The Ethics of Truth: Ethical Criticism in the Wake of Badious Philosophy

Gabriel Riera
SubStance, Issue 120 (Volume 38, Number 3), 2009, pp. 92-112 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/sub.0.0057

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v038/38.3.riera.html

Access Provided by University of Peloponnisos at 06/01/11 11:57AM GMT

The Ethics of Truth: Ethical Criticism in the Wake of Badious Philosophy

Gabriel Riera
1. Badiou and the Ethical Turn The ethical turn in literary criticism took place in response to the supposed pitfalls of three dominant paradigms in the Humanities: positivism, neo-humanism and Marxism. Inspired mostly by the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Franois Lyotard, it took the form of a reading practice that privileged heterogeneity, radical difference and, above all, the thought of an experience incommensurable to consciousness and language. The ethical turn was also in part invigorated by feminist criticism, gender studies and cultural studies, in their attempt to specify gender, racial, and cultural differences suppressed by more conventional approaches. The new century saw the most radical insights of ethical criticism being absorbed and neutralized by a bland ethical ideology that showed its true face after 9/11. Ethical ideology gave way to a discourse defending freedom and the spread of democracy by way of military intervention. What followed is well known: the renewal and re-implementation of the doctrine of National Security the US employed during the peak of the Cold War. This time, however there was no Latin American dictator as facilitator, but rather some European stateseven if their collaboration went against the letter of the European Constitutionand the complicity of some Arab states that took matters into their own hands. These practices went along with a proliferation of legitimizing discourses in American academia, and with a media obsession with security. This situation made any discussion on alterity suspicious, and the Levinasian metaphor of the self as hostage to the other difficult to swallow. It might seem that we have passed beyond ethical criticism, that it has been neutralized and appropriated by current discourses. However, a cursory look at the reviews of the different strands of ethical criticism shows one crucial omission: Alain Badiou.1 I would like to propose that Badious philosophy can help us inflect a different torsion to the ethical turn by moving away from some of the ideas that became domesticated by the ethical ideology and by asserting that the inventive act, art in general, and literature in particular, produces truths. 92
Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2009

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

93

The focus of this essay is Badious thinking, and this, for two reasons that, at first, seem at odds with the question explored in this special issue. On the one hand, and unlike Gilles Deleuze, Badiou does not privilege invention. He conceives philosophy as a process of rigorous deduction inflected by mathematics. For Badiou the matheme is the writing of the real; it is a pure writing because it does not maintain a rapport to the real; it subtracts itself from any type of relation. Insofar as it touches the real, any other type of writing becomes impure. Mathematical writing is not a trace of the real, but rather, it is the real that is a fleeting trace of this writing. Mathematical writing is the real itself.2 Moreover, Badiou conceives of a dimension that escapes the grasp of language. What distinguishes Badiou from most of his contemporaries is that for him, a domain exists in which language has to be considered as something secondary, and as having a subordinated function. Badiou affirms, with the same force, the absolute radical character of the event and its heterogeneous relation to the order of language. Ordinary language cannot provide an effective description of multiplicity, since it is implicitly ruled by the prescription of the One. Language can access the multiple only by being forcedthat is, the philosopher must pass through language, but only to displace it each time by the throw of the dice of a non-deductible nomination. Truth has nothing to do with an object of knowledge, with reference. It proceeds from a decision and under the modality of the event. The event is lawless and appears as a supplement to a given situation; moreover the event subtracts itself from the order of meaning and, therefore, demands an act of nomination (Being and the Event), or a deduction of a protocol of fidelity to its consequences (Logiques des mondes). The event requires a name (or an image, a figure that is in excess to the codes in question in the case of art in general, and in the poem in particular) that functions as the trace of its vanishing passage. Nevertheless, the event can be named neither in terms of a preexisting lexicon, nor be included in a dire bien insofar as it always affirms established and accepted significations. If mathematicsand set theory in particularprovides the laws to approach the teeming and inconsistent multiplicity of being (which enables Badiou to prove the existence of an abnormal or illegal multiple), the event, on the other hand, cannot be described in terms of those very rules. There is something of an archi-poiesis that from Being and the Event up to Logiques des mondes governs the fidelity to the event, or ethics of truth. As poetic invention, the events name is an improper saying, a scandal for the dire bien.3 There where the event arises, the subject, an operator of this sudden irruption, makes its belated appearance. This formal operator bears witness to the impossible: the ontological status of the event that transgresses the very laws of being insofar as it belongs to itself, is something impossible to say. The advent of an event therefore becomes a question

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

94

Gabriel Riera

of an intervention, a decision, and fidelity. Badious subtractive ontology provides a rigorous elaboration of the consequences that an event brings into playan ethics of truth. Although at first Badiou does not privilege invention in his philosophical system, this does not mean that his thinking is unreceptive to any reflection on art and literaturethat is, the inventive act broadly defined. Far from it: Badiou is a thinker for whom art is one of the four conditions of philosophy; art produces immanent truths that philosophy, in turn, formalizes in its effort to think the present. Unlike the Nietzschean postmodernist legacy that posits the value of art against the dreadfulness of truth, Badious untimely and strange Platonism values art precisely for producing truths that are proper to it (immanent), but that also have a universal scope (generic).4 Badiou has gone as far as to develop an inestheticsthat is, a new regime for thinking the question of art beyond the closure of traditional aesthetics and modernist conceptions of its role. On the other hand, Badiou has been adamant in his attack on what he calls the ethical ideology promoted in France by the Nouveaux Philosophes, as well as its varieties in the Anglo-Saxon world: cultural relativism and identity politics. This attack also targets the two dominant paradigms that have inspired the ethical turn of literary criticism: those of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. The former reminds us, according to Badiou, that any attempt to make of ethics the fundament of thought and action is essentially religious (Badiou, Ethics, 23). Badious critique of ethical ideology, however, finds its correlate in his positing of an ethics of truth, which in his most recent Logiques des mondes becomes an ethics of living with an Idea.5 In both cases ethics involves a break with doxa, a process of fidelity to the consequences of the event, and a love of the unnamable able to acknowledge that there are limits to the power of a truth and the work of naming.6 Unlike the ethics of respect for alterity and difference in which the other takes precedence over the same, Badious ethics is organized around the rare emergence of the same from the banal infinity of difference. Fidelity is the central feature of Badious ethics. It is a process of continuing with a singular and concrete situation from the point of view of what is yet unknownthat is, from the perspective of the event that comes to supplement the situation. Fidelity, therefore, compels the subject to think a world according to an unavailable principle (what has come to change it). It thus involves a process of inquiry (enqute), since the subject must discriminate the new with the language of the old, and isolate what escapes the established descriptions. Finally, if some strands of ethical criticismespecially in its AngloSaxon version that ended up, at best, in a sort of neo-humanism, and at worst in skipping a series of theoretical difficulties that reduced or
SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

