Essay Review of Badiou's MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR RÉEL

Essay review of Alain Badiou's MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR RÉEL by Terence Blake In his new book MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR RÉEL ("Metaphysics of Real Happiness", 2015 ), Alain Badiou asserts and attempts to elucidate the relation between "real happiness" and the philosophical life, between the cultivation of a happy life and the search for truth. He tells us from the beginning that for him the link between philosophy and happiness is an existential necessity: "every philosophy, even and above all if it is underpinned by complex scientific knowledge, innovative works of art, revolutionary politics, and intense loves, is a metaphysics of happiness, or else it is not worth an hour of effort" (Métaphysique du Bonheur Réel , page 7, my translation). Despite the edifying topic of the book Badiou proceeds quite systematically, and even gives us a summary of what is to follow in the Introduction. In this review I will follow the plan that he sketches out there. 1) "First I will proceed to a general determination of what can be today the interest of philosophy" (8). According to Badiou, philosophy is assailed on all sides by the ideology of democratic materialism, which pretends that we are already free and happy. Spectacle and communication have replaced the effort of the concept, enjoyment has replaced happiness, security has replaced passion, hedonistic calculus has replaced love. Continuing in a Deleuzian vein, Badiou presents his philosophy of real happiness as a philosophy of revolutionary desire. He claims to “take from poetry” the idea that philosophy “as oriented towards the universality of happiness” has four fundamental dimensions: revolt, logic, universality, and risk. According to Badiou, these four components of the desire of philosophy (and of the life and work of the philosopher) are also the four components of the desire for revolution. However, modern society places many obstacles in the way of this desire, both repressing it and ideologically undermining it: “the contemporary world … exerts a strong negative pressure on the four dimensions of such a desire” (12). 1) Revolt: supposedly there is no need for revolt as we are already free. But for Badiou this freedom is merely the hegemony of the market, which imposes on us the obligation to consume in a world of merchandise. 2) Logic: practically there is no need for logic and demonstration, as we are immersed in a flood of communication. But for Badiou this world is incoherent, a spectacle without memory. What it lacks most essentially is a “logic of time”. 3) Universality: intellectually there is no need for universality as we have money (materialised universality). But for Badiou this world is fragmentary, based on the competition of specialised interests and the tyranny of experts. 4) Risk: existentially there is no need, and no room, for chance, we calculate the risks and insure against them. But for Badiou the felicific calculus can never give us more than mediocre enjoyment or narcisstic satisfaction , as “real happiness is incalculable”. Thus the four components of real desire, of the “philosophical desire for a revolution of existence” (revolt, logic, universality, and risk) encounter in the modern world four corresponding obstacles: the rule of merchandise, communication, money, and specialisation, “the whole bound subjectively by the calculus of personal security” (15). There is a balance between the components of revolt and risk (which embody chaos) and those of logic and universality (which incarnate system). Despite the essential role played in his philosophy by non-academic or chaotic elements, Badiou’s self-styled “classicism” often gives primacy to the system, even if his system is non-deterministic. According to Badiou, contemporary philosophy presupposes two fundamental axioms: "first axiom: the metaphysics of truth has become impossible; second axiom: language is the crucial place of thought because that is where the question of meaning is at stake". These two axioms underly the twin themes, shared by both Continental and analytic philosophy, of the end of metaphysics and of the linguistic turn. Badiou argues that these axioms do not just express technical orientations whose scope remains internal to philosophical development: "there is in these two axioms - impossibility of the metaphysics of truth and consitutive character of the question of language - a great peril". The peril is to philosophical desire itself, and thus to the general desire to change the world for the better and to attain to "true life". He warns us of "the incapacity of philosophy to sustain its own desire on the basis of these axioms, facing the pressure that the contemporary world exerts on this desire". Badiou makes these two axioms responsible both for relativism and for democratic materialism. It is striking that in this book Badiou lists once again what he takes to be the three main orientations of contemporary philosophy: hermeneutic, analytic, and postmodern. Over the past few decades, he has given very similar accounts of the main philosophical orientations available to us. In particular, Badiou's description of the "postmodern" orientation is preponderantly informed by his perspective on Lyotard, and