Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event

PART I

SETTING

UP THE

ENCOUNTER

ONE

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Let’s imagine that a certain kind of philosophical thinking, one that in English-speaking contexts goes by the name Continental, passes from Germany to France after World War II. After Husserl and Heidegger, with an assist from Bergson and Sartre, philosophy switches territories and gears and becomes structuralism, whose main purpose (again from the standpoint of English readers of French philosophy) is to become poststructuralism. Poststructuralism has integrity as a (French) philosophical movement, although it immediately bifurcates into deconstruction, which attaches to the proper name of Jacques Derrida, and postmodernism, which is invented by Jean-François Lyotard but is useful as a catchall to encompass most forms of poststructuralism. Let’s imagine that there are two major French philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century who are not easily assimilated into these categorical schemas: Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Finally, let’s consider that there are two main problems of philosophy toward the end of the twentieth century: First, the general problem posed by the linguistic turn that affects all forms of philosophy in the twentieth century, analytic as well as Continental—this turn eclipses both the traditional philosophical concerns with ontology as well as Heidegger’s renewal of the question of being, which is also posed in terms of language. Second, the problem that haunts twentieth-century philosophy, especially after World War II, is the problem of totality, which distinguishes a postwar and post-Holocaust (as well as anti-Hegelian) philosophical attitude.

Whether the linguistic turn is associated with Frege or Nietzsche or Saussure, language becomes the fundamental problem of philosophy during the twentieth century. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger take up the question of language and its relation to reality in different ways. Jürgen Habermas claims that we can see a paradigm shift from philosophy of consciousness to philosophy of language around the turn of the twentieth century.¹ At the beginning of Being and Event, Badiou declares that Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher, primarily because he renews the question of being.² However, Badiou rejects Heidegger’s poetic discourse as the primary model for philosophy, opting instead for a mathematical ontology. Mathematics, not poetry, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being.³ According to Badiou, there is little doubt that the century has been ontological, and that this destiny is far more essential than the ‘linguistic turn’ with which it has been credited.⁴ Badiou opposes the linguistic turn in philosophy that characterizes philosophy of much of the century, and calls for a renewed formalization in and of philosophy.

Heidegger raises the ontological question, but then he links ontology with language. Post-Heideggerian French philosophy, also influenced by Saussure’s linguistics, remains obsessed with questions of language, and how it affects the discourses of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Deleuze avoided these dominant discourses of hermeneutics and phenomenology, and he never viewed language as a fundamental problem. Deleuze’s philosophy was always already ontological, and it was not shaped by the linguistic turn. Badiou follows Deleuze in evading the consequences of the linguistic turn, although Badiou is more invested in formalizing this ontology in mathematical terms, whereas Deleuze is more interested in problematizing philosophy, that is, seeing how philosophy asks questions and poses problems. Badiou’s philosophy and his mathematics are axiomatic, whereas Deleuze’s philosophy is more unsettled, and in a continual state of becoming.

The problem of totality is partly the theoretical response of European philosophy to the shocking forms of totalitarianism that emerged in the twentieth century, most famously under the names of fascism (Nazism) and communism (Stalinism).⁵ In order to avoid or oppose totality, philosophers have sought ways of affirming pluralism, perspectivalism, difference, and multiplicity. Continental philosophers attempt to think and to thematize that which resists thought and escapes thematization. Here the immediate enemy is Hegel’s encyclopedic system of dialectics, because it is seen as swallowing all forms of thought and life. Kierkegaard’s existential protest against Hegel is valorized as an authentic opposition to a totalizing and dehumanizing system. Although in the early twentieth century a Marxist Hegelianism was extremely influential in French thought, primarily by way of Alexandre Kojève’s incredible synthesis,⁶ after the crimes of Stalinism became apparent Hegel’s thought became suspected of being complicit with the logic of totalitarianism.

For most of the late twentieth century, Hegel was viewed oppositionally, and Deleuze was one of the main philosophers who wanted nothing to do with Hegelian dialectics. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, Hegelianism has been rehabilitated beyond the poststructuralist critique, which has been shown to be a caricature by the important work of Slavoj Žižek, Catherine Malabou, and others.⁷ Behind the problem of totality, however, lies the problem of the One, and hidden in the shadow of Hegel looms Plato. Deleuze opposes Platonism and the One by liberating simulacra from their enslavement to models, forms, or copies, while Badiou rehabilitates Plato but rejects the One. Both Badiou and Deleuze valorize the multiple, but in different ways, as will become clear in this study. Deleuze is able to affirm multiplicity by opposing Platonism, and he sees the death of God as the dismantling of the foundational One. Badiou, however, claims that Deleuze cannot escape the shadow of the One, and ends up grounding multiplicity in a renewed vision of the One, whereas for Badiou an affirmation of Plato is possible that does not necessitate an embrace of the One. A genuine Platonic multiplicity can be achieved mathematically, by means of set theory, and this set theory provides Badiou an ontology that frames an event. Even though the event cannot be prescribed from mathematical being as irreducible multiplicity, an understanding of being allows one to understand how it is that events can happen. Finally, the follow-up to Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, develops a transcendental logic that explains how events irrupt out of being.

This book offers a counterreading of Deleuze over against and beyond Badiou’s powerful critique in his influential work Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, published in French in 1997, shortly after Deleuze’s death in 1995, and translated into English in 2000. Badiou was inspired by a series of written letters between himself and Deleuze between 1992 and 1994 that eventually came to an end and an impasse. Deleuze told Badiou that he did not want his letters published, declaring them too ‘abstract,’ not up to the occasion.⁸ After Deleuze died, Badiou was asked to write an essay on Deleuze, and he says that he saw this as one last, posthumous letter written to a friend with whom he had a relationship that was conflicted, and as concerning a philosophical encounter that never quite took place.⁹ Badiou expresses his critique in strong terms, although he seems ambivalent about attacking the person he considers his only serious contemporary rival after the publication in 1988 of Being and Event. Badiou claims, despite Deleuze’s language celebrating multiplicity, that Deleuze is ultimately a philosopher of the One.

In order to open up a space for his own claim as a great philosopher, Badiou is forced to criticize and ultimately distort Deleuze’s philosophy, as I will show in this book. Badiou claims that, in addition to being a philosopher of the One and deceiving most of his readers about it, Deleuze is austere, aristocratic, and politically quietist in his work. However, he reads Deleuze selectively and ignores what does not fit the image of Deleuze that he constructs. In chapter 2, I will exposit Badiou’s critique and show how he interprets Deleuze in his influential book. This reading of Badiou’s book will provide a foil against which to develop my reading of Deleuze, which occurs in chapters 3–5. In chapter 3, I will provide my own reading of Deleuze’s masterwork, Difference and Repetition. I claim that it is not possible to really understand Deleuze’s thought without engaging and comprehending Difference and Repetition, although at the same time this is extremely difficult to do because Deleuze synthesizes so much philosophical, scientific, and literary material, and he radicalizes it in profound and unexpected ways.

In chapter 4, Deleuze’s Logic of Double Articulation, I focus on Deleuze’s logic, from his follow-up to Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense. In The Logic of Sense, drawing from Stoicism as well as his reading of Lewis Carroll, Deleuze posits two series, a series of bodies and a series of sense. This duality is not grounded in a unity, although Badiou cannot read it any other way. I will explain how Deleuze’s logic in The Logic of Sense develops into his logic of double articulation in A Thousand Plateaus, written with Guattari. Furthermore, this logic of double articulation can be read as a motor schema, to use Catherine Malabou’s phrase from her book Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Although Malabou privileges Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida in her work, I argue that her understanding of plasticity is informed by Deleuze and is in some respects compatible with his philosophy, although there is a profound tension in reading Hegelian dialectics together with Deleuzian difference. Chapter 5, Producing the Event as Machine, as Fold, and as Image, takes the notion of event that Deleuze expresses in The Logic of Sense and shows the shape it takes in his later work, specifically Anti-Oedipus, The Fold, and the Cinema books.

In this book I am explicitly developing a coherent interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophy over the course of his extraordinary career. For this reason I will not directly engage with the many important and influential works Deleuze wrote about other figures, including Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Proust, Bergson, Kant, Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, and Bacon. These are all valuable and important studies, and in many ways Deleuze worked out his philosophy by means of a profound engagement with other thinkers as well as artists, but the danger of reading Deleuze on another figure is that the result is a composite. Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, is the expression of a kind of Deleuze-Nietzsche. In this book, Deleuze helped create the so-called French Nietzsche who became so prominent and influential in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, it takes a great deal of time and effort to extract Deleuze from this composite, and if readers of Deleuze in English exclusively focus on these texts as opposed to the foundational philosophical works like Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, it becomes almost impossible to adequately understand Deleuze’s overall thought.

According to my interpretation, Deleuze is a philosopher of the event. Of course, he is not the only philosopher who thematizes the idea of the event, but his understanding of an event is crucial for appreciating the importance this term takes on in poststructuralism and eventually for Badiou. Badiou axiomatizes being in order to allow for an event. In chapters 6 and 7, I will turn directly to Badiou’s philosophy in his major works. Although I favor Deleuze and criticize Badiou in this book, I am in no way dismissive of his work and its significance. I will engage with Badiou explicitly and seriously, but it will be a contrasting reading to the one I valorize of Deleuze, so in this sense it is a limited (and limiting) reading. Chapter 6, Being a Sublime Event, will focus mainly on Being and Event, although I will draw a connection with his early work, The Concept of Model. In addition to explicating Badiou’s mathematical ontology, I will critically engage it from the standpoint of Kant and the Kantian sublime. Both Badiou and Deleuze were hostile to Kant and Kantianism, but Deleuze acknowledged Kant’s influence more explicitly and repressed Hegel’s, whereas Badiou acknowledges his similarity to Hegel but repudiates Kant. I will show, however, that Badiou’s mathematical ontology almost exactly reproduces Kant’s argument concerning the mathematical sublime, even if Badiou expresses it in terms of set theory.

Chapter 7, Being a Subject in a Transcendental World, shows how Badiou’s Logics of Worlds remedies a lack of consideration of the subject in Being and Event. In many respects, subjectivity is downplayed in Being and Event, and a subject comes into being out of fidelity to an event rather than by being inscribed in being. At the end of Being and Event, Badiou even criticizes the residual Cartesianism in Lacan, suggesting that we need to get away from the idea that there were always some subjects.¹⁰ From this extreme position, which Badiou adopts in order to avoid the subjectivity of pathos, Romanticism, and language, he returns to an earlier work, Theory of the Subject, in order to integrate the subject more deeply into being in Logics of Worlds. I will show how the subject becomes compatible with the object in this sequel, and how both converge on the thinking of a body. Logics of Worlds does not constitute a break with Being and Event, but is a qualification and complexification of the dualism that pervades Being and Event.

I argue that Badiou’s logic in Logics of Worlds is more compatible with Deleuze than his logic in Being and Event, even though Badiou describes himself as becoming more Hegelian. At the same time, Badiou’s axiomatization of mathematics in set theory still contrasts with Deleuze’s concern with the immanent becoming of mathematics and physics. In a more speculative chapter, I assert the significance of theoretical physics over against theoretical mathematics, and suggest that this emphasis on physics is not a return to the Pre-Socratics, as Badiou charges in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Chapter 8 sketches a provocative Energetics of Being that is inspired by Deleuze, but draws out more explicitly some of the connections of his work with theoretical physics, which Deleuze himself mostly neglected to specify. Deleuze engaged more obviously with mathematics and biology than with physics, but he was writing at the same time that chaos theory and complexity theory were being elaborated, and he provides a philosophical framework that better accounts for these phenomena than the strictures of Badiou’s thought.

In chapter 9, I argue that the creation of a time-image is a directly political and revolutionary event for Deleuze, against the charge that Deleuze detached himself from politics and political concerns at the end of his life and retreated into aesthetics. Badiou argues that Deleuze retreats into a kind of austere, solipsistic solitude toward the end of his life. I suggest that this reading is incorrect, because it ignores the revolutionary political significance of the time-image that Deleuze constructs in Cinema 2. Along with Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze with his analysis of nomadology and the war machine presses a political analysis of territory as far as it will go, but he realizes that deterritorialization will always be reterritorialized by the state, with its apparatuses of capture. In order to escape this inevitable reterritorialization, Deleuze turns to aesthetics, first in his book on Francis Bacon, and then his books on Cinema. Politics thought as territory conforms to what Deleuze calls the movement-image, whereas his goal in Cinema 2 is to construct a time-image, a brain for the people who do not yet exist but can be brought into existence. The state cannot think, which is why the state cannot create a time-image, only appropriate it. Although Deleuze’s political event is different from Badiou’s, I will suggest that it is no less important and in some respects it is potentially more revolutionary. In a final chapter on Vodou Economics, I will examine Haiti as a sort of case study of what Deleuze calls the people who are missing in contemporary neoliberalism, and suggest that understanding Vodou spirits or lwa in terms of a time-image provides striking resources for conceiving a radical politics in a postsecularist context. This last chapter is less explicitly focused on Deleuze, but it develops a quasi-Deleuzian reading of and application for our contemporary political and economic situation, and shows why Deleuze remains an important theoretical resource.

TWO

THE CLAMOR OF BEING

BADIOU VS. DELEUZE

DELEUZE: THE CLAMOR OF BEING is one of the strongest readings of Deleuze that exists, and Badiou does an incredible job of synthesizing and presenting an image of Deleuze’s philosophy so that we can consider it at a more profound level. Badiou is committed to, and equal to the challenge of, bestowing a Cartesian clarity upon everything that he engages, which includes nearly every sphere of human thought and activity. Before engaging this critique, I want to say that I am ambivalent about polemics: on the one hand I appreciate and admire Badiou’s incredible ability to polemicize, especially on matters of politics, and what I admire above all else is his uncompromising resistance to the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism at a time when seemingly everyone was at least resigned to it, if not actively celebrating it; on the other hand, I do appreciate Foucault’s caution, never engage in polemics, at least in terms of philosophy.¹ My resistance to polemics in philosophy may be the result of my status as an outsider in strict disciplinary terms, such that I do not have to choose between, say, Badiou and Deleuze, Deleuze and Derrida, Derrida and Žižek, Žižek and Negri, Negri and Agamben, Agamben and Vattimo, and so on. Or it may simply be a putting into practice of the Deleuzian AND: multiplicity is precisely in the ‘and.’²

In order to construct an image of himself as a master philosopher, Badiou constructs an image of Deleuze as alter-master-ego, and offers a fixed, frozen representation of Deleuze to readers. It is masterful, but it is also a distortion, this aristocratic, hierarchized space,³ from which the image of Deleuze is drawn. Badiou offers us an austere, ascetic, and aristocratic Deleuze, who pursues his rigorous philosophy in ironic solitude completely apart from the turbulence of history. In order to reduce Deleuze to this frozen image, Badiou is forced to claim that Deleuze is a classicist, a metaphysician in the traditional style, while overlooking or downplaying what is new in his thought. On the contrary, as Jean-Clet Martin affirms: The conquest of multiplicities does not attempt to emulate Hegel by reducing the totality of the real to a uniform play of the one and the many, the same and the other. The rhizomatic logic of multiplicities leads Deleuze to a multilinear conception of thought that—far from compartmentalizing itself within autonomous sectors, and circles of circles—produces folds, pleats and lines of flight that brings aesthetics, philosophy, ethics and science together within a mobile territory.⁴

In Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Badiou relies heavily on the quotation from Difference and Repetition that provides the title: A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings.⁵ This quotation is taken from the last page of Difference and Repetition, although it appears in a slightly different and more compressed form in chapter 1: A single voice raises the clamour of Being (DR 35). In the conclusion, it is more like a crescendo that culminates the incredible work of the book, and while Badiou takes from the last sentence, he does not reproduce the entire sentence. The phrase following the quotation reads: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess—in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in so turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return (DR 304). This condition is important, because it expresses the Nietzschean imperative that only what becomes returns, only difference returns as difference (not the same). We can only say that Everything is equal! and Everything returns! Deleuze claims, at the point at which the extremity of difference is reached, which is not a return to the One but a bursting open (DR 304).

Here Being is the One-All, and all of Deleuze’s work is read as the submission of thinking to a renewed concept of the One (CB 11). A single voice or a single event (we could also think about the indeterminate article—a life) is a singular voice or a singular event. As Alfred North Whitehead writes in Process and Reality, the many become one, and are increased by one, that is, become many again.⁶ The sameness of this process is a result of Badiou reading it under the sign of identity or monotony, and of his reading Deleuze too much in Heideggerian terms. Badiou claims that Deleuze is less distant from Heidegger than is usually believed, which is true (CB 21). But then Badiou makes too much of Deleuze’s invocation of Parmenides along with Heidegger in the quotation from Difference and Repetition. Badiou assimilates Parmenides (read through Heidegger) to Deleuze’s philosophical position: Parmenides maintained that Being and thought were one and the same thing. The Deleuzian variant of this maxim is: ‘it is the same thing which occurs and is said’ (CB 20). I will come back to this quotation from The Logic of Sense later in this book, in chapter 4. But here Badiou refuses to confront the radically Nietzschean heart of Deleuze’s philosophy: only that which becomes (becomes different) returns. Even though Deleuze reinterprets what Nietzsche means by the eternal return and forces it to mean the eternal return of difference rather than of the same, by neglecting the significance of Deleuze’s Nietzsche for Deleuze in favor of the more simple view that Deleuze assimilates Nietzsche to Bergson, Badiou fails to adequately understand Deleuze’s philosophy.

By favoring Bergson over Nietzsche as the primary model for Deleuze, Badiou is able to charge Deleuze with being a thinker obsessed with the past. This overemphasis on the past then determines Badiou’s misreading of the distinction between the virtual and the actual. Although he correctly understands and appreciates how Deleuze does not oppose the active and the passive, he fails to apply the same logic to this fundamental distinction between the actual and the virtual. Badiou appreciates how Deleuze deploys the conception of neutrality to avoid being caught between such premature attributions as active and passive (CB 34). But this subtlety is lost when applied to the virtual/actual opposition: ‘virtual’ is without any doubt the principal name of the Being in Deleuze’s work (CB 43). An actual being possesses its Being by means of the virtual, or its own virtuality. In this sense, the virtual is the ground of the actual, despite Deleuze’s repudiation of the notion of any absolute ground (CB 43).

Badiou charges Deleuze with a Platonism of the virtual, because Badiou