Essay review of Alain Badiou's MTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR REL

by Terence Blake
In his new book MTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR REL ("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" (Mtaphysique du Bonheur Rel , 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, Badious 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 Badious critique of "atonal" worlds, those worlds that are without affective
tonality, and reiterates Deleuze and Guattaris 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 philosophers 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 ones
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 Franois Laruelles 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 Badious 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). Hegels 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
Hegels 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 Badious 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
Jungs 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).