reiterates the oft-repeated charge of Lyotard's giving undue primacy to language. I think this accusation is unfair to Lyotard, in that even in his major work THE DIFFEREND, where the basic element is called the "phrase", this element is both linguistic and physical. Further, what Lyotard calls "regimes of phrases" (scientific, political, artistic, and ethical) are unacknowledged precursors of Badiou's truth procedures (and also of Latour's modes of existence). Indeed, Lyotard is mainly known now through Badiou's vision (survivor selection bias). So I think it is high time to re-equilibrate things, and to re-instate Lyotard's philosophy as a major influence on contemporary French thought. Badiou warns us that the only alternative permitted by these two axioms is between relativism and dogmatism: either philosophy installs itself in the plurality of language games, and all universality is lost in specialisation, particularism, and identity politics. This is the peril of pluralism. Or else it accepts the hegemony of one language, that it designates as the only one that can save us. This is the peril of monism. Yet Badiou's own philosophical language is itself in danger of imposing itself as the one true language that saves. Under the axiom of the primacy of language, neither the pluralism of language games (Lyotard, and also analytic philosophy) nor the monism of a privileged language (Heidegger, potentially Badiou himself, and any other systematic philosopher) are adequate to the task as Badiou sees it: "They do not respond to the challenge that the contemporary world opposes to philosophy's vocation to the universal" (18). NB: Badiou's emphasis here on the idea that the plurality of languages and of language games is the "rule of the world" allows us to formulate a problem that one can see in Latour's AIME project. The vision that Latour proposes of the Moderns in terms of a plurality of modes of truth-saying and of modes of existence is very close to the Moderns' own natural vision of itself. Over and above the descriptive question (does Latour or Badiou get the description right?) there is the concern that this very form of description is incomplete, and so stifles the desire for real change. Latour seems to recognise this, as he grafts onto his "anthropological" description an imperative, the call to save Gaia, that comes from outside and which, despite his rousing rhetoric, does not cohere with all the subtle ontological and semiotic distinctions that Latour himself is trying to make. 2) "Secondly, to clarify what educates us in the direction of such happiness and of its link with the desire for philosophy, I will speak of antiphilosophy....Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan. My thesis is that these antiphilosophers … are necessary for us, so that our classicism will not be transformed into academicism, which is the principal enemy of philosophy, and so of happiness: In effect, the affect by which academic discourse can infallibly be recognised is boredom”. (8-9). This passage takes up Badiou’s critique of "atonal" worlds, those worlds that are without affective tonality, and reiterates Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of academic philosophy, or "reflection", as turning its back on intensity. For Badiou, contemporary philosophy is the ideological reflection of capitalism, which is based on the universal circulation of all things, on the weakening of the social bond, and on the dissolution of intensities. It is interesting to see Badiou hard at work becoming a philosopher of desire, affect, becoming, and intensity, forty years after Deleuze and Lyotard. Badiou in this book expounds his philosophical system without the imposing technical apparatus that he develops in his larger works, and considers what sense philosophy in general, and his own philosophy in particular, can have for our lives in the contemporary world. In his "wisdom of life" formulations he tries to absorb the teachings of the so-called “anti-philosophers”, who are rather for Badiou the philosopher’s educators, and who “teach us that all that has true value is gained … by the effect, existentially experienced, of a rupture with the course of the world” (9). Antiphilosophy contains a radical critique of modern society and of academic philosophy. It is thus for Badiou an essential step on the intense path of the "materialist dialectic" that he opposes to our atonal world of democratic materialism. It is in this sense, according to him, that antiphilosophy "educates" us. In particular, antiphilosophy educates us to the value of rupture. However, ultimately what dominates is not rupture but absorption into Truths. No doubt he is trying to absorb the teachings of Lacan, of Deleuze and Guatttari, of Lyotard and of Derrida as well as those of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. But Badiou's espousal of the antiphilosophical impulse of singularity and of rupture with dominant opinions and ways of life, is immediately counter-balanced in his system by the opposing imperative of universality: “The fundamental desire of philosophy is to think and to realise the universal … because a happiness that is not universal … is not real happiness” (12). No argument is given in the text to justify the primacy given to universality, it is just imported and asserted at the moment that Badiou talks about Truths. "The fundamental desire of philosophy is to think and to realise the universal" (12). This is where Badiou parts company with Deleuze and with the pluralists. Deleuze emphasises that the universal exists only as product, and is in no case an absolute requirement or desideratum. “In this commitment of thought, the share of chance remains ineffaceable” (12). It would seem that Feyerabend, like Deleuze, gives an even greater role to chance and accident than Badiou. In a short article ironically called “Not a Philosopher” Feyerabend decries the systematic approach adopted by academic philosophers and declares: “I did not invent the opinions I have. I accidentally picked them up, from newspapers, plays, novels, political debates, and even from a philosophy book now and then”. Deleuze in DIALOGUES uses this same idea , and the same term, of “picking up” one’s ideas by chance encounter. Both, however, refuse the primacy of “universality”. Nonetheless, Badiou is close to Deleuze and Feyerabend on these points, and can also be seen as implicitly giving his reply to François Laruelle’s non-philosophy. Badiou is claiming not to be an “academic” philosopher in a fundamental sense. His articulation of the four truth conditions for any philosophy (science, art, politics, love) parallels Deleuze's insistence that philosophy exists only in relation to a non-philosophical outside. Badiou calls “antiphilosophers” thinkers who have a more open and ample thought, and reassures himself by incorporating their lessons into his own system. This is part of Badiou’s technique of non-engagement, he excludes certain thinkers from philosophy, and then reabsorbs them. Yet he is learning from them. Some philosophers do not even do that. 3) "In the third chapter, I grapple with the question that the modern man as well as the convinced Marxist always address to the philosopher: what use are you, with your abstract ratiocinations?" What use is an abstract system, when the real task is concrete? How does philosophy help us change the world? Badiou replies by analysing the concept of changing the world and finds that "there is a subjective link between the existence of an answer to the question of "how to change the world" and real happiness" (9). Happiness for Badiou is the subjectivisation of the consequences of a local event, when under the repetition imposed by the laws of a world a new possibility is discovered, one which was deemed impossible until then. This becoming possible of what was thought to be possible is accompanied by "discovering in oneself an active capacity that one did not know that one posssessed" (48). This subjectivisation is what Badiou calls "fidelity to the event", and involves saying "yes" to the new possibilities opened up by an event and to the consequences: "To be faithful is to become the subject of change, by accepting the consequences of an event" (50). One becomes a new subject, both part of the old world and belonging to the rupture with that world effectuated by the event. One conclusion of this model is that happiness does not mean being free to do what I want, because "what I want" is part of the world of repetition. Real freedom for Badiou is accepting the discipline that comes with following the prescriptions of the real (as revealed in the event) against those of the world: "a subject exists at the point where it is impossible to distinguish between discipline and liberty" (52). Badiou gives the examples of artistic creation and of scientific research, but I have always found his pronouncements on "disipline" in relation to politics both obscure and ominous. Badiou emphasises that this subjectivisation has nothing to do with a politics of identities. The only possible subject of change is generic, it cannot be closed in an identity. From the objective point of view of the world a subject always has an identity, it is always immanent to its world. "But from the point of view of the process of emancipation, a subject, as immanent exception, is generic and stateless" (52). It is necessary to distinguish satisfaction and happiness. Satisfaction comes from being adapted to the laws of this world, happiness comes from being faithful to the prescriptions of the real and to the local consequences of an event. Satisfaction is resignation, repetition, conformism, consensus, "subjective death". Happiness is affirmation, novelty, revolt, creation, "true life". Sometimes we must choose happiness against satisfaction. For Badiou the satisfactions proposed by this world are ultimately mediocre, dreary, and sad. However, there is a price to pay for choosing happiness as the affect immanent to a process of change. Turning this consequence on its head, Badiou concludes that the answer to the question of how to change the world is by being happy, as subjectivation of the process of change (i.e. of political emancipation, artistic creation, scientific research, or amorous transformation). 4) "The fourth and last chapter is more subjective. It is a matter of giving a local example of the strategies and affects of philosophy: the current phase of my philosophical thinking-writing". In this chapter, Badiou tells us the story of his philosophical voyage, beginning with his first major theoretical work THEORY OF THE SUBJECT. This book was published in French 33 years ago, in 1982, but it presents the content of his seminar from 7th January 1975 to 9th June 1979. Badiou's first "great" book BEING AND EVENT was published only 6 years later (1988, 560 pages) and contained material from his seminars from 1980 to 1988. Some 18 years later the second volume of BEING AND EVENT was published: LOGICS OF WORLDS (2006, 630 pages), containing the substance of his seminars from 1989 to 2002. The philosophical voyage is still under way, and this little book (90 pages) both recounts the path already traversed and indicates the way forward. In effect, Badiou envisages writing a third volume, whose title would be THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS. This projected book is meant to complete the system that Badiou has been elaborating during his philosophical voyage, and it “will bear, amongst other things, on the whole of what happens for a determinate individual when he is incorporated into a truth procedure, when he is taken into the Idea”, (57). Badiou links the various anti-philosophical themes of chance, risk, freedom, and change to the notion of negation: “one can say that I have been pursuing from one end of my philosophical enterprise to the other … a meditation on negation. I am simply trying to explain the possibility of change, the possibility of passing from a certain regime of laws of that which is to another regime, by the mediation of a protocol of a truth and of its subject. I am thus in dialectical thought, and in a dialectical theory of happiness, which is the paraconsistent negation of finitude by a complete infinite” (82). So Badiou can say that his thought embodies a dialectics without determinism: “as my dialectical thought includes a figure of hasard, it is non determinist” (82). Hegel’s Absolute is deterministic. Badiou argues that as he incorporates an element of chance in his system, his Absolute is nondeterministic. He tells us that in the futue book THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS he will discuss Hegel’s concept of the Absolute, as he agrees with Hegel and Plato that “all real happiness is a sort of provisional access to the Absolute” (82). Describing the forthcoming book: “with the presence of an aleatory element, I introduce the principle of a cut which is not exactly homogeneous to the classical principles of negation. That is why, finally, I will be using three different and interwoven logics: classical logic, intuitionist logic, and paraconsistent logic” (83). “At the same time, I will raise to the absolute the ontological system of reference – the thought of the pure multiple – by means of the truly sensational theory of “very big infinities” Threefold logic and infinity of infinities will be the key of a general theory of happiness” (83). One can praise Badiou for his readiness to take these “antiphilosophers” seriously, despite what remains classical in his own project. The only philosophers that I have ever truly liked have quite a big dose of antiphilosophy, although this term of Badiou’s is biased. One could equally call them the “real” philosophers, but this would amount to just turning the dualism around without changing its structure. Maybe we could put them all together, and talk about who is more or less reified on certain points. However, it is true that Badiou englobes all these influences again under the reified belief “I am a philosopher”. I am reminded of the beginning of RHIZOME, where Deleuze and Guattari say that they signed the text with their own names but that this does not make it an identitarian text – no reified belief in their own identity is implied or required. The analogy that they use is with people saying “The sun is rising” when they know this is just a manner of speaking. Deleuze and Guattari have no such belief, as they replace belief in identities with faith in becomings. Feyerabend published an article called NOT A PHILOSOPHER, and I think it is based on this same de-reifying strategy, as for me he is very obviously a philosopher in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Badiou is different from the anti-philosophers in that he believes in the identity of the philosopher, despite attempting to democratise it through the notion of the “desire of philosophy” that he deploys in this book. He talks about the need for the philosopher of effectuating a “rupture with the course of the world”, and so implicitly of taking the path through solitude and suffering, but he undoes this step by insisting on the need to “incorporate” oneself into Truths in order to be a Subject and to know happiness. One could call this the path of individuation, but people tend to talk about individuation as some sort of euphoric process, and in my view they are dis-individuated in doing so. I have sometimes felt obliged to intervene in such discussions to say that real individuation hurts and that sometimes it stinks. It is no euphoric individual or collective promenade in the fields of positivity. This is Jung’s point of view, that in the process of individuation one goes repeatedly through the experiences not just of difficulty and failure but of decomposition i.e. of rotting. So in the process of individuation (or of subjectivation) the “rupture” is by far primary over the incorporation. My problem with Badiou is that ultimately for him incorporation has primacy over rupture and individuation. This is one reason why I prefer to read Badiou without the identity that he himself seems to require. Read in that way certain ideas and phrases can be extrapolated out of their limiting context and can be used to stimulate thought. Badiou continues his implicit polemic against pluralism, maintaining that philosophy must "remove the obstacle that the world opposes to its universality" (21). Badiou puts the stake of philosophy in the opposition between universality and relativism. He seems to have no conception of pluralist realism, yet this is arguably the position of his illustrious predecessors (Deleuze, Lyotard), and of contemporary rival programmes such as Latour's AIME PROJECT. On the troubling use of the term "universal" by Badiou: the universality that he talks of is not a logical or scientific category, but designates the possibility for a truth arising in a particular world to be understood and put to work in another world. The truth is not transported unchanged, but is adapted, modified, and transformed. In this sense "universal" in Badiou's acception is close to "untimely" in Deleuze's usage. "Happiness can be defined there as the affirmative experience of an interruption of finitude" (10). The hypothesis of finitude is that of democratic materialism, the hypothesis of infinity is that of the materialist dialectic. It would seem that democratic materialism is realist only in a limited sense, its realism is the adoption of a normed approach to the real, but that the materialist dialectic introduces a non-normed realism of truths. "Real happiness is of the order of concentation, of intensification" (14). Badiou as philosopher of intensity resists the "imaginary dispersion" of the society of the spectacle, or the incoherence of communication. I kept expecting some inspiring revelation from Badiou on the relation between philosophy and happiness, but the book is disappointing from that angle. Badiou talks about the connection between the practice of philosophy and the pursuit of a complex, difficult, set of relations to the sciences, the arts, politics, and love. These "truth procedures" are the non-philosophical wellsprings of our desire for philosophy and of our philosophical activity, whether we are professional philosophers or not. He could have added religion, or sport, but this is not Badiou's style - he prefers a very limited yet concentrated field of practices. But what is philosophy for Badiou? Isn't he reserving the consequences of love and struggle in the world, of artistic creation and of scientific research for the philosopher? Isn't Badiou's conception of happiness totally elitist? He defines philosophy as a "discipline of thought": "Philosophy for me is that discipline of thought, that singular discipline, which sets out from the conviction that there are truths". There are truths in love, in research, in creation, in struggle. It is the relation to these truths that produces happiness as something more than just intellectual and emotional satisfaction. "This supposes a concept of truth" (83). Badiou is honest enough to continue: "This "truth" can very well receive another name". This qualification provides a very interesting response to the possible objection that he is imposing a new monism by means of his own privileged vocabulary. Badiou assures us that this is not the case, that he dies not invest exclusive meaning in one particular set of terms, and that he is willing to concede that other philosophers have been working on the same sort of problems as him, despite their different terminology: "Thus in a large part of Deleuze's work, what we call 'truth' here is called ´meaning'" (83-84). This concept of truth ties it to a plane of immanence, and so to the notion of "true life". For Badiou philosophy must include "the conviction that the true life can be experienced in immanence" (84). No transcendent guarantees, no future reward. True life must be lived and felt in the here and now, in an affect that manifests within our lives. Badiou is quick to add that there is nothing negative in this affect, and nothing "sacrificial" in it. In his eyes, this means that there is nothing religious about it. Yet Bruno Latour's description of the religious mode of existence also centers on this immanence, assigning the need for sacrifice and the belief in future rewards to a set of category mistakes. One wonders if Badiou has good reasons for excluding religion from his truth procedures, or if his hostility to its introduction as a "fifth" procedure is simply the reflection of his leftist doxa. There are no doubt many concepts and arguments in Badiou's work that are determined by the doxa of his particular world, and that could be criticised for their particularism. But his definition of philosophy means engaging with truths, wherever they are to be found, and struggling against the doxa, of every world even his own. His third volume of BEING AND EVENT will allow him to say from the viewpoint of the doxa of his world: "Philosophy is me" (85). This would be to endorse the triumph of the system over the exception, of the world over the real. Yet Badiou is not in favour of such self-satisfaction (what Laruelle calls the principle of sufficient philosophy). So he concludes that philosophy "is equally, egalitarianly, all you who are reading me, and who are thinking while doing this with me or against me (85).