95

plainly ignored the legacy of literary theory,7 Badious thinking not only subscribes to a radical form of anti-Humanism (he declares himself to be the most faithful follower of both Lacan and Foucault), but also manages to provide a series of answers to difficult issues. There where Levinas finds the idea of alterity in the situation described by Descartes in which the I think maintains with the Infinite it can nowise contain and from which it is separated a relation called idea of Infinity (Totality, 48), Badiou thinks actual infinity through Cantor, and consequently does not ground infinity in finitude, but rather shows the precedence of the former over the latter. Derrida and Badiou both cipher the ethical moment in aporia and undecidibility, but the latter also privileges undecidibility as the necessary frame to instantiate a process of fidelity to the event and its truth. For Badiou, the consequence of undecidability is that decisions become imperative. Undecidability, therefore, should not be understood as a barrier, but as a necessary path to encounter the new. Being can only be said as a consistent multiplicity, and consistencies are founded on decisions. In the end, Badious critique of ethical ideology yields an ethics of truth rooted in a subtractive ontology. The crux of Badious philosophy is to propose an ethics of truth whose main prescription is a non-dogmatic imperative: Decide from the point of view of what is undecidablea decision whose final goal is to stipulate the effects that the new brings upon a given structure. A brief discussion of this ontology is necessary in order to frame Badious ethics of truth and the way he stipulates its functioning in the sphere of art. Ontologies of difference were dominant during the twentieth century in Continental philosophy. These approaches took issue with Hegels thesis according to which difference, opposition and contradiction are the different facets of the Absolute. The philosophers of difference who have inspired the ethical turn took a stand against Hegels integration of difference as an inner moment of identityas an identity conceived no longer as static but in constant movement. For Gilles Deleuze this amounts to the final and most powerful homage ever made to the venerable principle of identity (Difference, 87). During the second half of the last century, the French philosophical scene characterized itself by a virulent anti-Hegelianism. On one side stand the philosophers of immanence, the French Nietzscheans like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, who rejected the idea of a dpassement of contradictions and of absolute knowledge. On the other side are those like Emmanuel Levinas and, up to a certain point, Maurice Blanchot, who criticized the idea of identity and developed a discourse of separation and alterity.8 Further, the philosophers of difference took as their point of departureand as their targetHeideggers ontological difference, or difference between Being and entities. According to Heidegger, the ontological
SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

96

Gabriel Riera

difference is metaphysics unthought, a discourse in which both terms collapse. This explains, in turn, its need to posit the idea of a Supreme Being as a way of explaining the entities, which leads Heidegger to equate metaphysics with an onto-theology. Ontological difference, claims Heidegger, is the very root of human existence insofar as it entails, at the same time, a pre-comprehension of Being and an attitude toward entities. It is Jacques Derrida who radicalizes Heideggers quest and who, at the same time, systematically shows that Heidegger remains caught in a metaphysics of presence, the very onto-theology Heidegger wishes to dispense with in the first place. Derrida states that, in the end, Heideggers conception of the ontological difference reinforces the presence of Being. This takes Derrida to sift Heideggers philosophy through Nietzsches filter and particularly through the idea that Being is a play of forces. It is possible to say that insofar as Heidegger envisions difference as an effect of Being, his is not, unlike Derridas, a thinking of difference, but rather one of Being. By playing Nietzsche against Heidegger, Derrida posits the idea of a difference older than ontological difference, which he calls diffrance. Derrida questions any idea of full presence and now. following Heidegger who writes Being under erasure (sous rature), speaks in terms of a simultaneous process of tracing and erasing that constitutes the trace. The notion that Being is written under erasure implies that there is no transcendental signifier and that its effacement amounts to the advent of an archi-trace, or archi-writinga writing without any antecedent, that should not be confused with a system of transcription. The arrival of the archi-trace is also the advent of play: On pourrait appeler jeu labsence de signifi transcendental comme illimitation du jeu, cest dire comme branlement de lonto-thologie et de la mtaphysique de la presence (Grammatologie, 79).9 For Derrida, play, understood in the Nietzschean sense of world-play, results from the absence of a transcendental signifier. There is play when a center is lacking, when there is a void that makes any deployment possible. This limitless play requires a field of infinite substitutions in which each signified can become, in turn, a signifier. Signification becomes a movement of supplementarity: it happens in substitution of significations lack of fundament, but also as a supplement in the sense of a representation, insofar as it occupies the place of a signification that lacks. Derridas play implies the transformation of a passive or reactive nihilism (negation of life) into an active nihilism that is invention and creation. Badiou can be included neither in the anti-Hegelian genealogy, nor in the lineage of difference. Instead Badiou privileges the multiple.10 For Badiou, ontology, the science of being as such, is mathematics. Math-

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

97

ematics, in its post-Cantorean inflection, knows only the multiple of multiples, or the pure multiple that is inconsistent from the viewpoint of any structure since it cannot be counted-as-one, or unified. The pure multiple in-consists and, for this reason, is unpresentable. Insofar as it resists unification, it reveals itself as the void. The void is what makes it possible to attach a situation to its being and, consequently, explains why for Badiou it becomes the proper name of Being. Nevertheless, and not unlike the philosophers of difference, Badiou takes issue with Hegel; his differend revolves precisely around the status of the void. While for Hegel the negative is a holethe void that the concept introduces in the realfor Badiou there is an irresoluble disjunction between the real and the concept. The void that the concept introduces in the real does not become, in turn, itself real: it remains forever ideal. The void is the conceptual feature most faithful to what is; embracing the real such as it presents itself. The void enables one to say the presentation, but it does not present itself as such. Concerning Heidegger, Badiou rethinks the question of the ontological difference. Natures precariousness results from its being founded on the void, but this precariousness is of ontological character. A consistent presentation of what is otherwise sheer inconsistent multiplicity unfolds only at the ontical level, where a stable and normative conception tends to prevail. However, inconsistent multiplicity underlies all presentation and is the condition of freedom, which means that Being makes room for singularities the event, truth and the subject. 2. Badious Ontology and the Ethics of Truth11 Badiou responds to an age dominated by cultural relativism and skepticism by positing the existence of universal truths. Against the partisans of philosophys demise Badiou argues that philosophy is possible and necessary. In fact, in the Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou emphatically contests all affirmations concerning the end of philosophy and instead declares that philosophy operates in terms of the concepts of truth, event and subjectivity.12 He specifically rejects the two inflections that the end of philosophy has taken in contemporary discourses: the Heideggerian version regarding the exhaustion of metaphysics, as well as the vulgar positivist version that sees philosophy superseded by the developments in the natural and human sciences. Faced with this situation, Badiou responds by stressing a classical aspect of philosophy: its systematicity. He establishes a new relation between discourse and mathematical deduction by equating ontology and mathematics as the thinking that operates in the proximity of the disseminated nature of Being.

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

98

Gabriel Riera

Philosophy is neither a constructive nor a deconstructive practice for Badiou but the site where thinking seizes the truths or generic procedures of an epoch. These truths unfold in the conditions (science, politics, art and love) that enable philosophy to accomplish its act: to provide those truths with an articulation so as to exhibit their epochal compossibility. Philosophy is not the truth: philosophy is what subtracts from any identity and plenitude. Fundamentally, philosophy must subtract truths from the labyrinth of meaning, and once thus seized, must organize them as what interrupts the regime of signification. Philosophy, in the end, de-substantiates, desacralizes any truth. Against Heidegger and any form of hermeneutics, Badiou posits that meaning is not the gift of Being; what we have instead is the paradoxical advent of meaning from what is a-significant As a configuration of thought, philosophy derives a series of directives with which to approach the teeming of things, and it does so by means of an analytic procedure that equates mathematics with ontology. Badiou develops his systematic ontology in Being and Event, where being refers to the order of the presentation of the pure multiple, and event to the dimension of non-being: the real that becomes possible when forced by means of a discipline of time and a fidelity to its incalculable irruption.13 Unlike Heideggers, in Badious ontology being is no longer an enigma but an underlying void attached to any entity. Being is a pure inconsistent multiplicity composed, in turn, of multiple elements.14 Contemporary mathematics, especially post-Cantorean set theory, provides for Badiou the only rigorous articulation of such a pure multiplicity. All beings in their being are infinite by prescriptioninfinite in the secularized sense introduced by Cantors revolution. In this sense, Badiou contests the two traditional forms of understanding infinity (or the infinite under the regime of the One): as a boundless exteriority (Aristotle) and as a temporal ecstasy (the Romantic legacy).15 The axiom of infinity constitutes Badious point of departure; it asserts a radical infinity beyond all possible proofs of construction. Inasmuch as it is not a number that one can arrive at by counting, the infinite is unattainable. Badiou seeks to replace the Hegelian and Romantic interpretations of potential infinity and human finitude with the concepts of actual infinity and the event. The consequence of Badious move is that the concept of the finite is secondary, insofar as it is retroactively produced by the infinite. Set theory establishes that the infinite is itself multiple and can neither be conceived as the One, nor as the Whole. It should be clear that Badious ontology is not the application of set theory, but rather what he believes is left unthought by that theory. But what is the meaning of set theory once it is treated philosophically? A set is a presentation that allows us to see a structured multiple, or counted-as-one. This One, the

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

99

structure, has no being in itself, but refers to a certain state of the presentation, a limitation of an infinite multiplicity. Badiou subscribes to a radical and materialist infinitism for which there is no real difference between an element of the set and the set that contains it. This means that the world is without totality and without God because no set of sets is available remember Russells paradox and Borges fictions based upon it. The void is the founding principle of the world. The axiom of the void thus plays a crucial role in Badious ontology. The void is a universally included set that belongs to no one in particular. Although ontology presents the multiple, the being of this presentation is empty and subtracts itself from the dialectic of the one and the multiple. The void is that from which there is presentation (Badiou, Ltre et lvnement, 68-71),16 but without being included (counted or represented) in it. Signification therefore entails an impoverishment of the infinities. If it is true that presentation supposes a level of unity, it is a limiting act that severs meaning from the inhuman prodigality of the multiple. However, the act of presentation splits itself into representations. It is precisely because of this splitting that signification unfolds. Signification is, at the same time, what serves to display the void and the chaos, as well as what bears witness that any situation goes from itself to a-beyond-itself. Badiou calls situation any multiplicity structured by a particular count or by a particular criteria of belonging and inclusion (two founding relations of the multiple). The result of counting is a meta-structure that designates the situation as One, or as the state of a situation. Badiou plays with the political connotation of the word state, since it is the principle that intervenes to control excess, to establish the set of the parts or subsets of a set. Knowledge or the language of the situation furnishes virtually infinite ways of arranging a situations part, but cannot provide a global, enabling unity to these arrangements. The state (of the situation) prohibits the presentation of the void, which is the fundamental element for any particularization. The objective order that the state of the situation thus guarantees accomplishes a violent inclusion whose effect is the disjunction between presentation and representation, between structure and meta-structure(EE 149). Ontology must describe the conditions that will allow moving beyond the state of a presentation toward a situation of pure presentation. It is the contingent, unpredictable dimension of the event that interrupts the order of knowledge by attaching itself to the void of every situation. The event called French Revolution, which for Badiou functions as an archi-event, a kind of Urszene, is, for example, the occurrence that allows us to read the inconsistencies of the Ancien Rgime. It is the truth of the Ancien Rgime, but a truth that cannot be named by the state of the

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

100

Gabriel Riera

situation called Ancien Rgime. An event is not a fact; it is a non-empirical, ephemeral and insubstantial passage that cannot be assigned to any stable element of the situation in which it takes place.17 The event is the supernumerary excess of the order of being that makes the production of a truth possible. Further, it demands an act of nomination (Christs Resurrection, in the case of Saint Paul; October Revolution, for Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries) from its operator or belated supplement: the subject. It is through the intervention of a subject (who is the after-effect of the event) on behalf of this truth that an event can be discerned and named as such. For Badiou a truth is clearly neither the correspondence between a subject and an object (homiosis, adquatio), the (un)veiling of Being (altheia), nor the result of different productions of practices and discourses at a given time in history (Foucault). A truth is produced by the excessive arrival of an event of whose passage only a name remains. A truth is what results from the subjective process once the name of the event is put into circulation in a given situation. What must be stressed here is that the subject does not pre-exist the event but, rather, the event is what makes possible a process of subjectivization. The latter consists in seizing the name of the event in order to make it intervene in a given situation. It is through this intervention that consensual and validated knowledge can encounter the real of a given situation. Because the event is always fleeting, an operator able to establish an effective mechanism of connection must exist. And since the truth of the event is indiscernible from within a given situation (for classical music, atonal music is a series of chaotic sounds; for the Greek philosopher, Christs resurrection is a fable) the language of the situation is unable to name it. In other words, a truth emerges as the outcome of a process in which a generic subset of a situation coalesces and is then sustained by a subjective fidelity to the event. Further, there is no subject in general, only a subject of each of the generic procedures or conditions and, consequently, truths are also proper to the four conditions. With the publication of Logiques des mondes, part two of Being and Event, Badious system has gone through important modifications.18 There has been a shift from ontology (set theory) to logic (category theory), and a new focus on the question of consistent presentations instead of the question of being in general. These modifications also had an impact on how Badiou conceives the event, the subject and the process of truth. In what follows, I will summarily review the most significant shifts in Badious system and, in particular, those having a direct import for his ethics of truth. For Badiou, an event arises as the inconsistency of Being that shatters the consistencies of presentation. The event thus releases the virtual potentials of a given situation (EE 274). Being the expression of the void

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

101

within the particular situation at hand, the event thus functions as a radical supplement to the indifferent multiplicity of Being. In Being and Event Badious typology of being reveals the existence of a type of multiplicity that transgresses the laws of the axiomatic that were set to formalize it, and is thus indiscernible from this very axiomatic. The axiomatic of set theory isolates two types of relations among multiplicities: belonging and inclusion; it is from the latter that the excessive type of multiples originate. In Badiou, therefore, the axiomatic of set theory defines the site of the inexistence that produces truthsthe event. The event is an exceptional multiple that is added to a given situation by tracing the passage of an interruption. It produces an interruption since it opens a perspective from which to discern what a situation cannot know or grasp: that which is left unaccounted for by the situations meta-structure. The event, therefore, points to the void or inconsistency out of which a situation holds together. The event is destined to a given situation and it confers a local extension to it (EE 196). Badiou calls evental site (site vnmentiel) the singular multiple whose elements do not present themselves in a situation. The state of the situation cannot count the terms that make up this singular and abnormal multiple (for example, a family of illegal immigrants whose members are unregistered and thus lack public status), and therefore it lacks existence. A site is thus always in the position of internal exclusion in regard to the situation within which it is presented, insofar as the site belongs to the situation without being included in it. What is excessive regarding the classes the state counts is neither one (the retroactive result of a structural operation) nor consistent: it is a nothing (rien). A site is thus unclassifiable since its excess exceeds what the state designates as being a legitimate part of a situation. Moreover, a site is precarious and ephemeral, and although it is a requisite for an event to appear, it is not the events cause, but its idiosyncratic condition. Because of its intrinsic feature, Badiou defines the event as an extraordinary multiple or ultra-One; it is, at the same time, the situation of the multiples of its own site and its own situation, which means that the defining feature of the event is its self-belonging. The event then is an unfounded and autonomous set or situation that subtracts itself from the axiom of foundation.19 Ultimately, the event is unfounded and autonomous in terms of the situation within which it arrives. What is decisive for the subject is to inscribe the event within a situation to which it does not belong, given that the event only belongs to itself. The events modality of manifestation is that of the eclipse: it is a fading and fragile appearing that produces the dispersion of the sites elements. However, given that the event belongs to itself, its dazzling passage

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

102

Gabriel Riera

leaves a remainder: a name, the only element by means of which it can survive its own disappearance. The name does not allow for the events disappearance to give way to a discourse whose grammar and syntax is grounded in the encyclopedic and classifying language of the state.20 In Being and Event the event as Ultra-One was a problematic construction for the corresponding conception of a subject understood as fragment of the event. The supernumerary character of the event and its subjective naming implied that the subject was something more than the fragmentary aftermath to the events sudden irruption, that it was its effect and its source. Therefore, there was a need to supplement the ontological description of the event with a logical description able to elucidate the temporality proper to the event. In Logiques des mondes, the event is a hybrid; a mix of pure being and appearing and, consequently, the thinking of the event is neither ontological nor transcendental, which explains why the specification of the site, of its singularity, must redouble the ontological delimitation proposed in Being and Event with a logical characterization. Between the site and the event, Badiou unfolds the transformations that real change undergoes. Badious logical characterization of the event takes the existential intensity with which real change endows a multiplicity as its point of departure. If in Being and Event the events irruption shattered the consistency of a presentation, in Logiques des mondes it produces a de-regulation in the logic of the worlda sort of transcendental malfunctioning or disruption. In other words, the event modifies the rules of appearing. This modification can be seen in any genuine event: something or someone, whose value in a given world was null or weak, suddenly acquires a strong or maximum existential intensity. Therefore, the event conserves its ontological character as a surging forth of the site in a moment of selfbelonging and, at the same time, it produces a brutal transformation of a given regime of intensity, so as to allow that which was inexistent to come into existence. This entails the regime of truth acquiring a double status too. Although it maintains its generic characteristic, the regime of truth produces the reconstruction of the whole set of rules by which things appear (by taking into account that something or someone that previously did not appear must appear now). If in Being and Event supplementation was the only term that accounted for the rearrangement of transcendental correlations, Logiques des mondes reintroduces a term that used to play a more decisive role in his Thorie du Sujet destruction: something must disappear in order for an inexistent element to appear in the world. The site is now conceived as a reflexive multiple and thus, insofar as it transgresses the laws of being, it is a multiple that belongs to itself. Further, a site is the fleeting revelation

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

103

of the void that haunts multiplicities. Finally, the site is the ontological figure of an instant; it appears only to disappear: Self-belonging annuls itself as soon as it appears. A site is a vanishing term: it appears only as disappearing. The problem consists in registering the consequences of the appearing.21 Due to the sites fleeting and vanishing nature, its true duration must be placed on the side of its consequences, or on the logical interpretation of the relation among the different degrees of intensity, which means that the logic of the site is the distribution of the degrees of intensity around a vanishing point. An event is a strong singularity that enables its consequences to exist maximally; it is the only type of real change that brings into existence the inexistence proper to the object-site (LM 397). Regarding Badious theory of the subject, the major shift that takes place in Logiques des mondes consists in that the subjects effective operation no longer concerns naming the event, but rather in imposing the legibility of a unified orientation (LM 54), that is, an evaluation of the intensity common to the appearing of two beings. In order to fully grasp the implications of this shift I will first focus briefly on how the subject is conceived in Being and Event. For Badiou the subject is not a universal or given category, neither a transcendental nor empirical subject; less a constructed one. Subjectivization, if it happens and when it happens lets remember that the subject is as rare as the eventonly takes place in the wake of an event. It is unthinkable apart from it, and is always the subject of a particular condition, since there is no subject in general. Badiou calls the recognition by which the event testifies to its unexpected and incalculable arrival an intervention. The intervention unleashes a discipline of time that controls the putting into circulation of the paradoxical multiple of the event (EE 232). In Badiou there is no way of knowing beforehand whether someone is connected to a given event. Fidelity thus names a process that separates and discerns the becoming legal of chance (EE 257). A truth is thus what results from a subjective process once the subject puts the events name into circulation. In Badiou subject refers neither to a network of representations grounded in experience nor to the transcendental constitution of any possible object of experience. It instead signals the linkage that brings together the event and fidelity, or the relation between subjectivization and the subjective process (EE 264). By the latter, Badiou understands the subjects seizure by the events irruption, as well as the act by which the subject gets hold of the events name in order to make it intervene in a given situation. The subject does not pre-exist the event, since s/he only becomes subject thanks to the interrupting force and the arresting power of the event (EE 48).

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

104

Gabriel Riera

If in Being and Event the subject is conceived as a finite fragment of a truth-procedure, or as a finite instance of an infinite process, Logiques des mondes, as I mentioned in the previous section, instead proposes a different distribution of subject and truth that no longer coincides with a finite/infinite distribution. Moreover, Badiou introduces the fundamental notion of consequence. He shows that the subject is identified by a type of marking, a post-evental (post-vnementiel) effect, whose system of operations is infinite, which means that once the subject is constituted under the mark of the event, subjective capacity is infinite. This occurs because subjective capacity amounts to drawing the consequences of a change and, if this change is evental (vnementiel), its consequences are infinite. In Being and Event, subjectivization fades away; its status remains indeterminate outside the problematic of the events name, which makes it difficult to conceive of subjective capacity in an immanent way. In Logiques des mondes the notion of consequence is bound to the subject and, therefore, immanence is possible. The subject is an active and identifiable form of the production of truths. The logic of consequences replaces the logic of naming. We are now in a position to approach Badious inesthetics and to focus on his reflections on the specific status of the truths of art. 3. Badious Inesthetics and The Truth of Art Badious approach to the question of art oscillates between the ethics of truths two possible outcomes: the logic of naming and the logic of consequences, although the first one seems to be predominant.22 By inesthetics Badiou understands
... a relation of philosophy to art which, by positing that art is in itself producer of truths, does not pretend in any manner to make of it an object of philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, an inesthetics describes the strictly intra-philosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art. (Handbook of Inesthetics, 1)

Inesthetics thus responds to a double exigency: on the one hand, it must be receptive to arts essence; on the other it must formulate the truths of the works of art into philosophical propositions. Insofar as art is one of the four conditions, it produces truths, but what are these truths? We know by now that what they have in common with the truths of the other conditions is the void. Art is Idea, and what art does with the Idea, the modalities by which it sustains the void, is immanent. Badious approach to the four conditions is shaped in terms of Lacans distinction between the regime of knowledge and that of truth. Aesthetics seeks to know what art is, its essence. By taking the work of art as its object it pretends to understand the meaning of the work of art

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

105

beyond the work itselfthat is, it assumes that it knows better than the work itself what the essence of art is. Badious inesthetics posits the existence of truths immanent to the work of art and, in turn, describes the intra-philosophical effects produced by an autonomous realm.23 Badious inesthetics is an anti-aesthetics: the opposite of a speculative aesthetics or a philosophical understanding of art according to which the latter is endowed with the task of furnishing an ontological presentation of a speculative metaphysics. Although it aims to describe the truths of art, inesthetics is not a philosophy of art, since it does not conceive of the work of art as the ground of truththat is, it does not share the foundational scope of Heideggers ontology of art. Further, an inesthetic description is doubly restricted: it is concerned only with intra-philosophical effects as they apply solely to some works of art.24 In this sense, Badious inesthetics is also a para-aesthetics, albeit a restrictive and selective one: it can be characterized, in David Carrolls words, as a critical approach to aesthetics for which art is a question not a given (Paraesthetics, xiv). Although Badious approach to art partakes of the generalized consensus that aesthetics cannot be a founding philosophical discipline,25 he insists on the autonomous character of art. Arts essence consists in the manifestation of a self-sufficient truth severed from any discourse on art; each art form has its own way of bearing witness to the Ideas passage. The positing of a new relation between philosophy and art organizes the Handbook of Inesthetics overall architecture, as well as its internal scansions. Badiou wants to delineate a relation between philosophy and art that is no longer didactic (Plato), classical (Aristotle), or Romantic (Hegel). These three types of relations, according to Badiou, are prevalent in contemporary articulations such as Marxism (Brecht), Freudianism (Lacan) and Romantic hermeneutics (Heidegger). Contrary to the new relation between philosophy and art that Badiou proposes, those three articulations do not posit the simultaneously immanent and singular character of the truths proper to the work of art. The didactic conception asserts the superiority of philosophy over art: even if art implements effects of truth, what really matters is speculation. This is, of course, Platos position, who sees in the work of art the semblance of a truth, and who assigns to art the task of educating the citizen. However the goal and final meaning of this process of education does not belong to art. Philosophy monitors and rules over art because only the former conceives of itself as the essential education of mankind, and this because it commits itself to the whole truth, while art abandons itself to the hypnotic effects of the sensible. Plato and the Marxist conception of art coincide in this desire to master the effects of art. Bertolt Brechts theater, according to Badiou, partakes of this schema: for the

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

106

Gabriel Riera

German writer there is a truth, the politics of dialectical materialism, and a pedagogical means to make of it a triumphant truth: the theater. For the didactic schema, the truth of art is singular (art is the truth as semblant), but not immanent (Truth is beyond art). Badiou is not far from Platos didacticism, as he preserves the educational value of the Idea. The second conception is the exact reversal of the first; it affirms that only art is capable of truths that, this time, are understood as a subjectivity made flesh. This is the Romantic position that presupposes that the incarnation of Truth in the sensible world can only enable us to contemplate this Truth in a human form. The Absolute truth is the subject, the infinite in the finite. For the Romantics, the truths of art are immanent, but not singular insofar as art is the whole Truth. Hegel, much like the Romantics, conceives of art as a speculative project. For Hegel it is in art that the Spirit (Geist) abandons the sphere of the finite (embodied in the individual and social life) in order to have access to its final stage: the Absolute, that is, the reconciliation between knowledge and reality. Hegel concurs with the Romantics in conceiving art as a figure of knowledge and, for this reason, the true work of art is at the service of neither an extrinsic signification, nor an external goal. The work of art finds its finality in its own being, which consists in the unity of the outer sensible appearance and the inner spiritualitythe unity of manifestation and signification. Truth, therefore, is not symbolized by the work; it becomes flesh in it. The artistic work is the incarnation of the Idea in the sensible form and thus the truths of the sensible reality. Although Badiou condemns the Romantic conception of art, his inesthetic must presuppose the advent of the Idea as a passage through the sensible (the modern form of Platonism), and above all, it presupposes that art bears witness to this passage. But unlike the Romantics, Badiou aims to preserve, at all cost, this passage of the Idea from any sensible identification; since the Idea is pure subtraction, it is a pure operation by which the sensible vanishes. Further, Badiou aims to preserve this subtraction as the inscription of a name. Nomination is in Badiou the other name of art which keeps his position closer to Heidegger than Badiou himself would like to acknowledge. Nomination preserves the very disappearing of the Idea. Finally, the classical conception stresses the therapeutic or cathartic function of art. It is pleasure and not truth that is at stake in the work of art (from Aristotle to Lacan the question of art does not belong, strictly speaking, to theory, but rather to ethics). Art is useful because in giving pleasure it has the power to treat the passions of the soul, to produce transference in the subject through identification. This transference consists in the deposition of passions on the staging of a plausible imaginary that the work of art provides. Art has the therapeutic function of exhibiting

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

107

that the object of desire, un-symbolizable in itself, is precisely what, by subtraction, draws itself on the background of the affective scintillations. It is in the imaginary, organized in a certain form, that the symbolic allows something of the real to appear in its singular configuration. For the classical position, there is neither immanence nor singularity in the truths of art; art is simply the imaginary of truth. From this position Badiou maintains the ethical orientation, but the inflection is different since for Badiou only the contemplation of the Idea educates. For Badiou the twentieth century was unable to transform these types of relations between philosophy and art and therefore experienced their saturation. Badiou employs here a Heideggerian schema based on the exhaustion of metaphysical representations in order to declare the end of aesthetics,26 and to show how each conception sutures art to different forms of knowledge. The didactic schema exhausts itself in the ideological implementation by the state of an art at the service of a common cause. The Romantic schema saturates itself in the prophetic appeal and its logical correlate, waiting. Finally, the classical scheme exhausts itself in the homage it pays to different theories of desire. For Badiou these conceptions should be abandoned and replaced by an inesthetics able to acknowledge that art produces its own truths. The thought of art is not extrinsic to it, but rather art itself. This thought, however, can neither have the upper hand on any of the other truth-procedures, nor hold the key to the compossibility of the four conditions that is philosophys proper task. Badiou focuses in detail on the inner logic of the procedure of truth that art is. His description presupposes the fundamental arrangements of his ontology and of the ethics of truth multiple, generic, subject, and truthbecause the four conditions allow for a general structure in which they circulate. However, it is important to isolate the specificity of each condition, since they circulate differently. Failing to acknowledge that art produces truths by itself and in its works leads the philosopher to keep alive a conception of art as the sensible form of the idea, from which philosophy would seek to distinguish itself insofar as it pretends to pass for the conceptual form of the Idea. Badiou argues that this conception is still present in Deleuzes distinction between art, science, and philosophy; and percepts, functives and concepts.27 However, for Badiou this conception is unable to show which types of truth art is capable of producing and, moreover, it fails to apprehend philosophys true task: to think the compossibility of the four conditions, to articulate the truths of an epochal situation with the empty and eternal category of truth. For Badiou a work of art is essentially finite, which means first and foremost that it exposes a limited objectivity in space and time. Second, by definition, the work of art has a principle of limitation and/or ending by

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

108

Gabriel Riera

which it affirms that it is all the perfection of which it is capable. Finally, the work of art is forever what it is within the inner circularity of its own end. A work of art thus should be conceived in its finitude, but finitude should be thought within the inner logic of the artistic procedure. A work is neither an event, nor the truth of this event, but rather the very stuff of the artistic procedure. This procedure, instantiated by an event, is a generic and infinite truth; it is made up by works, none of which manifest this generic and infinite truth in themselves. Each work of art is an inquiry (enqute) on truth and, therefore, a finite fragment of the infinite and unending. The openness of artistic truth means that although the works of art are the being of this truth, it is the fortuitousness of their organization and sequencing that constitutes their generic character. Each work, each inquiry, is the unknown of truth. Newness thus haphazardly deploys truth and the configuration thus put into circulation is inexhaustible: neither reducible to a proper name, nor to a totalizing process able to be placed under a single predicate. Moreover, it is always possible that new works of art can inscribe something unheard of within a particular configuration (art historians employ very general terms to refer to this inscription: impressionism, tonality, etc.). The procedure that brings a truth haphazardly into play originates in an event. And although the event might have a referent, a proper name (Sophocles, for Greek tragedy; Haydn for classical music), it is the arrival of a suddenly revealed indexation of the void in the indifferent multiplicity of being. One must endure these innovative, de-structuring and re-structuring capabilities of the voids irruption that are, precisely, the marks of any event. More specifically, an artistic event happens only when it is possible to discern in the available artistic matter (with its established canons, accepted norms and validating criteria) that an irruption of the power of the void has left its trace. It is the void that innovates because it comes to designate that it is possible, within a given situation, to transform and to leave behind the current active structures. This can be achieved by giving some type of form to what is seemingly shapeless from the point of view of the established situation. The void that is suddenly registered signals the exhaustion of an established form, and makes its presence felt only in listening, seeing or reading a new procedure that erupts within an already established form, and that inscribes the seal of the void within it. Art is affirmative; its affirmation shows itself by giving a sensible being to the void or to what in-exists within an already exhausted and given configuration. This configuration, however, does not need to be reduced to an objective determination, to a period in the history of art (Baroque, Symbolism, etc.). The configuration is the composition of a virtually infinite network of works that makes a generic truth of a specific art form.

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

109

Beyond some proper names (Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Duchamp, Ernst) and the historical sequence (Surrealism), there exists a large number of minor or ignored inquiries that are an integral part of this configuration (automatic writing, object trouv, ready made, etc.) too. The configuration can always be actualized anew, rearticulated in a new configuration, as with the ready made throughout the second half of the twentieth century. That at a given moment the configuration might appear as something obsolete does not necessarily mean that it is finished once and for all. Finally, any work of art is an inventive inquiry instantiated by an event that engages a beyond-a-previous-given situation by the void that opens within the canonical structures and that belongs to an infinite configuration. Art is a truth that gives form to what is shapeless, that renders visible or audible what was not such up to that point in a given situation (the silences of tonal music acquired a different truth in atonal music). Art distinguishes itself from the other three truth-procedures in that it has the sensible as such as its element. But for Badiou, what is essential is to isolate the trajectory of the Idea and to subtract it from the sensible. The truth of art consists precisely in this trajectory, and philosophy aims to formalize its passage. University of Illinois, Chicago

1. The most complete survey of ethical literary criticism is by Lawrence Buell, In Pursuit of Ethics, PMLA, vol. 114: 1, Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study (January 1999), 7-19. See also J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia UP, 1987, and Reading Narrative. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998; Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, Theory, and Representation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997; Andrew Gibson Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel, London: Routledge, 1999; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature and Ethics, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, Durham: Duke UP, 1999, and The Character of Criticism, London: Routledge, 2006. For a more encompassing argument see also Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Levinas, Derrida, West Lafayette, In.: Purdue UP, 1999, Ethics, Politics and Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, London: Phronesis, 1999, and Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso, 2007. Mention should be made also of Gerald L. Bruns, Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1999 and Marjorie Garber, (Ed.) The Turn to Ethics. London: Routledge, 2000. 2. For an interesting take on the matheme, see Ren Guitart, Evidence et tranget. Mathmatique, psychanalyse, Descartes et Freud. Paris: PUF, 2000. 3. The verbal invention of a name without precedent is experienced by the established and dominant languages of a situation as ill-said or missaid, in the words of Samuel Beckett. Beckett and Stephan Mallarm function as two constant points of reference and of inexhaustible insights for Badiou. Becketts work is an especially privileged instance of an art conceived as a labor of subtraction.

Notes

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

110

Gabriel Riera

His work, consequently, should be read as a patient, disciplined and vigilant evacuation of doxa. Insofar as Becketts late work is a rigorous exploration of the possibilities of the event, it also exposes an ethics of naming: the ill-said that testifies a fidelity to the event. 4. Badious return to Plato is an overdetermined gesture. On the one hand, it aims to de-suture philosophy from the fascination of the poem and thus allows him to declare a recommencement of philosophy beyond Heideggers declaration of the end of metaphysics. Badiou is also able to resurrect the conceptual figures of the Philosopher and the Sophist and to wage war against forms of thinking that relinquish the possibility of any real change. Finally, Badious Platonism, as processed through Cantor and his legacy, entails a reversal of Platonism, since for Badiou manifestation or appearing has a univocal and permanent character. While Being as such is inconsistent, appearing imposes the notion of a singular logic. 5. I have dealt with this issue in Living with an Idea: Ethics and Politics in Badious Logiques des mondes, Symposium: The Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy, Special issue on Alain Badiou, 13: 1 (Spring/Printemps 2009), 78-83. 6. See Alain Badiou, La vrit, forage et innomable, Conditions, Paris: Seuil, 1992. 7. I am thinking of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, whose works represent a revival of a moral, value-oriented approach to literature alien to the presuppositions of the ethical turn in literary studies. 8. In Intrigues: From Being to the Other New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, I have dealt with the interplay between an ethical writing and the ethics of writing in Levinas and Blanchot. 9. For the concept of play, see Derrida, La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines, Lcriture et la difference, Paris: Seuil, 1967. 10. Deleuze can also be included here, since for him being is a multiplicity that is en elle-mme systme de rapports diffrentiels. See Gilles Deleuze, La mthode de dramatization, in Lle dserte et autres textes, Editions de Minuit 2002, 132. Being, the pure groundless multiplicity is, at the same time, the principle of identity of what appears, and the principle of becoming of this entity. 11. This section reconsiders and expands various parts of the Introduction to Gabriel Riera (ed). Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, (2005), 1-20. My goal in this paper is to reframe those sections dealing with Badious conceptions of the event and the subject in terms of the major changes that his system undergoes with the publication of Logiques de mondes, Tome 2 de Ltre et lvnement, Paris: Seuil, 2006. 12. See Toscano, To Have Done with the End of Philosophy, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 9 (2000), 220-38. 13. See Kouvelakis, La politique dans ses limites, ou les paradoxes d Alain Badiou, Actuel Marx, 28 (2000), 39-54. 14. The question from which I began speculating can now be formulated as follows: can the One be unsealed from Being? Can the metaphysical enframing of Being by the One be severed?, Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence. A Short Treaty on Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany: SUNY Press, 2006, 34. Badious philosophical decision concerning the ontological rehabilitation of the multiple unfolds by way of a critique of the homologation of being and with an elucidation of the non-being of the one. This ontological rehabilitation of the multiple is grounded in Platos Parmenides. In his reading of Platos dialogue in Being and Event Badiou dislodges the dialectic of unity and multiplicity, as well as the dialectic of identity and alterity. In Plato Badiou sees both an ontology of the pure multiple, and a phenomenology founded upon the possibility of recognizing the one as the appearing of the multiple in the individuality of things. Badious Platonism posits a division in the transcendental plane of being (pure multiple) and the immanent plane of phenomena (the appearing of phenomena counted-as-one). See Pierre Verstraeten, Lapport the Badiou la 8eme hypothse du Parmnide, in Charles Ramond, (Ed.) Alain Badiou. Penser le multiple, Paris: L Harmattan, 2002, 154.

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

Ethical Criticism and Badious Philosopphy

111

15. For the question of the infinite in the philosophy of mathematics, see A. W. Moore, The Infinite, London: Routledge, 2001. 16. Further references to Ltre et lvnement will be cited as EE. 17. In Logiques des Mondes, Livre 5, Badiou, not unlike more phenomenological approaches to the event, also provides a typology of change that enables him to distinguish between modification, fact and strong singularity (event). For more phenomenological approaches to the event see, Henry Maldiney, LIrreductible. Epokh 3 (1993): 1149, and Claude Romano, Lvnement et le temps. Paris: PUF, 1999. 18. In Logiques des mondes Badiou develops an objective phenomenology of appearing in view of specifying the logical character of real change as it takes place in a real given world. This real change, event, or strong singularity results from a truth process that modifies both by its own power, and by the disconcerting force of its consequences, the appearing of multiplicities in a world. When it happens, real change imposes an effective discontinuity upon the world it comes to affect. 19. This formulation appears in Alain Badious Briefings on Existence, originally published as Court trait dontologie transitoire, Paris: Seuil, 1998, 58. This text predates the formulation of Logiques des mondes. 20. Up to this point I have dealt with the basic tenets of Badious ontology as presented in my Introduction to Gabriel Riera (ed). Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, (2005), 1-20. A close comparison between Badious ontology and his logic follows from this point on. 21. Further references to Logiques du monde will be cited as LM. 22. This is the case in both the On Subtraction, in Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum Books, 2004 and in On Beckett, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power, Manchester: Clinamen, 2003. However, in The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano, London: Politi, 2007, it is possible to see the logic of consequences at work, specifically in Badious determination of the poetic subjectivity of the century as that of the getteur. 23. In For an Ethics of Mystery, I dealt with the tension that the double demand of belonging and inclusion posits in Badious inesthetics. See Gabriel Riera (Ed.), Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, