the one that leads upwards’
(quoted in 87). See also Asaf Angermann, ‘Redemption ex negativo: Critical Theory and the History
of Mystical Heresy’, Bamidbar, 4.1 (2014): 1–20.
The fundamental thesis of negative dialectics, therefore, opposes both Hegel

and Badiou. Against Hegel, Adorno argues that negativity does not produce
a determination as a result and, consequently, determination cannot be the
result of the negativity of the subject – hence negative dialectics. Against
Badiou, Adorno argues that, at the same time, there is no true determination
without the negativity of the subject and negativity precedes the truth – hence
negative dialectics. Negative dialectics shatters the equation that both Badiou
and Hegel (the former disapprovingly, the latter approvingly) accept: to think
together negativity and determination means to think determination as
self-determination.
Against Hegel, the thesis of negative dialectics must be explained by the way
it understands the connection between true determination and the negativity
of the subject. Against Badiou, however, Adorno’s thesis must be explained in
terms of why the negativity of the subject is necessary at all in order to think
true determination as the self-transcendence of the subject. First, a quick
discussion of the first explanation before I try to intensify the disagreement
between Adorno and Badiou in the next section. It concerns the unavoidability
of negativity for truth.
Hegel’s figure of self-determination requires that we think negativity and
determination ‘as one’, as two sides of self-determination. Adorno, on the other
hand, defines their connection ‘in the movement of thought’ in such a way that
‘the fixed, positive point, just like negation, is a moment’, but these two do not form
a ‘synthesis’.68 The moment of negation, therefore, consists in the cancellation of
the false, reified ‘positivity’ of the concept that seeks to identify the thing. But
this is possible for negation only because ‘there is perhaps a so-called positive
motive force of thought’.69 This ‘moment of positivity, which acts as a corollary to
negativity’ is not cancelled but revealed by the negativity of thought.70 Negative
dialectics is not the dissolution of the positive in negativity but the rescue of the
positive as a moment through the destructive power of negation that directs
itself against the violence ‘in the act of identification’.71
68 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965/1966,

trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 29, 27 (translation modified). Adorno calls
this ‘positive moment’ the moment of ‘naïveté’ in thinking (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 39). See
also the different interpretations by Alexander García Düttmann, So ist es. Ein philosophischer
Kommentar zu Adornos ‘Minima Moralia’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), and Martin Seel,
Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004).
69 Adorno, Lectures, 26.
Ibid.
70
71 Ibid., 30.
Intervention
This explanation of the way Adorno connects determination and negation
(like Hegel but in a very different way) already indicates how, in a second
step, negative dialectics tries to justify, in opposition to Badiou, why this
connection is necessary: why the indeterminateness of true determination
must be thought together with its determination by the negativity of the
subject. The reason for this lies in the fact that, according to Adorno, true
positivity cannot be rescued without the critical cancellation and even
destruction of false, reified positivity. The unavoidability of negativity is
based on the unavoidability of positivity: without the power of negativity,
there is no true determination, no affirmation; without negativity, there is
only reified positivity. This is how determinations exist by themselves. How we
are supposed to understand this argument of negative dialectics, in the end,
can be demonstrated by reference to the way Badiou thinks the connection
between the ‘event’ of affirmation and the ‘intervention’ of the subject.
This connection defines Badiou’s concept of historicity, which is in direct
opposition to negative dialectics.
(i) Badiou describes the emergence of affirmation (i.e. of true determination)
as an ‘event’. This account defines affirmation as something that happens
historically. At the same time, Badiou thinks the concept of historicity in such a
way that he describes it as a type of situation: the event of affirmation is possible
only in historical situations; or, to put it differently, a situation is (or becomes)
historical when the emergence of affirmation takes place in it. What makes a
situation historical arises from its difference from natural situations.
The difference between a historical and a natural situation lies in the way
the ‘operation’ that Badiou calls ‘presentation’ unfolds in them.72 Situations exist
only in their presentations. Presentation implies that something is counted as
one or forms a unity: it is ‘the “passage” to the set of subsets’.73 This operation
brings about the unity of the situation (or the situation as unity) and, at the same
time, fundamentally exceeds it: it goes beyond what is included in the situation
(namely, the subsets). The operation that produces the unity of a situation is ‘in
absolute excess of the situation itself ’.74 The production of unity is, therefore,
at the same time the production of an absolute difference. This difference is

73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
absolute since it is not the difference between one unity and another but the
difference of unity in and by itself.
At the same time, there are two fundamentally different ways in which
presentation unfolds in a situation. On the one hand, we have the natural
situation. Badiou defines it structurally as ‘self-homogeneous self-presentation’.75
This is also the definition of ‘normality’: nature means normality. What is normal
or natural is a presentation without excess: the natural situation is a situation
without (absolute) difference.76 In opposition to this, the historical situation is
‘the abnormal, the instable, the antinatural’: ‘It is rational to think the ab-normal
or the anti-natural, that is, history, as an omnipresence of singularity – just as we
have thought nature as an omnipresence of normality.’77 Singularity here refers
to those elements that ‘belong’ to a situation without being ‘included’ in it and,
therefore, are not moments of a unity or a totality.
This is why events are possible only in the abnormality of history. The
realization of this possibility is a leap carried out through an interpretative
‘intervention’. The intervention decides the undecidable, the belonging of the
event to the situation.78 This belonging is undecidable since there can be no
objective criteria for the difference between normality and abnormality (and,
therefore, no objective criteria for the difference of a situation from itself and
in itself). As the decision concerning the undecidable, the intervention is thus
subjective. The intervention is the act of the subject: it is the act through which it
makes itself into a subject and, at the same time, allows the event of affirmation
to emerge (or, to be more precise, allows the historical situation to emerge as the
possibility of the event). The intervention of the subject, therefore, shows itself in
its fidelity to the event of affirmation, whose possibility was brought into history
by the subject’s decision.
(ii) Thereby, we can raise the decisive question about Adorno and Badiou.
The question is: what is an intervention? What does the act of intervention
that constitutes the procedure of the subject consist of? We already know –
based on their definitions of the concepts of ‘rescue’ and ‘fidelity’ – that
Adorno and Badiou both understand the intervention through which the
75 Ibid., 128.
76 Shouldn’t we, then, conclude that the natural situation is the situation that misrepresents itself
(since the determination of the situation means that the presentation of the situation ‘overshoots’
the situation) and, therefore, the difference between the natural and the historical situation is never
symmetrical? In this case, the historical situation would not be a second type of situation next to the
natural situation but rather the situation of the situation.
Badiou, Being and Event, 174.
77
78 Ibid., 201.
subject constitutes itself as the subject’s self-transcendence in reference to

a true determination. Furthermore, we also know that the intervention of
the subject (through which it brings itself into being and transcends itself
towards a truth that it itself did not produce) requires that we distinguish two
fundamentally different situations: the natural-normal and the historical-
abnormal situations. The historicity of the situation in which the intervention
of the subject takes place is not given. The intervention of the subject must
first produce the situation in which it can take place. To be more precise, the
intervention of the subject must produce the situation as a historical one,
or it must produce the historicity of the situation. It must produce it as a
situation in which there are elements that are not included in the totality of
the situation and, therefore, can become events of affirmation or truth events.
How do we have to think the intervention of the subject if it is to be able to
accomplish this goal?
In Badiou’s account of the intervention of the subject, the subject
intervenes in situations that first appear to be ‘neutral’. Neutral (or apparently
neutral) situations are those in which ‘it is neither a question of life (nature)
nor of action (history)’.79 According to Badiou, then, the intervention of the
subject must be understood as an act of decision. But this decision is not
a choice among already given possibilities. The intervening decision of the
subject must always be a decision in favour of the historicity of the situation
and the event of truth. A decision against historicity is not an intervening
decision at all (but the resigned acknowledgment of the present impossibility
of a decision).
Adorno see this the same way – and he adds a decisive qualification to the
description of the situation that fundamentally changes our understanding of
the subjective intervention. It concerns the concept of neutrality. For Adorno,
there is no neutrality. The neutralization of the difference between the natural
and the historical is not itself neutral. Neutrality in relation to this difference
means nothing other than an avoidance of the difference of the historical from
the natural. Neutrality means second nature.80 In its primary form (i.e., by itself,
79 Ibid., 177.
80 In Negative Dialectics, we find the following: ‘The theory of second nature, to which Hegel already
gave a critical tinge, is not lost to a negative dialectics’ (38). For more about this question, see
Christoph Menke, ‘Hegel’s Theory of Second Nature: The “Lapse” of Spirit’, Symposium: Canadian
Journal of Continental Philosophy – Revue Canadienne de philosophie continentale, 17.1 (Spring/
Printemps 2013): 31–49. The theory of second nature assumes ‘the abrupt immediacy, the formations
which society and its evolution present to our thought’. The self-presentation of the social and
the historical proceeds as their self-cancellation. In Badiou’s vocabulary, the presentation of the
situation appears as non-presentation; it appears as identity. The absolute difference that, according
as it is given before and to thought), the situation is not neutral in relation to

the difference between the historical and the natural. In its primary form or by
itself, the situation is always already the scene of a totalization whose closure the
situation allows to appear as (or as if it were) natural: in the beginning we find
the false, quasi-natural, or second-nature-like totality (that Adorno analyses as
the totality of the concept, which in turn forms the model of the socially real
totalization of situations).
What is at stake in the intervention of the subject, therefore, is not the
decision that the situation is historical and not merely natural. Rather, in
a first step that precedes this decision, its task is to dissolve the appearance
of naturalness, the power of second nature, and, thereby, to initiate the time
of history.81 The intervention of the subject cannot be the decision about the
possibility of the event without turning itself against the inert and tenacious
power of false totalization in order to dissolve it. This is why Hegel’s definition of
thought as the ‘enormous power of the negative’ is so fundamental for Adorno’s
understanding of the intervention of the subject.82 The intervention of the
subject (made possible by the event of affirmation) begins with the ‘energy’ and
‘restlessness’ through which the natural totalization of the situation will be set in
motion and will be dissolved from within itself.83 This is the labor of the negative,
which can become effective only as a ‘moment’ in its interplay with the ‘positive
motive force of thought’ but cannot be deduced from it: it is an independent
force, and without its efficacy there is no truth event. This is the thesis against
Badiou: without preliminary negativity, there is no affirmation. There is no such
thing as an ‘affirmation without preliminary negation’.84
to Badiou, defines the concept of presentation can be laid bare through ‘analysis’ as ‘the immanent
difference between phenomena and that which they claim to be in themselves’. Adorno’s positive
definition of ‘analysis’ corresponds to the ‘praise of understanding’ (whose labor prepares the ‘birth
of the New’) in Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(New York: Verso, 2012), 273.
A strong counterclaim can be found in Being and Event (where Badiou distances himself from
81
his Theory of the Subject). Here, he argues that there is no ‘essential link between destruction
and novelty’ (407). This means primarily that novelty (i.e. affirmation) does not by itself require
destruction (or, to put it more emphatically, novelty does not mean destruction): ‘Killing somebody
is always a matter of the (ancient) state of things; it cannot be a prerequisite for novelty’ (408). The
fact that there is no ‘essential link between destruction and novelty’, however, also has a more
fundamental meaning for Badiou in the sense that novelty or affirmation does not presuppose
destruction: ‘Destruction is the ancient effect of the new supplementation amidst the ancient’ (407).
Destruction, therefore, comes after innovation, and innovation does not need any negative labor.
See also John Van Houdt, ‘The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou’, Continent, 1.4
(2011): 234–8. The crisis of negation is the crisis of the idea ‘that negation can be creative, create
something new’ (234).
Ibid., 157.
83

*
Badiou wants to think the subject (as the subject of radical change) without
the concept of freedom precisely because he wants to think the subject without
negativity. The subject is the subject of affirmation, and affirmation must be
thought as a ‘pure and simple encounter’.85 At the end of Being and Event, we
find Mallarmé’s line: ‘Nothingness gone, the castle of purity remains.’86 The
foundation for the avoidance of the concept of freedom in the definition of
the subject is Badiou’s theory of affirmation as the form of true determination.
The argument is the following: if the true form of determination is affirmation
without preliminary negation, and if the subject is the procedure of affirmation,
then we do not need the concept of freedom to think the subject.
The presupposition of this argument is that freedom and negativity belong
together – they explain each other reciprocally. This is the basic assumption
of modern philosophy that Badiou also shares. This is why he strikes out
both concepts with one stroke from his theory of affirmation and his theory
of the subject. To think determination as affirmation and to think freedom
as negativity are mutually exclusive.87 This thesis can invoke Hegel’s theory
of determination: Hegel thinks true determination (in opposition to mere
‘determinacy’) as self-determination because it is not the abstract other in
relation to the negativity of subject and, this way, the subject remains ‘with
itself ’ as negative in its determination (or, because determination as self-
determination is a negation of negation, the passage over into determination
that sublates negation). Hegel understands the determination that arises from
the subject’s negativity as its self-determination. This is the very same idea that,
in a negative form, underlies Badiou’s eradication of negativity from affirmation
and his avoidance of the concept of freedom. The basic premise of Badiou’s anti-
Hegelian theory of affirmation is Hegelian.
Hence the objection against Badiou that we can raise from the perspective of
Adorno’s negative dialectics: Badiou is too Hegelian because he does not see the
gap that opens up between negation and determination when we try to think
them in their indissoluble correlation as ‘moments’. This gap is the focus of
Adorno’s attention: this is the reason why (unlike Badiou) he thinks together the
truth of determination and the negativity of the subject as independent or, even,
85 Ibid.
87 This is where Frank Ruda’s radical program intervenes to think the freedom of affirmation and
freedom as affirmation (in order to release it from its conceptual entanglement with negativity). See
Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2016).
in relation to each other autonomous moments (unlike Hegel). The justification

for this position is that this is the only way we can think the intervention of
the subject that opens up the event of truth. This intervention is essentially
polemical. It does not simply define the intervention of the subject in such a
way that it must make a decision in a neutral (neither unequivocally natural
nor unequivocally historical) situation, but rather in such a way that the subject
must direct itself against the dissimulation of the possibility of the decision
(dissimulation in the form of the naturalization of history as second nature).
This is why the intervention of the subject presupposes the force of negativity.
The objection against Badiou raised by Adorno’s negative dialectics argues that
one can accomplish the goal to think together affirmation and subjectivity only
if one also thinks together affirmation and negativity.
10
Badiou and Adorno on Philosophy and Music

Jelica Sumic
Philosophy and its time
At first blush, Badiou and Adorno seem to make an unlikely couple. What,
indeed, could there be in common between a militant philosopher of events
and eternal truths and a thinker who could only find hope and resistance in
melancholy, a philosopher, moreover, who was obsessively concerned with the
‘saving of thought’s honour’, to borrow Lyotard’s term? In what does this saving of
thought’s honour consist? And how does the saving of thought’s honour connect
with what it means to think and to resist? Adorno’s solution consists in assigning
to thought the task of bearing witness to that which resists. Thought, according
to Adorno, cannot exist without the unthought, without the something other
than thought that thought plunges into. What is noteworthy about Adorno’s
idea of thought yielding to the unthought is that thought aiming at that which
disrupts it exhibits and enacts the very rupture in question.
According to this view, the resistance of the unthought, ultimately, of the
somatic, results in a set of fractures in thought’s conceptual edifice that denounces
all pretensions to totality and thus reveals the irreducible remnant of non-identity
within every claim to identity. And it is in the inevitable non-identity between
thought and that which it thinks, in the awareness of the irreducible gap, that
Adorno grounds negative dialectics. Essentially, with negative dialectics, this
being Adorno’s proposal for a new direction for philosophy after Auschwitz,
we are dealing with a paradoxical attempt at reconciling thought, inevitably
conceptual in form, with the recognition that heterogeneity of the non-identical
cannot be conceptually grasped. The task of bearing witness to that which resists
thus poses an almost insurmountable obstacle for thought, as it is in the nature
of thought, as Adorno himself claims, to do violence to that which is other than

thought.
Although Adorno and Badiou are hardly kindred spirits – indeed, by situating
the site of resistance in the somatic rather than in the conceptual, Adorno is
closer to Lyotard and Deleuze than to Badiou – nevertheless, they have more
in common than one might expect. Hence, the question that I wish to address
here in relation to Adorno’s and Badiou’s work is the extent to which both in
their different ways attempt an exploration of the possibility of philosophy in
today’s world. What is at stake here is nothing less than the question of knowing
if it is possible to mobilize philosophy in the task of changing the world we
live in. However, in examining the possibility of philosophy in today’s world,
Adorno and Badiou adopt two incompatible positions regarding the destiny of
philosophy today.
According to Adorno: ‘Philosophy . . . lives on because the moment to realize
it was missed.’1 Although it seems that philosophy, by missing the moment of
its realization, outlives its proper raison d’ être – in a sense, it is still alive simply
because it has ‘forgotten to die’ – there is, according to Adorno, a way in which
philosophy, despite this unrealized opportunity, ‘can be responsibly practiced’.
At the end of Minima Moralia, Adorno links this survival of philosophy to its
ability to ‘contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the
standpoint of redemption’.2
What is remarkable about these two formulations: ‘Philosophy lives on
because the moment to realize it was missed’ and the survival of philosophy
depends on its ability ‘to contemplate all things as they would present themselves
from the standpoint of redemption’ is the way they bring together the redemptive
function of philosophy and its survival. The point made by Adorno is to not
merely acknowledge that philosophy has failed to realize itself this time. The
point is rather that, due to its failure, philosophy seems to have also ruined the
possibility of the world’s redemption. Yet, far from denying the irreparability of
the missed opportunity, Adorno paradoxically insists that philosophy’s survival
depends on it. A peculiar survival to be sure, as it entails that no second chance
for redemption will present itself.
But, there is another reading of the task that Adorno assigns to philosophy
in the contemporary world. According to this reading, by missing the moment
1 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), xi–xii.

2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London: Verso, 1978), 247.
Badiou and Adorno on Philosophy and Music 173
of its realization, philosophy seems to be returning to the point of departure,

as it were: to be once more nothing but the interpretation of the world. But in
assuming its traditional role, philosophy nevertheless succeeds to embody a
point of excentricity or extimacy within the world, which allows it, by reopening
a gap between the world as it is and the ‘saved’ world, to maintain a critical
distance vis-à-vis the world.
What constitutes the task of thought, according to Adorno, is nothing less
than to create perspectives that would ‘displace and estrange the world’ in order
to ‘reveal it to be, with rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will
appear one day in the messianic light’. At the same time, this task is ‘also the
utterly impossible thing’, as Adorno himself admits, because it presupposes a
standpoint removed from ‘what is’. But thought must at least understand ‘its own
impossibility . . . for the sake of the possible’.3
Paradoxically, the restoration of the possible, in which redemption in our
time should consist, is given, if we follow Adorno, only as an always-already
missed opportunity. According to Adorno, it is the ‘despair of the world’ that,
paradoxically, ‘guarantees to us that the hopelessly missed things exist’.4 This
is why the task set for thought is nothing less than to restore the possibility
that dwells within these ‘hopelessly missed things’. This can only be achieved
by turning our attention not to things as we find them solidified in concepts
but rather to things as they are in their ‘becoming’. Thus, to see things in their
becoming or, to use Adorno’s proper formulation, to read things ‘as a text of their
becoming’,5 it is to glimpse what he calls ‘the possibility of which their reality has
cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one’.6
Such a perspective can only be achieved if our thinking ‘while doing violence
to the objects of its synthesis’, says Adorno, ‘heeds the potential that waits in
the object, and it unconsciously obeys the idea of making amends for what
it has done’.7 On this reading, the capacity of thought to bear witness to ‘a
potential that waits in the object’ would reside in the very splitting of thought
between victimization and testimony to the inflicted wrong. Thought is unable
to make ‘amends for what it has done’ to that which tries forever to evade it –
the unthought, the ungraspable – unless thought turns against itself. Hence, if
the task of thought appears to be almost impossible, this is because it requires
3 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 52.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 19.
nothing less than ‘thought thinking against itself ’.8 Only by turning against itself
can thought become the resistant thought. Only then can thought assume the
task assigned to it: to bear witness to resistance already operating in the world,
and, at the same time, to augment this resistance with a resistance of its own.
For Adorno, this resistance proper to thought consists essentially in its refusal to
give in. In making it impossible for ‘a desperate consciousness to deposit despair
as absolute’.9
Hence, rather than criticize the impotence of thought confronted with the
unthought, Adorno pleads for a passivity in the face of the disparate, of that
namely which always and inevitably escapes thought: he calls for a thought that
thinks against itself, that knows of its own inevitable limitation and refuses
to go beyond it. It is precisely to the extent that the primacy of the object
inevitably entails thought’s passivity that we could argue that the capacity
of thought to bear witness to ‘a potential that waits in the object’ depends
ultimately upon thought adopting an attitude that could be characterized as
passivity without anxiety. Thus if the becoming of things, as Adorno sees it,
is, strictly speaking, given only in retrospect, through cracks and fissures in
their appearance, it is no doubt a fantasy, a utopia, says Adorno. Nevertheless,
this utopia yields hope. This is all the more paradoxical since it is grounded
in a fantasy: staging not what a thing could have become but rather what it
has failed to become.
Adorno’s peculiar articulation of melancholy, resistance and hope, as many
commentators have noted, seems to only lead to a hopeless ‘negativism’. To
flesh out the roots of this ‘negativism’, Adorno’s critics focus on negative
dialectics. Considered as an erratic use of determinate negation, emancipated
from Hegelian dialectics, negative dialectics, for Adorno’s critics, is simply not
dialectical enough. It then comes as no surprise that for someone like Robert
Pippin, Adornian negative dialectics is not dialectics, but a philosophy of finitude.
This also explains why, in this reading, Adorno’s non-identical is identified with
Kant’s Thing-in-itself. The reference to Kant is revealing because it draws a
parallel between negative dialectics and Kant’s transcendental dialectics, since
the latter also questions the notion of totality resulting from the transcendental
use of reason’s ideas.
Important in this respect is a short but rewarding passage in Badiou’s Five
Lessons on Wagner, wherein Badiou positions himself in relation to Adorno
8 Ibid., 141.
9 Ibid., 404.
on the specific issue of negative dialectics. His comments reveal a profound

scepticism about thought’s self-limitation. Thus Adorno’s negative dialectics
and Kant’s transcendental dialectics may differ in their details, but they share, in
Badiou’s estimation, a decisive failing which he labels a ‘pathetics’. On Badiou’s
reading, the Kantian moment that Adorno takes up and develops further is ‘the
conviction that philosophical thought must be concerned with the question of
its own limits’. And, indeed, for a philosophy of non-identity, a ‘thought of what
is different from itself ’, this requires the internalization of ‘its own limits’. In
more general terms,
what Adorno preserves from Kant is the irreducibility of experience, the fact that
it is impossible to dissolve the experience in the pure activity of the concept.
An utterly irreducible element of passive limitation remains – just as in Kant,
passivity, which is the practice of the sensible, is irreducible . . . In short,
there is a non-constructed element in the construction: receptivity. This very
fundamental idea of receptivity – the notion that, since it is impossible to remain
within the pure constructive movement of the concept, there is consequently
not just a dialectics but a ‘pathetics’, or a fundamental receptivity – is precisely
what Adorno retains.10
It is not for nothing that Badiou detects a philosophy of finitude in Adorno’s

negative dialectics. This is so because Badiou sets out from an alternative
vision of philosophy’s task, categorically different from Adorno’s and provides
a definition of philosophy’s task that consists in the recognition of a time-
breaking novelty causing a radical reorientation of thinking and existence.
Thus, with Badiou, we have rather a different emphasis on the current time
and therefore a different solution for philosophy. And, indeed, there is perhaps
no better example of a desire for the continuation of philosophy than Badiou’s
audacious repetition of a Platonic gesture, a master’s gesture if ever there was
one, that, while redrawing the limits of its pertinence, succeeds nonetheless
in establishing philosophy as a genuine place of and for a thought that strives
to transform the world by thinking about the time-breaking novelties, ‘eternal
truths’, as he calls them. For Badiou, the task proper to philosophy, as it turns
to its time, consists namely in marking the discontinuity of time by wrenching
something eternal from the present moment. Only in this way, that is, by going
against the grain of the times in order to rescue the moment of eternity in it, can
10 Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Suzan Spitzer (London: Verso, 2010), 48.
philosophy, insofar as it is considered as a form of resistance to the present, to

borrow Foucault’s term, ‘“heroize” the present’.
To think its time means, for Badiou, that philosophy has to detect points of
interruption which mark a break with the previous paradigm of thinking, and,
as a consequence, inaugurate a new time, and start a new counting of time. More
specifically, philosophy could be designed as an attempt to isolate, to extract the
real of its own time or, to paraphrase Badiou, literally ‘wrench time from time’,11
in order to reveal those unheard of possibilities of which time, because of the
constraints of reality, did not know that it was capable, to identify those points at
which the impossibility of a given time turns unto a possibility of some unheard
of novelty, allowing for a definitely new beginning.
Philosophy, on this view, is a paradoxical turning towards its time, a turning
which involves a curious torsion of the thought of time onto itself. We can find
the most concise formulation of this torsion, this turning of time onto itself, this
return of time to itself, precisely in the book consecrated to reflection on the
twentieth century:
For us philosophers, the question is not what took place in the century, but
what was thought in it . . . What was thought in the century that was previously
unthought – or even unthinkable? . . . to be more precise, how the century
thought its own thought, how it identified the thinking singularity of the relation
it entertained with the historicity of its own thought?12
Taking up Hegel’s metaphor of Minerva’s owl that takes flight only at nightfall, in
short, when all is said and done, Badiou claims that philosophy as such always
comes after the fact. Indeed, by coming ‘after’, philosophy is constitutively
anachronistic in its own time. This may explain why, for Badiou, the principal
task of philosophy is to draw up a balance sheet of its own time.
But what becomes of philosophy as conditioned by its conditions in worldless
times? How can philosophy continue to operate in accordance with the task it
has set for itself, without the possible overstepping of the limits imposed on
it? No doubt, there is no problem in ‘heroizing’ the present when something
radically new takes place. It is, however, more difficult to extract something
‘eternal’ from worldless times.
Generally, philosophy is supposed to come ‘after’ its conditions. Yet this usual
task of philosophy seems to be particularly difficult to accomplish in periods in
11 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 21.
12 Ibid., 3.
which nothing appears to be happening, in times in which no truth procedures

seem to be active, in short, in ‘eventless times’. In such times, ‘short of events’,
philosophy has to adopt a different stance towards its time. In the times, when
no new truth seems to be emerging, philosophy has to make a wager à la Pascal,
namely that contemporary philosophy is ‘capable of enveloping today’s actions
and drawing strength, tomorrow, from what these actions will produce’.13
Paradoxically, it is precisely because the duty of philosophy is to think at ‘the
breach in time’,14 in worldless times, when such a ‘breach in time’, a bifurcation
of time, or the co-existence of two, heterogeneous times, historical time and
evental time or the time of truths, is obliterated, practically invisible, to the point
that the inhabitants of such a world are unable to even conceive of the possibility
of another world, the role and the importance of philosophy seems to increase.
The difficulty that philosophy faces today is that, precisely as the owl of
Minerva, that is to say, coming ‘after’ the event, it must prove that it can also be
truly contemporary to its time. That is to say, capable of taking part, participating,
together with ‘its’ conditions, in bringing new truths to life. Philosophy presents
itself today as a paradoxical articulation or knotting of a balance sheet of the past
and a manifesto enveloping the precarious present of the emerging novelties in a
fiction of the future of this nascent present. Just like avant-garde’s proclamations,
philosophy, today, must provide formulas to ‘invent a future for the present’ of
truths, without being ‘certain whether the thing itself is already present’.15
In an interview with Le Magazine Littéraire, following the publication
of his book, which was, as its very title signals, The Century, conceived as
a philosophical balance sheet of the past century, Badiou introduces a new
definition of philosophy’s task in a striking and at the same time enigmatic
fashion, by stating that, by definition, philosophy comes ‘after’, after the fact,
yet despite or more properly because of this, as philosophers we also have ‘the
possibility to come before, if we assume that, by means of the categories that
we forge, something of that of which we have been belated contemporaries, is
gathered together, brought back to life’.16
By being intrinsically late, by coming ‘after’, that is, once the event that has
inaugurated a truth procedure has already disappeared, i.e. by situating itself
in this delay, lagging behind, philosophy is capable of wrenching, extracting
13 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New York:
Continuum, 2006), 7.
14 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1999), 38.
15 Badiou, The Century, 138–9.
16 ‘Alain Badiou, Un philosophe dans le siècle’, Le Magazine littéraire, 438 (January 2005): 96.
from its own time something more in the times than time itself, the instant of
‘eternity’ as the objet a, a bit of the real that remains irreducible to chronological
time. Yet the price to be paid by philosophy, insofar as it is true to its task – to
identify the real of its own time, is that its own gesture is displaced, excentric,
ultimately anachronistic, in relation to its time. But it is precisely on the basis of
its excentricity, I would argue, that the philosophical gesture of ‘seizing truths’ is
a paradoxical ‘after’ that is at the same time ‘before’.
However, in intervallic times, that is, periods in which nothing new (seems to)
take(s) place, philosophy, in particular one which defines itself as a philosophy of
the event, that is a philosophy which, because it cannot directly create novelty, or
force the events, but can only record its traces in thought; philosophy which is,
ultimately, under the condition of its conditions, seems to lose its reason d’ être.
What, in fact, could be the task of a philosophy which is ‘under the condition of
its conditions’, if these conditions seem to be unable to produce something new?
How, indeed, can philosophy be of help to its conditions?
If philosophy is not ‘eternally condemned’ to ‘come after’, that is, to make a
balance sheet of its time, but is also required to be contemporary with its time, this
requirement coming from a thinker committed to a philosophy ‘under conditions’,
cannot but come as a surprise. Does it mean that philosophy should be descending
in the playground previously assigned to its ‘conditions’ in order to prove that it is
indeed capable of being contemporary with its time, that it can actively contribute
to the creation of the present, this being the only time of truths?
Philosophy and music
It is precisely from the perspective of this curious torsion of time, that is,
when the conditioned, philosophy, seems to be intervening in its conditions,
that this paper will examine the relationship between philosophy and one of
its conditions, art, and more specifically, music, in order to shed some light on
Adorno’s and Badiou’s respective positions on the entanglement of temporality
and transformation.
The question of art is at the forefront of Adorno’s philosophy. However, to
grasp the full significance of Adorno’s stance on art, it is necessary to assess his
more general comments on the relationship between philosophy and art. In
broad terms, art presents a challenge to philosophy insofar as it appeals to truth
while being unable to fully express it. But the radical question about art in which
Adorno is interested is centred on its transformative power. Given the apparent
hopelessness of the present situation, due to the lack of the expected radical
social and political transformation, the possibility of the hoped-for change,
according to Adorno, should rather be considered from the vantage point of
the promises of a new order brought into existence by the most innovative
contemporary artistic creations. Thus, despite his unrelenting pessimism that
predominantly informs his implacable critique of modernity in general and the
actuality of the dystopian reality, Adorno did not renounce the possibility that
it could be otherwise, searching for this ‘otherwise’ in art, particularly music.
Crucially, he conceives of art’s role – music especially – in terms of a utopian
promise. This is questionable for a variety of reasons, but the defensible part of
the argument is apparent in Adorno’s insistence that the function of utopia is to
be understood as a critique of what is present.
As Adorno notes, ‘an “it shall be different”’, the possibility of something
different that art signifies, is ‘hidden in even the most sublimated work of
art’.17 But for art to be able to express its opposition and make its resistance
understood, it ‘requires thought and therefore stands in need of philosophy,
which is nothing but the thought that refuses all restrictions’.18 From a rigorously
Adornian perspective, the need of artworks for the philosophical interpretation
is itself grounded in ‘their need for the production of their truth content’, but this
necessity of interpretation is at the same time ‘the stigma of their constitutive
insufficiency’.19
Art and philosophy thus share the same responsibility as each turns to the
other in order to realize its potential for truth. In this respect, as Adorno never
tires to repeat, ‘there is no artwork that does not participate in the untruth
external to it, that of the historical moment’.20 In view of this untruth that
tarnishes art’s utopian promise and unrelenting yearning for happiness, artworks
inevitably fail in their striving to present something different than reified reality.
The utopian moment that every artwork, according to Adorno, generates and
shelters, is therefore not to be seen in ‘the longing for the new’, for such a longing
for the new itself, says Adorno, would remain ‘the negation of what exists’ while
being ‘obedient to it’.21 On the contrary, for an artwork to be truly utopian, it must
be capable of stopping time. It is, indeed, as ‘a cessation, a suspended moment
17 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’. In Notes on Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 92.
18 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund
Jepphcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 262.
19 Ibid., 128.
Ibid., 347.
20
21 Ibid., 32.
of the process’,22 that an artwork interrupts the dystopian progress of time and
in so doing it allows access to another time, a time that, strictly speaking, does
not (yet) exist, the time of its utopian promise. Only in this sense can then be
argued that art, as ‘a promise of happiness’, ‘embodies something like freedom in
the midst of unfreedom’.23
It goes without saying that this task applies to music as well. As Adorno
succinctly puts it, ‘the promise contained in the age-old protest of music [is]
the promise of a life without fear’.24 In giving music a pride place in his writing
on the transformative power of art, Adorno emphasizes criticism as being
‘immanent to music itself ’, because the power of music points to something
beyond itself. Indeed, music criticism is ‘required by music’s own formal law: the
historic development (Entfaltung) of works and of their truth content occurs in
the critical medium’.25 It is because of its capacity to refashion what is into what
might be that what Adorno calls ‘music’s own formal law’ can be considered as
incarnating the utopian moment in music. Addressing what he regards as the
music’s critical utopianism, more precisely, its quest for lost difference, while
following precisely that logic from which difference is expelled, Adorno insists
that insofar as music keeps ‘reopening the wound, instead of affirming the world
as it exists’, its goal ‘must be the complete liberation of the human subject’.26 Here,
music inevitably encounters philosophy, that philosophy namely upon which it
is incumbent – ‘after having missed its opportunity’ – ‘to provide a refuge for
freedom’.27
There is, then, a curious proximity, a familiarity even, between music and
philosophy. Indeed, philosophy, in its suspended state and aiming at ‘the
expression of the inexpressible’, is ‘a true sister of music’.28 How are we to
understand this sorority of philosophy and music? Following Benjamin, Adorno
points to something which is crucial for philosophy and music, namely, the
power of nomination:
As language, music tends toward pure naming, the absolute unity of object and
sign, which in its immediacy is lost to all human knowledge. In the utopian
22 Ibid., 6.
23 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 248.
24 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livnigstone (London: Verso, 1981), 145.
25 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
26 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Classicism, Romanticism, New Music’. In Sound Figures, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 120–21.
27 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy’. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans.
Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 14, 10.
and at the same time hopeless attempts at naming is located music’s relation to
philosophy, to which, for this very reason, it is incomparably closer, in its idea,
than any other art. But the name appears in music only as pure sound, divorced
from its bearer, and hence the opposite of every act of meaning, every intention
toward meaning.29
Precisely because music, as Adorno claims, ‘can only express what is proper to
itself ’, it is only ‘in mediated form, that is, as philosophy’,30 that music offers
greater resistance to interpretation than other art.31 So, what Adorno calls its
immanent movement, music’s lack of objectivity and unambiguous reference
make it freer than other art, because it is less compelled to reproducing existing
reality and is therefore able to take on a critical role in keeping alive an awareness
of how things could be transformed. This allows Adorno to claim that the strict
concept of art can only be derived from music.
For Adorno, music’s idea is ‘the form of the name of God. It is demythologized
prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt,
futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings.’32 Music
is the idea of naming in so far as it is intentionless, non-representational. In
being a non-representational mode of presentation, music serves as a paradigm
for philosophy, an example to follow. However, if philosophy is truly the sibling
of music, as Adorno maintains, this is not only because his idea of music is
informed by modern music, specifically by the ‘Second Viennese School’, but also
because he thinks philosophy with music’s idea in mind. It is no exaggeration
to say that Adorno’s negative dialectics, a proper philosophy of dissonance, is
almost exclusively shaped by his experience of contemporary music. Taking cue
from contemporary music Adorno claims that ‘the task of art today is to bring
chaos into order’.33 To introduce chaos into the existing order in the name of a
different, utopian ‘order’, is precisely the task that allows Adorno to compare
philosophy to music.
In emphasizing the transformative power of art he insists at the same time
on the transformation of this transformative power. His comments on Wagner’s
relevance for today are particularly instructive:
29 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Music and Philosophy’. In Essays on
Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2002), 140.
30 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund
Jepphcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10.
31 Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Music and Philosophy’, 143.
Adorno, ‘Music, Language and Composition’, 114.
32
33 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 222.

As spiritual entities, works of art are not complete in themselves. They create
a magnetic field of all possible intentions and forces, of inner tendencies and
countervailing ones, of successful and necessarily unsuccessful elements.
Objectively, new layers are constantly detaching themselves, emerging from
within; others grow irrelevant and die off. One relates to a work of art not merely,
as is often said, by adapting it to fit a new situation, but rather by deciphering
within it things to which one has a historically different reaction.34
If even Wagner can become new in a new time, this is because, as Adorno
acknowledges, ‘the binding, truly general character of musical works of art is to
be found, if at all, only through the medium of their particularity and concretion,
and not by recourse to any kind of general types’.35 Adorno can therefore locate
Wagner’s musical power in the fact that there is nothing general there, except
the extreme particularity. Thus, one of music’s indispensable tasks lies in ‘the
overcoming of the temporal dimension through articulation’.36 Paradoxically,
art is successful in performing this task only by deploying its trace through
embodied beings in time and space:
Since truth of musical works themselves unfolds in time, it is no metaphorical

exaggeration . . . when one states that Beethoven, for example, is revealed much
more readily when one starts from what confronts us today, as the construction
of an antagonistic totality, and ultimately its suspension, than if one were to
confine oneself to the historical preconditions and immediate intension from
which this work once originated.37
In view of this, one can better understand Adorno’s fine irony implied in the
title of one of his famous essays: ‘Schoenberg and Progress’. While Adorno
clearly acknowledges the expressionistic period of ‘heroic’ free atonal works
by Schoenberg, he is one of the first commentators to note the self-defeating
tendency within the dodecaphonic compositional approach. According to
Adorno, the integral serialism which evolves from free tonality, instead of
increasing freedom leads to its abolition. This is why Adorno claims that
‘twelve-tone technique approaches the ideal of mastery as domination, whose
boundlessness consists in the exclusion of whatever is heteronomous, of
whatever is not integrated into the continuum of this technique’.38 Paradoxically,
34 Adorno, ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, 586.

35 Ibid., 588.
36 Ibid., 639.
37 Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Music and Philosophy’, 147.
38 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schoenberg and Progress’. In Philosophy of New Music, trans. and ed. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 53.
the effect of this ‘mastery’ is not the liberation supposedly ensured by the break
with tonality and seen as ‘emancipation of the dissonance’. On the contrary, in
striving for ultimate mastery, serial composers are either unable or renounce to
create the form which would shape the musical material, as a result ‘material
and composition remain alien, opposed to each other’,39 thus rendering the
music completely alienated and inaudible: ‘Today the alienation inherent in the
consistency of artistic techniques itself forms the content of the artwork.’40
It is here, though, that the decisive questionable assumption in Adorno’s
linking of philosophy to music can be located. For Adorno, if music provides
important insights into the development of modern society, this is because the
evolution of music itself depends on the given social-historical constellation.
Thus, by being inseparably linked to the social and politics crisis of modern
society, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique of composition exemplifies, for
Adorno, a crisis in modern music rather than the progressive method on which
the future of music could be constructed. And conversely, as he suggests in
his celebrated essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in which he outlines ‘une
musique informelle’, new music that would be capable of avoiding the impasses
of serialism by taking up ‘the challenge posed by the idea of an revised,
unrestricted freedom’41 in order to resolve ‘the dilemma of how to reconcile
temporal form and musical content’.42 Rejecting both extremes: ‘faith in the
material’ and ‘absolute organization’, the future musique informelle will strive to
transform the deformation of rationalism that reigns in serial music into a true
rationality through the self-critical intensification of the control over material.
The aim would then be ‘music in which the ear can hear live from the material
what has become of it’.43 The idea behind Adorno’s proposition of a future music,
musique informelle, is essentially Kantian. As Adorno himself suggests, musique
informelle could be understood as an idea of reason in the sense that it is a
concrete, which is to say, realizable possibility, while remaining an idea. As such,
musique informelle is in the service of ‘free humanity’. Thus, to follow Adorno,
‘only what is fully articulated in art provides the image of an undeformed and
hence free humanity’.44 But this goal can be attained only by ‘a music which is
39 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’. In Quasi una fantasia, 285.

40 Adorno, ‘Schoenberg in Progress’, 101.
41 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 275.
42 Ibid., 297.
43 Ibid., 319.
44 Ibid.
in control of itself ’ and which would therefore be ‘in control of its own freedom
from every compulsion, even its own’.45
For Badiou, by contrast, ‘only the serial sequence opened by the Schoenberg-
event pronounces the truth of the post-Wagnerian musical world’.46 More
specifically, if the Schoenberg-event, ‘by affirming the possibility of a sonic world
no longer ruled by the tonal system’,47 marks a break in the history of music, this
is because it opened a new music-world to be populated by a virtual infinity
of works resulting from ‘the systematic exploration, within the sonic universe’
of the intrinsically infinite possibilities initiated by the Schoenbergian event.
For such a world to be identifiable, it is necessary to extract from the artworks
belonging to this world the prescription that presides over their production, and
whose formulation Badiou reconstructs as follows: ‘An organization of sound
may exist which is capable of defining a musical universe on a basis which is
entirely subtracted from classical tonality.’48 However, if serialism or, more
exactly, ‘the serial organization which refers the notes back to their internal
organization alone’,49 treating the twelve tones of the chromatic scale no longer
according to the laws of harmony, but equally, has eventually reached a point
of its saturation, this is not because it failed, Badiou argues, it is because ‘its
“corporeal” capacities, those that could inscribe themselves in the dimension
of the work, were increasingly restricted’, leading to the splitting of ‘the musical
body “serialism” . . . between pure written form and auditory sensation’.50 Adorno
and Badiou may well detect the same internal antinomy in new music, yet they
treat it in a radically different manner. It might also be said that although Adorno
and Badiou both connect art and music in particular to their conceptions of
philosophy, there is a crucial difference in their handling of truths that art is
capable of engendering.
In comparison to Adorno’s statement on the relationship between philosophy
and music in terms of sorority, Badiou considers the relation between art and
philosophy ‘hierarchically’, that is, in terms of the relationship between the
conditioned and the condition. Badiou is emphatic that ‘art itself is a truth
procedure’51 as it produces truths of its own that philosophy ‘welcomes and
45 Ibid., 318–19.
47 Ibid., 80.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 81.
51 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), 9.
shelters’52 by describing ‘the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by

the independent existence of some works of art’.53 Badiou takes his most anti-
Adornian turn in the following passage with his consideration of the relation
between philosophy and art claiming that ‘art – as the configuration “in truth” of
works – is in each and every one of its points the thinking of the thought that it
itself is’.54 Badiou insists that truth is as such immanent to art, signifying in this
way a radical break with a position of aesthetics, Adorno’s including, a position
that transforms art into an object in order to extract the truths that art is capable
of producing. But if art deserves moreover to be counted as one of philosophy’s
conditions, this is because, in dealing with the sensible via the formalization of
the seemingly formless, the specific status of art as a truth procedure consists
in exemplifying for philosophy the problematic relationship between the finite
(the artwork being a finite objectivity in space and time) and the infinite nature
of truth (this being a generic multiple initiated by an eventual rupture). Or,
more to the point, what singularizes art and its truths can be seen in an intricate
relationship between the sensible and the formal as can be revealed through
always particular possibilities of formalization.
Concerning music, by contrast, music may well be recognized as thought
capable of generating new truths, nevertheless it does not constitute a condition
for Badiou’s philosophy. Thus, unlike Adorno’s philosophy that has deployed
itself under the condition of the ‘Schoenberg event’, more specifically, under
the condition of the ‘Second Viennese School’, Badiou’s philosophy was not
particularly marked either by that or any other musical event. Not only does
the Schoenberg event fall under a peculiar category of ‘a non-conditioning
event’, to borrow François Nicolas’s felicitous term,55 moreover, in Badiou’s book
consecrated to the twentieth century’s new truths generated by time-breaking
events music is singularly absent. Hence, the century particularly reach in
events, appears to be musically mute, indeed, ‘a century “without music” ’.56
On the other hand, however, Wagner’s music, although it is situated prior
to a musical event ‘Schoenberg’, without explicitly being assigned the status
of a musical event, appears to have strongly affected Badiou’s thought. What,
then, are we to make of Badiou’s recent incursion into music, if this implies that
the Schoenberg event is overshadowed by the prior Wagner-event? Thus, even
52 Ibid., 63.
53 Ibid., xiv.
54 Ibid., 13–14.
55 François Nicolas, ‘Schoenberg’. In The Badiou Dictionary, ed. Steven Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
56 Ibid., 307.
though the Schoenberg-event is given a pride place in Badiou’s Logics of Words, it

is obvious that the name Schoenberg is simply used to exemplify, in the world of
music, the problematic articulation of the infinite truth and the finite body of the
artwork. The fact that this particular production of a generic truth in the world
of music is treated in Badiou’s philosophy as an example, this clearly signals,
as Nicolas rightly points out, that, as far as Badiou’s philosophy is concerned,
there is nothing necessary nor compelling about the Schoenberg-event. Because
it is contingently linked to Badiou’s philosophy, it can be replaced by another
example. It is in view of this externality of the Schoenberg-event with respect
to Badiou’s philosophy that the key to understanding Badiou’s philosophical
relation to music is to be found in the way in which Badiou’s philosophy relates
to Wagner.
This may account for the somewhat awkward place Five Lessons on Wagner,
this being a rare incursion into music, holds in Badiou’s oeuvre. This insituability
of Wagner, however, will be taken as an opportunity to ask how does Badiou’s
analysis of Wagner relate to his broader philosophical project? In particular, this
essay will focus on the status of music in view of its possible transformation
into a full-fledged condition for his philosophy. Badiou’s starting point could
be summarized as follows: what musical innovation did create Wagner that
this novelty succeeded in making a claim on philosophy? In his meticulous and
comprehensive rehearsal of the anti-Wagner case, Badiou does not so much try
to refute anti-Wagner arguments as to open access to a ‘new Wagner’, conceived
as a creative project that still holds promises for the future.
Taking up Lacoue-Labarthe’s critical account of the Gesamtkunstwerk,
considered to be the key for teasing out the implications of this notion for the
relationship between art and politics in Wagner’s music drama, Badiou relegates
the Gesamtkunstwerk to ideology in order to shed some light on Wagner’s music
dramas considered as a stage on which ‘music of the future’57 and a different
conception of politics is played out.
Thus instead of focusing on an ideological pseudoproblem of the
Gesamtkunstwerk, we should venture instead into ‘Wagnerian fragmentation’
and localization ‘at the point where continuity and dissonance, the local and
the global confront each other both musically and dramatically’.58 More to
the point, it is only by divorcing Wagnerian music dramas from the notion of
totality inherent to the Gesamtkunstwerk, that the singular Wagnerian dialectical
57 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 32.

58 Ibid., 84.
tension between music and drama can be brought to light and in so doing it
will be possible to demonstrate that music, far from being in the service of a
preconceived totality, stands as the very medium in which dramatic possibilities
are created that engender unforeseeable transformations.
When turning to Adorno, one comes across the symptomatic absence
of Adorno’s pivotal text In Search of Wagner and his later, yet crucial text on
‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’. Instead, provocatively, yet ingeniously Badiou
takes as Adorno’s text of reference Negative Dialectics, in order to find clues
in it for Adorno’s criticism of Wagner, but also some indications concerning a
positive alternative to Wagner, ‘musique informelle’, as Adorno terms it, which
is, strictly speaking, non-existent, still to come, yet capable of functioning as
a condition for Adorno’s negative dialectics. Badiou’s principle target in his
reading is Adorno’s critique of ‘the identity principle’ and his insistence on the
moments of heterogeneity, difference and non-identity, precisely to the extent
as such moments of the unthought that resist the conceptual capture, prevent
any attempt at a reaching unity or a resolutive closure. In this critique of unity,
Adorno is by no means lonely. In fact:
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe all agree in viewing Wagner

as someone who forces musical unity upon a variegated mass, upon difference
whose essential character of otherness disappears or dissolves as a result . . .
Unity in Wagner’s music is ultimately in the service of a vision . . . of the nation
in general and of the German nation in particular.59
In spite of the obvious divergence between Adorno and Badiou, both

nevertheless converge upon a few crucial points in their assessment of Wagner’s
artistic creation that offer a point of philosophical contact. In view of Badiou’s
summary criticism of Wagner’s adversaries, it is enlightening to turn to Adorno’s
essay on Wagner’s relevance. Emphasizing the importance of Wagner’s work for
Schoenberg and his disciples and its potential for new music, Adorno rejects,
retroactively, so to speak, Badiou’s reproach that musique informelle is presented
as Adorno’s solution to Wagner’s ‘totalitarian’ failings. Thus, Adorno claims, in
Wagner’s music,
the continuity is created, over long stretches, by an unconstraind redrawing of

the dramatic curve from moment to moment. The intact diatonic tonal structure
makes it possible to dispense with surface links. In this way, the music achieves
a concreteness of the irregular that traditional music never dreamed of. This
59 Ibid., 58.
would remain prototypical for Schoenberg, for Berg, and for the most recent
tendency: the trend toward structures that are free, yet dense . . . it would provide
the ideal model for a truly informal process of composition.60
In defending Wagner against Adorno’s charge, Badiou argues that Wagner’s

music cannot be seen as imposing ‘musical unity upon a variegated mass’, since
‘dramatic possibilities are created through the music’,61 this being precisely
Adorno’s argument for ‘musique informelle’. One cannot but wonder why
Badiou stubbornly refuses to acknowledge how close he and Adorno are in their
assessment of Wagner’s work and its relevance for today. Both insist on Wagner’s
relevance which imposes his bringing ‘back again using different means’.62 For
both this construction of ‘a second Wagner’ takes as its point of departure a
problematic articulation between true and false, progressive and reactionary,
innovation and restoration in Wagner. Thus, for Adorno,
His truth content and those elements that legitimate criticism has found
questionable are mutually interdependent. The uncertainty with which a self-
conscious performance practice approaches him is caused, not least at all, by
the fact that there is no way around this interweaving of the true and false in
his work.63
For Badiou, by contrast, the examination of the knotting of new and old,
progressive and reactionary, true and false, is unavoidable because we are
dealing in Wagner with a multiplicity of artistic configurations and each of them
explores ‘a possibility of ending’.64 Put otherwise, each music drama elaborates
musically the consequences of its own innovative mode of thought regarding
the possibility of ending. Of particular interest to Badiou are the elaborations
of various possibilities from the perspective of the ‘relationship between the old
and the new, between tradition and innovation’,65 such as have been elaborated
in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal.
The lesson to be drawn from Wagner’s music dramas is that, just like politics,
art cannot be only ‘grounded in formal subtraction, that is, in a break with the
past’, in short, neither art nor politics can take as its ultimate goal ‘radically
new creation, irreducible originality’.66 This is because a radical break with the

62 Ibid., 129, 83.
65 Ibid., 107.
66 Ibid., 108.
past would sacrifice its transformative potential, what is needed instead is a

creative repetition of the past, such that its disruptive effects can persist in the
present – via the incorporation of the evental trace. It is precisely at the point
at which art encounters politics that Badiou mobilizes Mallarmé’ s ambition of
restoring a modern, non-religious and non-transcendent ceremony, considered
as a generic ‘community’s mode of self-representation’.67 Despite the fact that
Wagner’s Parsifal, according to Badiou, ultimately failed to establish a new,
modern ceremony, Wagner’s idea of a modern ceremony, addressed to a generic
humanity rather than to a mythical Volk, cannot be simply discarded. Hence,
for Badiou, the ‘question as to whether the Crowd declares itself . . . cannot
be exclusively recapitulated in collective figures of revolt . . . It must also put
forward, examine and produce its own consistency’.68 It could then be argued
with Badiou that even though Parsifal ultimately does not change ‘the ceremony
into something new’, it nevertheless encourages us ‘at least to be able to get ready
to intrude into future celebrations, that is, to anticipate or have the necessary
prerequisites for the future celebration’.69 Thus, according to Badiou, it is possible
to tease out of Wagner’s music dramas a novel concept of art as well as of politics.
Badiou’s focusing on ceremony is clearly overdetermined by his reading of
Mallarmé, more exactly, of Mallarmé on the future of ceremony. In presenting
Parsifal in Mallarméan terms, a displacement is produced which might have
some unforeseeable consequences: in recasting the question of ceremony in
the vocabulary of the Mallarméan Book, it seems that Mallarmé is summoned
in order to reassure us that future ceremony will not be the perpetuation of
the ruined modern ceremonies such as the Catholic Mass, the concert hall,
or politics. Meillassoux’s close reading on this issue offers a slightly different
perspective on Badiou’s reading Mallarmé into Wagner.
Taking as his point of departure Badiou’s central question in Five Lessons on
Wagner, namely, ‘Can humanity really do without ceremony? Can politics do
without ceremony?’70 – and if, as Badiou clearly announces, this is not possible
in the long run, then the question is obviously in what must the modern
ceremony consist? – Meillassoux sets out to ‘construct a Mallarmé other than
that of Badiou, but capable in this sense precisely of responding . . . to the most
recent interrogations of the philosopher’,71 by insisting on what Meillassoux
67 Ibid., 147.
68 Ibid., 158.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Badiou and Mallarmé: The Event and the Perhaps’, trans. Alyosha Edlebi,
Parrhesia, vol. 16 (2013): 35.
calls ‘discrete resistances of Mallarméan poetics vis-à-vis Badiou’s philosophy’.72

While there is no doubt about the centrality of the question of ceremony in
Wagner and Badiou, Mallarmé, such as Meillassoux constructs it on the basis of
his examination of the ceremony of the Book, is capable of providing ‘a response
in his own way to the question that guides Badiou’s analyses on Wagner’.73
Crucially, Mallarmé’ s positing of Chance as the new infinite that takes place of
the old God, necessarily leads to the eternalization of the moment of hesitation:
The infinitization of verse must be produced by a hesitation to toss the dice, a

hesitation that is then incorporated into the verse . . . Igitur simply shakes the
dice in his hand . . . he tosses the dice without tossing them, confining himself to
this ambiguous gesture as symbol of the poetic act to come.74
Thus, on Meillassoux’s reading, it is forever uncertain whether the toss of

the Master has taken place or not. But it is precisely through the irresolute
‘perhaps’ of the poetic act, the irreducible hesitation of the poetic gesture
between affirmation and negation of the toss that the ceremonial splendour is
symbolized, the latter is infinite precisely to the extent that it is hesitant. This
allows Meillasoux to conclude that
the ceremony of the moderns will be a ceremony of hesitation, the sole act
capable of comprising in itself the infinite opposites: hesitation to smile with
irony, or to believe with sincerity in the possible rebirth of a poetic and political
communion.75
Badiou, in effect, concludes his Lessons on Wagner with the enigma of Parsifal,
an enigma formulated as the question concerning the true subject of Parsifal,
this being ultimately none other than the ‘great question’ of the nineteenth
century: the possibility of a new ceremony, of a post-Christian ceremony. Yet in
Meillassoux’s Mallarméan recasting of this question, the true subject of Parsifal
is not the question of whether a modern ceremony is possible or not but, rather,
the undecidibility, an irresolvable oscillation between restoration and innovation
of the future ceremony. For Meillassoux, the double splitting of ceremony: first,
between two ceremonies in Parsifal itself (the first celebrated by Amfortas, the
second by Parsifal), two ceremonies that are formally identical, as Badiou points
out, and the splitting of ceremony between a real ceremony (in Parsifal) and the
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., 44.
75 Ibid.
performed ceremony in Bayreuth, clearly signifies that it is ‘not certain . . . that

there will have been here a new ceremony or even a ceremony tout court’.76 Put
otherwise, if, for Badiou, the hesitation produced through the double splitting
of ceremony, as a sort of empty repetition, marks a painful suspension to be
resolved through the event, for Meillassoux, this hesitation is in itself the answer
posed by Wagner’s Parsifal. Thus,
what could have reconciled – be it partially – Mallarmé and Wagner: this whole

uncertainty, oscillating between the ridiculous and the sublime, the new and the
repetitive, the real and the fictive – all of this could have represented fairly well,
I believe, not a failure, not a waiting for another thing, but quite precisely the
modern ceremony, according to its intrinsic and, in a certain way, unsurpassable
‘perhaps’. The ceremony as eternal hesitation between the derisory and the
solemn, the constellation and its night.77
In his reading of Mallarmé, Meillassoux offers a different version, revising

various aspects of the Mallarméan–Wagnerian–Badiouan question concerning
the possibility of creating a new ceremony, a ceremony of the generic. While
Meillassoux’s conclusions may well raise suspicion about the well-foundedness
of Badiou’s belief in the evental resolution of the future ceremony issue, the
crucial point here is less about the accuracy of such a reading-revision than
about the implications that it might have for the status of Wagner in relation
to Badiou’s philosophy and, more generally, for the status of music as a possible
condition of this philosophy. Concerning this specific point, the relationship
between philosophy and music, Adorno, once again imposes itself as Badiou’s
privileged interlocutor.
Conditioning philosophy’s conditions
If Schoenberg constitutes for Badiou’s philosophy a non-conditioning event

and can therefore be used to illustrate or exemplify particular aspects of the
artistic truth production, the status of Wagner in relation to Badiou’s philosophy
is quite different. In order to better determine the status of Wagner within
Badiou’s evental philosophy, Nicolas proposes an in-between notion, between
the event and the example, namely, the singularity. As he writes, ‘In Badiou’s
76 Ibid., 46.
77 Ibid.
philosophy, Wagner is the name of a singularity more than of an event properly

speaking: there is, for this philosophy, the Wagner-singularity, more than a
Wagner-event.’78 For were Wagner the name of an event, it would by the same
token be apt, just like Mallarmé’ s poetry or Cantor’s set theory, to condition
Badiou’s philosophy.
While Adorno and Badiou seem to have hardly anything in common, there
is a strange coincidence that brings their philosophical trajectories in some
proximity. In his first novel, Almageste,79 Wagner’s music is assigned ‘a singular
power of nomination that permits us to conceive of it as the secret prayer of
things’.80 As aforementioned, Adorno, too, sees music endowed with the
power of nomination. By being a non-representational mode of presentation,
intentionless, music, for Adorno, incarnates the power of naming things
directly, unlike philosophy, equally apt to naming things, only indirectly – via
language. In a similar way, Badiou attributes to Wagner’s music this power of
naming directly, because, for him, only music is ‘able to name everything, since
it is hardly a sign . . . but the secret prayer of things’.81 In its capacity to give things
a name that suit them, music holds a secret that it can ‘avow’.
Introduced as the name of a singularity for Badiou’s thought, Wagner as a
name of a singularity changes several statuses. There are, in fact, two principal
figures of Wagner-the-name-of-a-singularity: the first Wagner intervenes in the
relationship between philosophy and music and modifies it at the same time, and
precisely to the extent, that it is a name for a music presented as a ‘fundamental
operator of contemporary ideology’. The second Wagner, certainly more complex
regarding its nominative function, is a Wagner that has been retroactively
extracted from Badiou’s Five Lessons on Wagner. Indeed, in Five Lessons, Wagner
emerges as a name for a music capable of generating and exploring different types
of possibilities: the possibility of a future great art, the creation of new subjective
possibilities, based on the split subject and the toleration of heterogeneity; the
exploration of a collective capacity of transformation; the capacity of staging
a new, post-Christian ceremony allowing a generic collectivity that can attain
its self-representation; and finally the possibility of non-dialectical figures of
resolution, that is, transformations no longer guided by teleological principles;
the exploration of this possibility implies the affirmation of a new faith or fidelity.
In unearthing these diverse facets of Wagner’s music Badiou posits Wagner as a
78 Nicolas, ‘Wagner’, in The Badiou Dictionary, 380.

79 Alain Badiou, Almagestes, Trajectoire inverse (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 199.
80 Nicolas, ‘Wagner’, 381.
81 Badiou, Almagestes, Trajectoire inverse, 101.
philosophical name, a name for philosophy, but also for music, in so far it is ‘the
name of an opening and of a future’,82 rather than the name of a closure or even
a name of an event. Here, again, the status of Wagner as a name used by Badiou’s
philosophy remains to a certain extent elusive, enigmatic as an anticipation of
something that will only receive its full significance retroactively. This emerges
clearly from the following description, offered by Nicolas, to capture various,
yet converging aspects of Badiou’s use of the name Wagner. Indeed, ‘Wagner’ is
used in Badiou ‘as a possibility, as a motif that is still secret but already there, as
the promise of a future anterior, as the announcing of a moment in which the
Wagner-possibility will have come’.83
Put simply, what Badiou’s incursion into music, in particular Wagner’s
music dramas, ultimately aims at is to transform Wagner or, better, to create the
name Wagner as a philosophical name for music, rather than its saturation or
closure, as Adorno would have it. This gesture is more ambitious than it might
first appear. Ultimately, by transforming a proper name, Wagner, into one of the
possible names for music itself, Badiou explores nothing less than the possibility
of music as a condition of philosophy, as he conceives of it. Put another way
and drawing on some insights from Nicolas’s highly perspicacious comments
on Badiou’s reading of Wagner, the question that is put on the philosophical
agenda with Badiou’s Five Lessons is the following: is what starts to be gradually
uncovered under the name Wagner and which is still to some extent hidden,
secret, undisclosed, a promise of the future-anterior for the music to be situated
as one of the conditions of philosophy?
Badiou’s subtle, yet extremely detailed analyses of Wagner’s music dramas
in view of their actual and future impact on music and philosophy seem to
lead to the conclusion that music is slowly emerging as a specific condition
for Badiou’s philosophy, a condition that is clearly to be distinguished from
the already established conditions (science, politics and love), but also from
various artistic creations that have effectively conditioned Badiou’s philosophy
(from Mallarmé via Pessoa to Beckett). Crucial here is that the name Wagner
as a philosophical name for music, names something that is already ‘there’,
although not yet fully deployed in view of its still to be uncovered potentials.
In this sense it could be said that music, as it can be derived from Badiou’s
analysis of Wagner, has a paradoxical status of a precondition for a philosophy,
since philosophy, in so far as it is affected by Wagner, has discerned by now
82 Nicolas, ‘Wagner’, 382.
83 Ibid.
some aspects of its transformative power and potential for future developments
in music.
In order to capture the specific modality that allows Badiou to conceptualize,
for philosophy, the effects produced by Wagner, not directly on philosophy, but
rather on the relationship established between philosophy and music, Nicolas
borrows one of Badiou’s notions from Being and Event, namely: intervention.
The philosophical intervention in question is one that can best be described as
an anticipatory retroaction, a peculiar temporal and logical operation intended
to intervene into that which is supposed to condition philosophy: music as a
would-be condition of a future philosophy under conditions. In this respect,
retroaction can be considered as an act by means of which philosophy, while
not yet conditioned by this music, posits the latter as ‘music that is liable to
condition it’.84 Bringing together both aspects, anticipation and retroaction,
Badiou’s intervention in the way in which philosophy relates to music as one
of its prospective conditions, retroaction, as Nicolas defines it, presents itself
as ‘a (philosophical) avowal of a (music) secret, an avowal that endeavours to
designate, under the (philosophical) name Wagner, an unperceived musical
capacity’.85
Strictly speaking, what ‘Wagner’ as a name for music designates is a not fully
effectuated and thus still undisclosed, secret capacity of music, that is only slowly
starting to emerge via Badiou’s philosophical intervention. One is tempted to say
that in the same way in which Badiou reconstructs, retroactively, by deriving
from existing serial musical pieces the prescription that guided their creation as
a sort of prescription of serialism, he tries to formulate a prescription in order
to capture that which conditions actually existing Wagnerian music. However,
to the extent that this retroactive prescription is inferred from already created
music while simultaneously addressed to music that is still to come, Badiou’s use
of the term ‘prescription’ here is somewhat misleading. This is why, as Nicolas
suggests, it takes the form of a prophecy. For this reason, this prescription-
prophecy ‘concerns less future music as such than music as a possible condition
for philosophy’, that is, the music to come that will be able to ‘re-engage its
power of conditioning on philosophy’.86 Thus, to follow Nicolas in his rather
tortuous attempt to gauge what Badiou’s reading of Wagner amounts to, Badiou’s
philosophy by disclosing or
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., 382–3.
philosophically avowing the secrets of a possible musical conditioning, . . .

intervenes here upstream of its own upstream, as it were, in such a way that it
is a matter for it of prophesising about what music, under the name Wagner, is
already capable of (without being really known in music or by musicians), which
means: capable of for philosophy.87
To clarify in what exactly this prophetic prescription consists in with respect

to a music to come, there is perhaps no better way than to compare Adorno’s
and Badiou’s respective interventions. Unlike Badiou, Adorno’s philosophy, as
aforementioned, is deployed under the condition of the event ‘Second Viennese
School’, while this event was still capable of producing consequences within the
musical field. It could then be asserted that, for Adorno, music is indeed the
principle condition of his philosophy. By contrast, ‘une musique informelle’,
which is his proposition for a future music, was motivated by the very project of
his negative dialectics, an intervention that will lead to the invention, by Adorno’s
philosophy, of a non-existent music – une musique informelle – specifically
destined to serve as an ideal musical condition for philosophy.
Succinctly put, instead of composing as the musician that he was a musique
informelle that he considered lacking in his time, Adorno circumscribes,
within philosophy, a place destined for the music that would be appropriate to
conditioning philosophy. In this respect, it is not by accident that his Negative
Dialectics has been called a musique informelle.
As Badiou himself points out in his Five Lessons on Wagner,88 by proposing
a musique informelle as a musical solution to the impasses of serial music
deriving from the Schoenberg School, Adorno accomplishes a sort of a
retroaction. According to Badiou, Adorno philosophically constructs a place for
this music that would be able to condition philosophy, this place operating here
as a ‘condition in absentia’, since no music of that kind existed to occupy this
predestined place. Hence, what we are dealing with here is a kind of a philosophical
precondition of a musical condition, because, in music, nothing new had taken
place, nothing had been happening in music itself that would afford it the status
as a condition of philosophy. But this also means that Adorno’s intervention into
the musical condition or music as a condition of philosophy, does not work as
Adorno had expected. In this sense, Adorno’s musique informelle could be seen
as an inverted conditioning, where the conditioned conditions its condition or
87 Ibid., 383.
88 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 33, 44, 46, 53, 67.
supposed condition, prescribing to music what or how it should be in order to

be of any interest for philosophy.
Badiou’s philosophical intervention, on the other hand, is entirely different,
though it is true that we are dealing with the same retroactive gesture, in so far
as Badiou’s retroaction is also grounded in already existing music. In this sense,
it presents itself as a manifesto enveloping the precarious present of the already
existing yet not fully disclosed music, as well as the musical novelties to emerge
in the future of this nascent present.
11
Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in

Adorno and Badiou
Rok Benčin
In a rare confrontation with Adorno’s philosophy, found in his book on Wagner,

Badiou situates the German thinker among his usual philosophical foes –
Heidegger and Deleuze – as another proponent of ‘the ideal of the open’. Badiou
presents Adorno’s critique of the principle of identity as a denunciation of
any kind of unifying or universalizing closure in the name of multiplicity and
difference, thus significantly contradicting his own philosophical programme,
which seeks to renounce the one without affirming the multiple. In the context
of music and art more generally, Adorno’s ideal of the open supposedly entails
a disintegration of form, the unifying principle that Badiou himself reaffirms as
the vehicle of artistic truth. A closer look at Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, however,
reveals that form nevertheless remains the only means art has of expressing
the non-identical. While indeed form does violence to the heterogeneity of
the sensible, which makes all art melancholic, form is also the only way art can
keep its promesse de bonheur. In what follows, I examine how Adorno’s theory
of artistic form and its immanent relation to affect reflects back on Badiou’s own
account of artistic truth in terms of form as well as on his recent outline of a
‘metaphysics of happiness’. My contribution is based on the assumption that a
parallel reading of Adorno and Badiou can reveal how unravelling the aporias of
their philosophical conceptualizations of artistic truth requires the development
of a peculiar dialectics of form and affect.
Setting the scene
Reading original philosophers side by side requires the construction of a

scene on which their thinking can meet, even if this scene turns out to be a
battleground. In order to go beyond simply identifying the obvious divergences
that make philosophical endeavours irreconcilable (and perhaps spotting some
apparent similarities along the way) a common conceptual problem should
be (re)constructed as a scene against the background of which the differences
between their conceptual designs can be measured.
In the case of Adorno and Badiou, the divergences are obvious enough. Even
if both could be argued to claim that the existence of philosophy is conditioned
by events, the nature of the events in question differs greatly. While Badiou
articulates his notion of truth as a subjective fidelity to an event (whether in
politics, art, science or love) that redefines the coordinates of possibility, for
Adorno events compel subjects to impossibilities (living after Auschwitz) and
missed opportunities (the failure of communist revolution, i.e. philosophy’s
self-realization). On the other hand, similarities can be discerned, for example,
between both authors’ stance towards contemporary philosophical thought on
being, especially between Badiou’s critique of Deleuze and Adorno’s critique
of Heidegger. But beyond differences and similarities, is there a specific
philosophical problem, a conceptual scene that would truly allow us to read
both thinkers side by side?
An example of a scene of this kind was presented by Badiou as ‘the French
moment’ in philosophy, that is, as a set of conceptual problems and modes
of approaching them that he and his French contemporaries from Sartre to
Deleuze have shared despite their many differences.1 While there is no such
historical ‘moment’ that would include both of them, Badiou nevertheless
frames his reading of Adorno in the context of a more thematic philosophical
sequence. Alongside mainly Nietzsche and Lacoue-Labarthe, Adorno and
Badiou himself belong to what Badiou calls the Wagnerian philosophical ‘genre’,
revolving around the philosophical questions that Wagner’s music implies.2 For
these philosophers, as Badiou emphasizes, ‘Wagner as a philosophical question’
was not a peripheral topic of interest, but a question they felt was essential to
address. This is why Badiou does not focus on Adorno’s texts on Wagner, but
1 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/
New York: Verso, 2012), li–lxiii.
2 Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Susan Spitzer (London/New York: Verso, 2010), 55–6.
Form and Affect 199
goes straight to Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s philosophical magnum opus.3

The implications of philosophical discussions on Wagner are not limited to
music or even to aesthetics, but put the core differences between philosophical
endeavours at stake.
On the background of this common ‘genre’, Badiou’s presentation of Adorno
is set up to provide a stark contrast to his own views. According to Badiou,
Adorno’s philosophy of the non-identical entails an aesthetics that demands of
art to abandon form in the name of affect. The disintegration of form enables
art to bear witness to suffering in which the non-identical appears.4 For Badiou,
on the other hand, the affect of truth can only be happiness, while artistic truth
is specifically identified with the capacity of form. Although Badiou’s reading
is highly respectful, there is not much in Adorno he would be willing to
affirmatively extract and potentially recycle.
I will argue that Adorno and Badiou nevertheless share a theoretical concern
that sets up a scene allowing their work to be read in conjunction. A closer look
at Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory reveals that for him as well, the notion of form is in
fact what allows philosophy to think the truth of art. Despite the fact that form
inflicts violence upon the sensible, it is through formal innovation alone that art
can convey the suffering it is compelled to express. Reading Badiou’s account of
Adorno in isolation, on the other hand, one might get the wrong impression that
Badiou himself stands for forms as ideal and ahistorical templates that determine
artistic relation to truth. On the contrary, Badiou defines artistic truth as the
transformation of form, as art’s ability to move the boundaries of its capacity to
form the sensible. Both authors declare their intention to move away from the
traditional ‘academic’ understanding of forms as fixed designs of an aesthetic
ideal. Badiou identifies academicism with the reactive subjective position which
claims that formal novelties in art are mere deformations of established forms.5
Similarly, Adorno claims that by insisting on formal unity academic artworks
‘strangle the diffuse element of art’, whereas a great artwork is not an informal
one but rather one ‘whose form springs from its truth content’.6 For both Adorno
and Badiou form is the site of struggle for truth in art.
Artistic truth is thus less a matter of form than it is a matter of the capacity of
formalization, the ability of artistic form to be transformed. Here, the emphasis
3 Ibid., 27.
4 Ibid., 38.
5 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New York:
6 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London/New York: Continuum,
1997), 188–9.
shifts from form’s relation to its other, that is, the sensible material that it forms,
to its own productive and transformative capacity. The question can then be
posed as to what drives the transformation of form and in relation to what such
autoreferential form could be said to be the bearer of artistic truth. As I try to
show, this is precisely where the relation between form and affect is established.
In both philosophers an account of affect can be found that pertains to artistic
form as such. In Adorno, the ‘melancholy of form’ is also what allows art to make
its ‘promise of happiness’.7 Badiou, on the other hand, has recently developed a
metaphysical understanding of ‘real happiness’ as related to truth (artistic truth
included), even allowing for a certain ‘measure of despair’ as its condition.8 The
status of these affects in their relation to truth nevertheless remains somewhat
unclear in both authors. With reference to the psychoanalytic conceptualization
of melancholy and mania I argue that the relation between form and truth is
established precisely through an affect that is immanent to form. In its self-
referentiality, form produces a particular kind of object as a remainder – or, more
precisely, a surplus – of the process of formalization itself. It is in its relation to
this elusive object, I argue, that form is affected and thus capable of transforming
itself and becoming the site of artistic truth.
Poetic ontology and ontological need
Bringing Adorno and Badiou together around the notion of form provides the
necessary ‘scene’ for this parallel reading, although it does not limit the effort
to the field of aesthetics. What is first and foremost at stake is the appearance
of truth. In this regard, Badiou classifies Adorno alongside Heidegger, Bergson
and Deleuze as a propagator of ‘the ideal of the open’ that resists any formal
and identitarian closure.9 The primacy of open-ended transformation over
the closure of formalization is not so much an aesthetic preference as it is an
antiscientific stance that all the above-mentioned philosophers share in contrast
to Badiou’s embrace of mathematics as ontology. Annulling the gap between
Adorno and Heidegger, perhaps the fiercest philosophical divide in twentieth-
century German philosophy, but also between the German philosophical
tradition and the French vitalist current from Bergson to Deleuze, requires a
7 Ibid., 144, 136.
8 Alain Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel (Paris: PUF, 2015), 39.
great leap that is only possible on the assumption that Badiou’s philosophy itself
introduces a break so radical that the differences between previous currents of
thought become irrelevant.
To understand this stance, one must go back to Badiou’s Being and Event,
where he introduces his philosophical project as a break with Heidegger’s ‘poetic
ontology’.10 As is also clear from his critique of Deleuze,11 Badiou is primarily
concerned with challenging any kind of ontology that seeks for a revelation
of being, its poetic expression or opening, regardless of how its presence is
conceptualized. Instead of searching for the proximity of being, Badiou’s
ontology is based on ‘the radically subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed
not only from representation but from all presentation’.12 Ultimately, Badiou
‘un-binds the Heideggerian connection between being and truth’ and proposes
a concept of truth that is not the truth of being but a truth procedure instigated
by a subject in fidelity to an event.13
Is it justified to claim that Adorno was a poetic ontologist? The answer to
this question is not straightforward. The project of negative dialectics is as
much a critique of the identity principle as it is a defence of conceptual thinking
that unavoidably succumbs to this very principle. Adorno’s own critique of
Heidegger, but also of Bergson, aims precisely at attempts to relieve thought of
its identifying burden. While Heidegger is trying ‘to heal the concept of “Being”
of the wound of its conceptual thinking’, Bergson yields to ‘a cult of irrational
immediacy’.14 For Adorno, thought cannot gain direct access to the non-
identical in ‘the open’ since thinking cannot shed its identifying form: ‘Yet the
appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is
to identify.’15 It is through this form alone that the non-identical can be thought –
this is the contradiction that drives negative dialectics and distinguishes it from
contemporary ontological and vitalist attempts at surpassing metaphysics.
Along these lines, Adorno presents his own version of the critique of poetic
ontology: ‘A philosophy that would try to imitate art . . . would be postulating
the demand of identity, claiming to exhaust its object by endowing its procedure
with a supremacy to which the heterogeneous bows a priori.’ Even though the
10 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2005), 9–10.
11 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis/London: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3.
13 Ibid., 15.
14 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London/New York: Routledge, 1973),
70, 8.
15 Ibid., 5.
concept stands in the way between thinking and what is thought, it is also the
only connection that can be established between them, which is why philosophy
‘must strive, by way of concept, to transcend the concept’.16 Even though Adorno,
as Badiou notes, anticipates the critique of the one dominant in philosophy
thirty years later, his critique is closer to Badiou’s own primary philosophical
decision that ‘the one is not’17 than to some kind of ‘postmodern’ affirmation of
multiplicity. For Adorno, the ‘illusion of taking direct hold of the Many would be
a mimetic regression’, since only unity is able to ‘transcend’ unity.18 For Badiou
as well (even though strictly speaking the comparison cannot be made in such a
direct manner), there is no one, only the process of unifying (the ‘count-as-one’)
that undoes itself.19
On the other hand, Badiou is right in claiming that, according to Adorno,
the non-identical nevertheless appears to thought: ‘What is the appearance of
what is non-identical to thought? The latter obviously doesn’t present itself as
thought: it necessarily presents itself as affect, as body, even.’20 Even though
thought cannot avoid its identifying form and think non-identically, its attempt
to transcend the concept by way of concept is based on the affective appearance
of the non-identical. The non-identical appears to thought as an imperative
posed by suffering: ‘The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all
truth.’21 Contrary to Heideggerian anxiety, however, this ‘ontological’ affect is not
existentially tied to Dasein but is rather historically and socially determined. The
principle of identity is not limited to thought – it is the spiritual reflection of the
principle of domination that ‘antagonistically rends human society’.22
Even though the non-identical does not have an explicitly ontological status,
the ‘poetic’ claim to express something real beyond what is transcendentally
constructed as reality can still be traced in Adorno. In Badiou, the situation is
reversed. According to Being and Event, thought can directly access the pure
multiplicity that is the form of the presentation of being by way of mathematical
set theory. On the other hand, there is no affective access to being, no ontological
experience – being is simply not in the mood, so to speak. From the perspective
of Badiou’s radically subtractive ontology, Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s
16 Ibid., 15.
19 Badiou, Being and Event, 44–5.
22 Ibid., 48.
‘ontological need’23 that substantializes the very non-substantiality of being thus

falls short.
Artistic truth: Immanent and singular?
Turning our attention more specifically to the articulation of form and affect
in aesthetics, the question can first be posed as to how the critique of poetic
ontology translates into the critique of what could be called ‘onto-poetics’: the
idea that the expression of being beyond what is representationally constructed
as reality is also what ultimately paves the way for philosophical thought on
art, detectable in both Heidegger and Deleuze. Considering Badiou’s subtractive
approach to ontology, in which the link between being and truth is untied, onto-
poetics ought not to be an option his philosophy would pursue. Although he does
not explicitly frame his discussion of aesthetics in these terms, his ‘inaesthetics’
seems to confirm this by denouncing ‘aesthetic speculation’ and insisting on the
‘independent existence’ of artistic truths with regard to what philosophy extracts
from them.24
For Adorno, on the other hand, the voice of suffering as an expression of
something real that lies beyond what is cognitively and socially constructed as
reality is indeed what philosophy looks for in art: ‘If thought is in any way to
gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something
[behind] the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively
demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides.’25
Adorno’s aesthetics thus still has an onto-poetic structure, even though what is
to be unveiled beyond the construction of reality is not being as such but rather
suffering caused by social domination.
As Rancière points out, even Badiou’s own accounts of artworks, especially
poetry, are often very close to simply reproducing his ontological insights.26 Even
if the ontology thus evoked by poetry is of a subtractive and not of a ‘poetic’ kind,
the question nevertheless lingers whether Badiou’s break with onto-poetics is as
clear-cut as the logic of his philosophical system would demand.
23 Ibid., 102, 106.
24 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), xii.
25 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18.
26 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), 215–25.
Be that as it may, Badiou’s philosophy is based on the assumption that

philosophy itself does not produce any truths but is rather conditioned by the
truth procedures that occur independently in art, science, politics and love.27
This is why he rejects both Plato’s philosophical dismissal of art’s capacity for
truth and Heidegger’s devotion that puts artistic truth above all else.28 These two
extremes give rise to two principle historical models of philosophy’s relation to
art. The so-called didactic model claims that ‘art is incapable of truth, or that
all truth is external to art’.29 This entails that art must be radically criticized by
philosophy or put into didactic use conveying a truth prescribed from outside.
The romantic model, on the other hand, is based on the thesis that ‘art alone is
capable of truth’.30 In this model, philosophy can only be subordinated to art.
There is also the third model, the classical one, originating in Aristotle, which
deproblematizes the artistic relation to truth. Classicism claims that what is to
be looked for in art is not truth but resemblance and verisimilitude in relation to
affects that fiction is able to provoke. It thus makes no sense to criticize it for its
lack of truth since art is simply not a matter of thinking but a matter of affect – of
pleasure and catharsis.31
Badiou has declared that the twentieth century was unable to put any alternative
models on offer: Marxism was didactic (Brecht), hermeneutic philosophy,
romantic (Heidegger), and psychoanalysis, classical.32 It falls to inaesthetics
finally to introduce a new model, one based on the immanence and singularity
of artistic truth:33 against classicism it claims that art is capable of truth, against
didacticism that this truth is immanent to art and against romanticism that it
is also singular, that is, specific to art – it cannot be considered as a general,
supreme truth.
Considering his view on the century’s ‘passion of the real’ and its indissoluble
connection to art,34 Badiou’s dismissal of twentieth-century aesthetics could
perhaps be seen as surprising. He does, however, address the phenomenon
of the historical avant-gardes, which he sees as an anticlassical mixture of
didacticism (their critical dimension) and romanticism (their radical call for
renewal).35 If Badiou gives the avant-gardes a special mention, on account of
27 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1999), 33–9.
28 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 1.
29 Ibid., 2.
30 Ibid., 3.
31 Ibid., 3–5.
32 Ibid., 5.
33 Ibid., 9.
34 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2007).
their being consistent with his theory of subjectivation, then the omission of
modernism may seem curious, especially considering Badiou’s fascination with
Beckett, something he incidentally shares with Adorno. Still, Badiou’s readings
of modern literature could very well be seen as antimodernist, which might also
explain why Adorno can simply be left out of Badiou’s account of twentieth-
century aesthetics.
Adorno is famously anticlassical in his critique of the cultural industry and the
‘culinary’ attitude towards art. But where would he fit in the dilemma between
didacticism and romanticism? Rejecting both Lukács’s and Brecht’s versions of
Marxist aesthetics – the former for its affirmation of realist representations of
social totality at the expense of modernist presentations of social antagonisms
through experimenting with artistic form and the latter for its naïve didactic
simplification of political truth – Adorno defends the autonomy of art and
adopts (much like Badiou) a modernist artistic canon. Nevertheless, his theory
of art’s ‘truth content’ is not immanent in the strict Badiouan sense. In fact, he
goes so far as to say that the ‘truth content of an artwork requires philosophy’.36
According to Badiou, philosophy only conceptualizes artistic truths so that it can
transform its own concepts. For Adorno, on the other hand, the truth conveyed
by artworks needs philosophical interpretation to be fully developed. Yet, this
does not mean that art would be instrumentalized in the name of an external
truth of which philosophy would be in full possession. Philosophy itself, as
Adorno famously states in the first sentence of Negative Dialectics, lingers on
because the truth it stands for failed to be realized. Art is now in the position
to both bear witness to this failure and act as a placeholder for the further
possibility of this realization or, as Badiou himself puts it with regard to his
philosophy of event, ‘the possibility of possibilities’.37 Art’s truth content refers to
the nonexistent realization of truth by means of its semblance, which is to say its
form: ‘The appearance of the nonexistent as if it existed motivates the question
as to the truth of art. By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers
objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears
it must indeed be possible.’38 Art thus reminds philosophy of the possibility of
truth that evades philosophy itself. In this manner in Adorno too, art conditions
philosophy. In any case, a properly philosophical interpretation of artworks ‘is
defined by the reflected immanence of works, not by the external application

37 Alain Badiou, ‘The Idea of Communism’. In The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj
Žižek (London/New York: Verso, 2010), 6.
of philosophems’.39 The immanence of artworks thus remains the privileged

site in which the possibility of truth remains open and it is this possibility that
philosophy is obliged to conceptualize by interpreting art.
This leads us to the second problem of Adorno’s understanding of artistic truth
from a Badiouan standpoint: it is not singular either. Clearly, the truth that is at
stake does not refer to art alone but has much wider implications. In this respect,
Adorno’s aesthetics could be seen as romantic. But the truth content found in art’s
immanence is not a Hegelian incarnation of the infinite within the finite nor the
Heideggerian return of the Gods. The truth at stake is rather the truth of social
antagonisms and the possibility of reconciliation. If reconciliation would indeed
take place in a utopian society, truth would be able to exist on its own, leaving both
art and negative dialectics behind: ‘There is no artwork that does not promise that
its truth content, to the extent that it appears in the artwork as something existing,
realizes itself and leaves the artwork behind simply as a husk.’40
According to Badiou, artistic truth is singular, but not immanent in the didactic
model, immanent, but not singular in the romantic model and both immanent
and singular in the inaesthetic model. From this perspective, Adorno’s aesthetic
theory could be seen as the missing final logical possibility of this squared
schema: art is indeed capable of truth, but this truth is neither immanent nor
singular. One could see Adorno’s aesthetics as some sort of disjunctive synthesis
of the didactic and romantic models. It is negatively didactic in that it teaches
with silence what is no positive doctrine or method. It teaches us to be faithful
to the promise of the nonexistent. In a similar manner, Adorno’s aesthetics is
romantic, but in a materialist and subtractive way: its generalized truth is not
the truth of being but the untruth of social antagonism, with the possibility of its
abolition being alluded to by way of rejecting any kind of incarnation: ‘Through
the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast
to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled.’41
Form in Adorno: Original sin and permanent protest
Badiou claims that Adorno’s critique of the identity principle implies an

antiformalist aesthetics: ‘a process of formal “doing” that is simultaneously
39 Ibid., 341.
40 Ibid., 132.
41 Ibid., 33.
a disintegration of form’, which ultimately contributes to ‘the struggle against

identity’s dominance’.42 The artistic ideal that follows from this is the type of art
that ‘terminates the unifying processes of form and consequently tolerates real
difference or multiplicity, that is, the genuinely heterogeneous’.43 A closer look
at Aesthetic Theory confirms that Adorno indeed understands form as a process
of identification and unification that commits violence to the multiplicity of the
sensible material that it forms: ‘What art in the broadest sense works with, it
oppresses: This is the ritual of the domination of nature that lives on in play.’44 At
the same time, however, form remains the element in which truth is unfolded in
art. In fact, Adorno himself warns against endorsing the ideal of formlessness: ‘art
is disavowed wherever support is given to the theodicy of the unformed’.45
How, then, does the dialectics of form play out in Aesthetic Theory? ‘As little
as art is to be defined by any other element’, Adorno claims, ‘it is simply identical
with form.’46 The other of form, that is, the heterogeneous that it unifies, can thus
only come to expression within it: ‘those artworks succeed that rescue over into
form something of the amorphous to which they ineluctably do violence’.47 The
violence of form is also the means by which art gains its distance from the merely
existing and thus gains its autonomy and critical stance towards the empirical
reality it transforms.48 This is why the element of form is both ‘the original sin of
art as well as its permanent protest’.49
Identifying the violent aspect of form does not therefore imply the ideal of
its abolition. Adorno is himself critical of the antiformalism in aesthetic theory,
represented by realism, on the one hand, and vitalism, on the other.50 Regarding
the former, Adorno picks on Lukács’s rejection of modern art. Against formal
experiments, which he considers to be merely subjective, Lukács emphasizes the
essentiality of content that dictates its own form. According to Adorno, Lukács
considers form as something superimposed on the sensible arbitrarily from
the outside. A similar abstract and undialectical opposition of form and life is
posited by vitalism. For Adorno, form is rather the objective transformation of
the material that generates its own content – there is no content outside of form.

43 Ibid., 53.
45 Ibid., 144.
46 Ibid., 140.
47 Ibid., 50.
48 Ibid., 143–4.
49 Ibid., 50.
50 Ibid., 141–5.
Furthermore, Adorno is highly critical of artistic practices that are based on

the disintegration of form. Such modern artists get caught in the paradox of
formalizing their spontaneity: ‘Today artists would like to do away with unity
altogether, though with the irony that those works that are supposedly open
and incomplete necessarily regain something comparable to unity insofar as
this openness is planned.’51 Action painting or l’art informelle try to avoid ‘the
burden of giving form’, which only results in surrendering the formal outcome
to mere statistics that determines the contingency of the material.52 Such ‘open
forms’ ultimately succumb to a ‘nominalistic critique of universality’ and prove
insufficient, as testified by Brecht’s inability to find convincing conclusions to
his plays.53 By renouncing the original sin, art also loses its ability to protest and
surrenders to the very barbaric reality it is supposed to stand against.
This does not mean, however, that art is completely closed off in its form.
Instead of an ivory tower type of seclusion, its formal separation from reality
gives art a monadic structure. The Leibnizian metaphor allows Adorno to present
artworks as completely separated from reality and yet be internally shaped by
the same forces that govern the outside world. As monad, art resembles reality
without imitating it.54 Form is thus the medium of the artwork’s relation to
objectivity: ‘Only in the crystallization of its own formal law and not in a passive
acceptance of objects does art converge with what is real.’55 The heterogeneous
element is thus immanent to form itself. The antagonisms that run through
reality are reproduced and transfigured in artistic form: ‘unsolved antagonisms
of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’.56 The divine
harmony that aligns the monads into a coherent universe according to Leibniz is
thus replaced by Adorno with the disharmony of history.
The reproduction of social antagonisms in artworks also entails that art is
unable to simply oppose domination and the identity principle. Art’s autonomy
is in fact a continuation of the very processes of domination and identification
at work in history and thought. And yet, it is only by perfecting its identity
with itself that art gains separation and thereby the possibility of witnessing the
non-identical: ‘Spirit does not identify the nonidentical: It identifies with it. By
pursuing its own identity with itself, art assimilates itself with the nonidentical.’57
51 Ibid., 141.
52 Ibid., 221.
53 Ibid., 220.
54 Ibid., 5.
55 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 6.
56
57 Ibid., 134.
Adorno even states that the ‘aesthetic unity of the multiplicitous appears as
though it had done no violence but had been chosen by the multiplicitous
itself ’.58 The expression of suffering thereby requires form, not its disintegration.
If it is to be expressed from the perspective of the possibility of reconciliation,
the promise of happiness, art should not renounce form but rather pursue its
radical modes.
The dialectics that makes the violence of form at the same time its capacity of
alluding to reconciliation nevertheless remains enigmatic in Adorno. If we are
to avoid the messianic trope of redemption lurking in the proximity of danger,
which would bring Adorno dangerously close to Heidegger, the productive
aspect of form, its ability to not only allude to but in a certain sense produce the
non-identical, is still to be conceptualized. As it turns out, the productive aspect
of form is precisely what is emphasized by Badiou . . .
Form in Badiou: Between finitude and infinity
The problem of artistic truth is introduced by Badiou in his book on inaesthetics

as a problem of the relation between finitude and infinity: while in its essence,
truth is ‘an infinite multiplicity’, the artwork itself is not only finite but ultimately
‘the only finite thing that exists’.59 Without entering into the complicated
technical details of Badiou’s conceptualization of the infinite, it should be noted
that, on the one hand, Badiou reaffirms the infinity of truth against Heideggerian
embrace of finitude and, on the other, uses Cantor to multiply infinity in order to
reject the theological and romantic notion of truth as the infinite transcendent
one that descends into the finite sphere. For Badiou both the situation of mere
existence and the truth that eventually comes to disturb this situation are infinite.
As explained in a recent seminar, ‘the finite is a result of a dialectics between
two types of infinities . . ., the infinity of the situation on the one hand and the
infinity of form or the idea on the other’.60 Finitude, exemplified by the work
of art, is therefore always a product, which exists as something completed and
closed off in the autonomy of ‘its own immanent ends’.61 How to think a finite
product as a development of the infinite without succumbing to the romantic
58 Ibid.
59 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 10–11.
60 Alain Badiou, ‘L’immanence des vérités 3: Séminaire d’Alain Badiou (2014–2015)’, 24 September
2014. www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/14–15.htm (accessed 18 April 2018).
logic of expressing or incarnating the infinite is thus the challenge of Badiou’s

conceptualization of artistic truth.
In the Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou resolves this problem by describing
the structure of the truth procedure in art as an ‘artistic configuration’. Artistic
truth is not identical to specific artworks. Instead, artworks are ‘differential
points’ in which an artistic configuration develops a truth, inaugurated by an
event.62 Greek tragedy from Aeschylus to Euripides, the classical style of music
from Haydn to Beethoven, the novel from Cervantes to Joyce are examples
of such configurations in which the virtual infinity of a truth is elaborated by
a multitude of individual artworks until it becomes ‘saturated’.63 Curiously,
Badiou’s actual inaesthetic practice shows that specific artworks nevertheless
remain the centre of attention and the primary source of lessons that philosophy
learns from art. Beyond listing examples of it, Badiou’s works do not seem to
include a single comprehensive analysis of an artistic configuration. From the
conceptual perspective, the problem of this solution is that it merely describes
the procedure of artistic truth without identifying its operation – what an artistic
truth actually ‘does’.
The answer to this question comes with the Logics of Worlds, the second
volume of Being and Event, in which Badiou defines artistic truth in terms of
form. The artistic state of things in which a truth procedure will have intervened
is defined as a given regime that regulates the ‘tension between the intensity of
the sensible and the tranquillity of form’.64 The event is then defined as a break
with this regime. All of a sudden, ‘what seemed to partake of the formless is
grasped as form’.65 The procedure of truth will consist of a set of works (much
like the earlier notion of configuration) that treat or realize the ‘consequences of
the new capacity to inform the sensible’.66
Defining artistic truth in terms of the tension between formalization and the
chaotic sensibility brings Badiou close to Adorno, although the resolution of
this tension is quite different. For Badiou, the sensible is simply indifferent with
regard to form. There is no indication that form could be violent to the sensible or
that the sensible could in any way resist form. The struggle to move the frontiers
of form and conquer the formless seems to be entirely immanent to form. It
seems that Badiou thus achieves the ultimate break with onto-poetics – there
62 Ibid., 12.
63 Ibid., 13.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
is no oppressed ‘real’ that needs to be expressed by art. If that is indeed the

case, the question could then be posed: what is it that drives this process of
transformation, of discovering new forms? An answer can perhaps be found in
his most recent work, where Badiou defines the truth content of an artwork as
its ability of bearing witness to infinity. Formal innovation is thus driven by ‘a
certain experience of the infinite’,67 making an artwork’s form a finite witness of
the infinite. This infinity, however, is immanent to the production of form itself.
Artistic innovation is a pure affirmation of the capacity of formalization: ‘I think
in the artistic field the immanent infinity is finally something like the infinity
of the form itself. And what is infinity of the form itself? It’s the possibility that
the new form – the new possibility of the form – is in relation, in direct relation
with the chaotic sensibility.’68 Even though such formal infinity is still defined
in relation to the sensible, it seems to tend towards the absolutization of form
itself in what could be read as a distant philosophical echo of Flaubert’s ideal of
a book about nothing, a book with no subject matter, held together by its style
alone. Defined purely as an access to chaotic sensibility, it seems that form no
longer has an objective correlate to its infinite capacity. It is as though Adornian
windowless monads would thus be transformed into monadless windows.
From the melancholy of form to the metaphysics of happiness
If in Adorno we missed the elaboration of the productive aspect of form that

would produce its object (the non-identical), in Badiou this productivity
is intensified to the degree that it becomes purely self-referential and again
misses its object. This ‘missing’ object, however, should not be understood as a
deficiency of form or its essential limitedness with regards to the richness of its
other – the sensible that it forms. What is at stake here is precisely the objective
correlate of form itself, the relation to which makes form immanently affected.
If the aporias of form as the element of artistic truth are to be understood, the
specific articulation of form and affect should be given due consideration.
While the suffering that conditions truth in Adorno is indeed, as Badiou points
out, the appearance of the non-identical that contradicts form, form and affect are
nevertheless not necessarily opposed in Adorno. For Adorno, in fact, form itself
67 Badiou, ‘L’immanence des vérités’.

68 Badiou, ‘The Subject of Art’, The Symptom, 6 (2005). www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.
html (accessed 18 April 2018).
is affected. Its separateness from the empirical and the violence that it does to the
sensible material that it forms permeate it with melancholy: ‘Melancholy is the
shadow of what in all form is heterogenous, which form strives to banish: mere
existence.’69 The promise of utopia that form implies is restricted to semblance
and based on violence. The work of form necessarily ‘limits what is formed’;
it is ‘a process of selecting, trimming, renouncing’ the sensible.70 The lost and
the not-yet-attained refer to the non-identical that form as identity gives rise to
and at the same time excludes. And yet, as we have seen, form does not merely
identify the non-identical but identifies with it: it is thus suddenly transformed
from the violator to the protector. How should we understand this turn?
Although Adorno does not elaborate further on the concept of melancholy
that he uses, the identification with something non-identical and even non-
existent corresponds well with Freud’s famous definition of melancholy. Freud’s
melancholic identifies with the lost object, although the nature of this object
or, more precisely, its loss, remains unclear. What distinguishes melancholy
from mourning – the non-pathological reaction to a loss of an identifiable
object – is the unconscious character of loss. This does not necessarily mean
that the melancholic is unaware of the loss or cannot identify the object that has
been lost – the problem is that the actual lost object is not identical to what is
lost. Freud writes that the melancholic may very well know ‘whom he has lost’
(identify an actual lost object), but cannot figure out ‘what he has lost in him’ (the
loss does not refer to the identifiable lost object as such).71 The true melancholic
object seems to be its very non-identity to any identifiable lost object. It seems
that beyond any object, the melancholic clings to the loss itself as object. From
this perspective, melancholy is less a reaction to than a production of loss. The
peculiar nature of the melancholic object is confirmed by Lacan who describes
melancholy as a direct identification with the object a beyond the imaginary
frame within which it otherwise appears.72
The psychoanalytic elaboration of the melancholic object can shed additional
light on the dual nature of Adorno’s melancholy of form. On the one hand, the
loss implied by form’s violent imposition on the sensible, the loss of everything
the formal frame necessarily excludes, can be seen as the identifiable lost object
common to both mourning and melancholy. The properly melancholic aspect

70 Ibid., 144.
71 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 245.
72 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book X, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge/
Malden: Polity, 2014), 335–6.
of form, however, comes from its identification with the non-identical, the
evasive object of loss produced by the process of identification itself. While
the lost object can still be understood as something external to form, that is,
the sensible multiplicity being unified, the object of loss is the heterogeneous
moment immanent to form itself.
One could be tempted to take this analysis further, drawing a parallel
between narcissism and self-loathing characteristic of the melancholic ego
in its identification with the lost object and Adorno’s ambivalent view of art
as simultaneously the herald of utopian truth and the carrier of ideological
falseness. But what is perhaps more interesting is the convergence of the
melancholy of form with the promise of happiness, the other principle affect
related to the artwork according to Adorno. Far from being the manic other
side of melancholy, the happiness that art promises is, again, of a subtractive
character. Given that there cannot be any true happiness in a false world, art
can only keep its promise by breaking it.73 But there is also a more affirmative,
although still subtractive aspect of the Adornian promise. Towards the end of
Negative Dialectics, Adorno discusses the fascination Proust’s narrator as a child
has for the names of unknown towns and villages. The promise of happiness these
names provide can of course never be fulfilled by actually going to these places.
And yet, actually going there does not make one disappointed but rather makes
one feel he or she is now too close to see the beauty.74 The promise of happiness
cannot therefore be empirically broken by an experience of the body – rather, it
indicates a metaphysical experience: ‘Happiness, the only part of metaphysical
experience that is more than impotent longing, gives us the inside of objects as
something removed from objects.’75 The promise of happiness should therefore
not be understood merely as a desire for something indefinitely delayed, but also
as a fulfilled affect in its own right.
This is the singular point of convergence between Adorno’s and Badiou’s
philosophy of affect: far from looking for a psychological or a physiological seal
of immediacy, both explore affect with the view of reaffirming the possibility of a
metaphysical experience. That being said, it should be taken into account that for
Badiou promise is not a modality in which truth could transpire. As a subjective
procedure of developing the consequences of the event in a specific situation,
truth can only be actual or does not exist. Beyond the satisfactions of the finite

75 Ibid., 374.
individual, then, Badiou defines ‘real happiness’ as the affect of subjectivation

and further characterizes it as enthusiasm in politics, bliss in science, pleasure
in art and joy in love.76
The emphasis on affirmation and actuality also entails that there can hardly be
a ‘true sadness’ as a correlate of subjective happiness. For Badiou, sadness seems
to be relegated to the travails of the human animal, except for ‘a certain measure
of despair’ involved in the rupture the contingent encounter with the event may
inflict upon an individual existence.77 Happiness itself, on the other hand, is not
defined as the pure annihilating joy of such rupture, but rather as the affect of
truth in its immanence. As such, it touches on the topic of the forthcoming third
volume of Being and Event, entitled Immanence of Truths, where Badiou plans to
address truth procedures no longer from the point of view of their radical break
with a specific situation or world, as in the first two volumes, but rather in their
own proper dynamic.78
It is perhaps tempting to dismiss Badiou’s examination of affect as a merely
ornamental addition to his theory of truth. It would not be wrong to claim that
real happiness is a secondary effect of truth procedures without consequence
for their unfolding itself. After all, happiness is a reward for the individual’s
integration into a subject, not an affective driver that would push the individual
towards such integration. On the other hand, however, Badiou uses his
booklet on happiness precisely to present a preview of the final volume of his
philosophical project. The question of happiness, he claims, is closely related
to the central aim of his forthcoming conclusion to the Being and Event trilogy,
namely to tackle the dialectics of finitude and infinity at play in the immanence
of truth: ‘Evidently, happiness is implicated in this affair since its definition
could be simply the following: happiness is a finite enjoyment of the infinite.’79 If
we now recall Badiou’s claim that new artistic forms are brought about precisely
as a consequence of witnessing or experiencing the infinite, it seems that – at
least in art – happiness is no longer merely the affective effect of truth but rather
an affect coinciding with the truth procedure itself.
In this sense it could be claimed that for Badiou as well as for Adorno, there
is an affect pertaining to form itself, an affective moment in the production of a
formal novelty that exempts form from mere formal academicism. In the case of
Adorno, Freud’s account of melancholy helped us to determine form’s relation to
76 Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel, 40, 51.

77 Ibid., 39.
78 Ibid., 59–60.
79 Ibid., 61.
the sensible in terms of a duplication of the object: first as a lost object and then as
an object of loss, produced by form itself as the appearance of the non-identical.
It is less certain that a psychoanalytic account of affect could help us propose a
productive reading of Badiou’s metaphysics of happiness. Badiou’s subject, after
all, is defined precisely as ‘the subject without object’,80 thereby excluding it from
the reach of analysis. As we have seen, the sensible does not appear to resist
formalization, which is simply defined as an access to the chaos of the sensible.
To nevertheless risk the Freudian perspective on the case, the absence of the
object in affective terms could be said to equal the transition from melancholy
to mania. As specified by Lacan, ‘what is at issue in mania is the nonfunction
of [the object] a and not simply its misrecognition. No a comes to ballast the
subject and this delivers him, in a way without any possibility of freedom, to
the sheer infinite and ludic metonymy of the signifying chain.’81 Considering
Lacan’s remark, characterizing the Badiouan subject of truth as manic proves
to be less odd than it may seem at first sight. For Badiou, the truth procedure
is a non-teleological and non-systematic (‘ludic’) series of interventions – local
instances of a virtually infinite truth – which do not lead to a final incarnation of
truth itself but are nevertheless faithfully bound (not ‘free’) to the event in terms
of strictly developing its consequences. It could therefore be claimed that the
truth procedure is structured as an infinite metonymical chain set loose by the
deactivation of the object (the event being the very definition of non-objectivity).
Conclusion
This parallel reading of Adorno and Badiou shows that their philosophical
conceptualizations of artistic truth share two elementary assumptions:
1. Form is the concept that allows philosophy to think artistic truth.

2. Form becomes the element of artistic truth through its capacity to be
transformed.
Both philosophers’ versions of these propositions, however, bring about different,

but complementary, issues. In Adorno, the violent relation of form to its other,
that is, the sensible material that it forms, obscures the productive capacity of
form to identify directly with the non-identical. In Badiou, on the other hand,

81 Lacan, Anxiety, 336.
this productive capacity becomes absolute and there seems to be no other to

which form would relate.
I have attempted to resolve these issues by adding the third proposition,
situating form’s capacity of truth in its ability to be immanently affected:
3. The ability of form to be transformed stems from the fact that the process
of formalization produces a surplus, an object that immanently affects
form. Formal transformation is played out in relation to this evasive object
through which form is affected.
If there is an affect pertaining to form itself it is because form is not merely

related to the other that it forms, but is also in a (non-)relation to an object
that it itself produces in the process of formalization. The productivity of form
that makes it the site of truth in art can thus be understood as circling around
this evasive object: either in the manner of melancholy (the non-identical in
Adorno) or in the manner of mania (the truth procedure in Badiou).
Index
Adorno philosophy 10, 69–74, 81–2, 96–101,

art 142–6, 179–83, 197–216 109–11, 176–8
artistic form 203, 205–9, 211–16 time 71–2
Hegel 14, 162–5 unconditional 28, 161–3
intervention 165–8
multiplicities 207–9 dialectics 9–12, 14–16, 148–9, 156–70
music 178–89, 195
Negative Dialectics 14, 162–4, 174–5 event
non-identity 139 annihilation 49–50
ontology 201–3 Hegel 55–62
philosophy 171–3 intervention 165–70
reality 202–3, 208 reality 15, 64, 177–8
subject 159–62 truth 14–17, 79–82, 167–8
thought 142–3 world 14–15
Wagner 9
affirmation freedom
dialectic 158–9 Adorno 180
event 59, 62, 68, 165–70 decision 141–6
and negation 9–11, 14–16, 21, 147–9, Hegel 58, 149–52
170 Kant 27
world 17 negativity 147–52, 169
antiphilosophy 90–2, 99–112 subject 150–2
art Freud, Sigmund 52 n.4, 53 n.7, 119,
Adorno 142–6, 179–83, 197–216 212–16
music 179–96
Nietzsche 10 generic 14, 30–1, 125, 129
and philosophy 80–1, 179 German Idealism 69–70, 85–6, 88, 104
and politics 143–5
truth 197–207, 209–11 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
absolute knowing 55–8
being Adorno 14, 162–5
art 96–8, 125–30 Being 37–41, 62–7
in Hegel 37–42, 62–7 determinate negation 64, 152–8
and Heidegger 118, 121–4, 129, 201–5 and the event 55–62
in Husserl 11–12 freedom 58, 149–52
idea 123 and Heidegger 114
mathematics 14, 125–6 infinity 36–7, 67–8, 70–1
one 75–82 and Kant 20, 37–8, 42, 70–2, 74, 84–7
ontology 71, 76 and Marx 104–6
qua Being 96–8 Master-Slave-dialectic 11–12
mathematics 36–7, 128
conditions negativity 147–52
music 185–96 reality 38, 40, 46, 49–50
218 Index
subject 38, 43–50, 64–7, 169–70 Lacan, Jacques

truth 56, 58–9, 62–3 antiphilosophy 100, 102
world 44–5, 59, 105 melancholy 212
Heidegger, Martin object a 215
being 118, 121–4, 129, 201–5 real 21, 49–50, 120
Hegel 114
Kant 12–14 Malevich, Kazimir 41, 48
mathematics 121–30 Marx, Karl
ontology 119–23 antiphilosophy 102–12
philosophy 113–18 Hegel 104–6
Plato 52–3, 124 philosophy 90–112
poetry 116–19, 123–5, 130, 201–3 politics 107
subject 119 reality 102, 104–9
technology 121–3, 127 truth 106
truth 135–6, 209 world 103–7
world 121 mathematics
Husserl, Edmund 11–12 being 14, 125–6
Hegel 36–7, 128
idea Heidegger 121–30
and being 123 multiplicities 202
ideal 133, 140, 207 ontology 14, 96, 125–9
Kant 31–3 and structuralism 13–14
music 181–3 Meillassoux, Quentin 189–91
truth 133 multiplicities, multiple
ideology 87–8 Adorno 207–9
infinity inconsistent multiplicity 22, 41, 96
Hegel 36–7, 67–8, 70–1 mathematics 202
Kant 70–1 the one 75–83, 96
mathematics 124–5 sameness 31
subject 157 world 35–6, 93–4, 137–9
Jesus of Nazareth 45–50 negativity, negation

and affirmation 9–11, 14–16, 21, 147–9,
Kant, Immanuel 170
and Adorno 142, 174–5 determinate negation 64, 150, 152–8
Critique of Practical Reason 26–9 doubled negation 32, 40, 156–60
Critique of Pure Reason 22–6 freedom 147–52, 169
Critique of the Power of Judgment Hegel 147–52
29–30 Negative Dialectics 137, 142–3, 162–7
freedom 27 Nietzsche 10
and Hegel 20, 37–8, 42, 70–2, 74, 84–7 one 156–8, 164
and Heidegger 13–14 philosophy 81, 83, 108
idea 31–3 subject 147–9, 158, 163–4
infinity 70–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 100
ontology 22–3, 38
reality Kant 20–6, 29 one
subject 19–33, 71 being 75–82
thing-in-itself 20 count-as-one 202
universal 30–3 and the multiple 75–83, 96
world 20–1, 32–3 and negation 156–8, 164
Index 219
ontology reality, real

Adorno 201–3 Adorno 202–3, 208
being 71, 76 derealization 32–3
determinate negation 154–7 event 15, 64, 177–8
event 64 Hegel 38, 40, 46, 49–50
Heidegger 119–23 Kant 20–6, 29
Kant 22–3, 38 knowledge 58
mathematics 14, 96, 125–9 Lacan 21, 49–50, 120
poetry 200–3 Marx 102, 104–9
situation 41–2, 96–8 the One 156–8
philosophy 82–4, 87, 94, 179, 205
Parmenides 52–3, 114 politics 93
St. Paul 22, 45, 48–50, 148, 160–2 situation 120
philosophy subject 151–5, 161–2, 172–3
conditions 10, 69–74, 81–2, 96–101,
109–11, 176–8 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11, 132–43
Marx 90–112 Schoenberg, Arnold 182–8
negativity 81, 83, 108 Spinoza, Baruch 43–4
poetry 83–4 situation
politics 82, 90, 111, 132–3 event 15–16
reality 82–4, 87, 94, 179, 205 historical situation 165–8
subject 74, 80 impossible 33
time 51–3 ontology 41–2, 96–8
truth 79–82, 92–5, 177–9 real 120
universal 83, 94 void 47
world 69–70 state 42, 138, 150
Plato subject
Heidegger 52–3, 124 Adorno 159–62
Parmenides 52–3, 114 decision 139–42
The Republic 132, 136 freedom 150–2
sophists 99, 118, 127 Hegel 38, 43–50, 64–7, 169–70
truths 12–13 Heidegger 119
poetry infinity 157
Heidegger 116–19, 123–5, 130, intervention 165–8
201–3 Kant 19–33, 71
Mallarmé 190 negativity 147–9, 158, 163–4
ontology 200–3 and object 215
philosophy 83–4 philosophy 74, 80
politics reality 151–5, 161–2, 172–3
antiphilosophy 109 truth 14, 160–3
art 143–5
Marx 107 time 51–3, 72–4, 175–8
and music 183, 186, 188–9 truth
and the party 144 absolute 62–3
philosophy 82, 90, 111, 132–3 art 197–207, 209–11
Realpolitik 93 being 96–8, 125–30
resistance 13, 16 decision 140–3
truth 95, 137 determination 152–4
psychoanalysis 120, 200, 204, event 14–17, 79–82, 167–8
212, 215 and the good 131–3
220 Index
Hegel 56, 58–9, 62–3 truths 13–14

Heidegger 135–6, 209
idea 133 void 22–6, 41, 47, 81, 98
immanence 214
Marx 106 Wagner, Richard 9, 182–95, 198–9
music 182–6 world
philosophy 79–82, 92–5, 177–9 affirmation 17
politics 95, 137 contemporary world 172–4
Plato 12–13 event 14–15
subject 14, 160–3 exception 72–3
truth procedure 15, 45, 59, 69, 148, 177, Hegel 44–5, 59, 105
184–5, 210, 214–15 Heidegger 121
universal 13–14 Kant 20–1, 32–3
untruth 135–6 Marx 103–7
world 137–44 music 10, 184–6
multiplicities 35–6, 93–4, 137–9
universal nihilistic world 93–4
concrete universality 45–50 philosophy 69–70
Kant 30–3 truth 137–44
philosophy 83, 94 worldlessness 144, 176–7

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Badiou and the German

Badiou and Indifferent Being, William Watkin

Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Christopher Norris

Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nick Hewlett

Introduction – The Transmission and Its Moment Jan Völker 1

It all started with a conference, one of the classical constellations of a

Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, mathematician and political

Rok Benčin is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre

Svenja Bromberg is Lecturer in social theory and Marxism in the Department

Justin Clemens is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. His

Alexander García Düttmann teaches philosophy at the University of the

Dominik Finkelde SJ is professor of contemporary philosophy and epistemology

Christoph Menke is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Goethe

Frank Ruda is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Dundee,

Jelica Sumic is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research

Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy – the title is an indication of

There is a slight shift to be recognized in this quote: the German move is rather

of the problem that is classically referred to as a problem of influences and

French philosophers went seeking something in Germany, then, through the

a small book on Wittgenstein8 and a seminar and texts on Nietzsche.9 While

8 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso, 2011).

a starting point for the continuation of the discussion of philosophical junctions,

of antiphilosophy – as a specific philosophical strategy – can be applied to

beyond self-determination, Badiou insists on the necessity of affirmation,

Beyond Negative Dialectics

My goal today is to inscribe some German references – Heidegger, Adorno

Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject

detail below. In particular, I will attempt to expound on it in the context of the

An evacuation of the thing-in-itself in fact equals a dissolution of the subjective

Two reasons have determined the choice of this quotation as my point of

6 Ibid., 80 (my translation).

So we have to be quite precise about this point: our phenomenal world is not

Kant presents us with a genuine doctrine of the real.

And the second:

With respect to the subject, the transcendental subject is a point of the real.8

own transcendental condition of possibility. At least this is my understanding

transcendentalism because it is where an empirical externality is reinvaded by

of the trans-empirical empirical. Furthermore, this is the figure of the subject

University Press, 2003; hereinafter GMM).

this not-known is transformed from a lack, a negativity, into a positive, framing

where he exists as a ‘proper self ’, that is, as a practical subject, as a rationally

Now on to the Critique of the Power of Judgement.25 To refresh our memories: I

adding the notion of a sensible feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The feeling of

itself in its irreducible singularity. The singular is that which, in a particularity,

purely hallucinatory realizations of the subjective desire of reason. Thus, we could

that is at work in reflecting judgement is a thought embodied in particular

Lack and Concept: On Hegelian

5 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 141.

such an interpretation appears to be in fact also urgent with regard to Hegel at

To be sure, Hegel emphasizes to a certain extent the positive effect of this

Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112.

Hegelian infinity is an intrinsic property of the finite. Therefore Badiou

If there is a fundamental conviction that Hegel as a dialectical idealist and

empiricism and rationalism exists exactly in not having delivered a synthesis

situation, can never be entirely excluded by thinking. A gap or divide between

Antigone exposes such void within a situation in a Badiouan as well as in a

39 Badiou, Being and Event, 99.

Subject within substance

to this concept of substance the concept of the subject, opposing Spinoza

For Hegel, therefore, substance via ‘subject-as-substance’ is affected by a

51 Badiou, Being and Event, 182.

Hegel’s Immanence of Truths

Je crois, moi, qu’il n’y a pas de précurseur.

Badiou and Indifferent Being, William Watkin

Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Christopher Norris

8 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso, 2011).

Kant presents us with a genuine doctrine of the real.

With respect to the subject, the transcendental subject is a point of the real.8

University Press, 2003; hereinafter GMM).

5 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 141.

Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112.

39 Badiou, Being and Event, 99.

51 Badiou, Being and Event, 182.

Hegel’s Immanence of Truths

1 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Images du temps présent: 2001–2004 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 306.

25 Hegel, Science of Logic, 29.

From the point to the line to the finite

63 Hegel, Science of Logic, 99.

4 Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 12.

8 Cf. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 11.

17 Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Desire’, 39.

Renewing philosophy from the midst of its crises

8 Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 13.

23 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2010), 4.

28 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 113.

41 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2011), xxxi.

46 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 143.

From antiphilosophy in general to the case of Marx

54 See Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 11.

61 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 79–80.

65 Badiou, Conditions, 19, 21.

74 Ibid., 10, my trans. (Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 10).

91 Marx, Early Writings, 208–9.

Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 81.

Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 425.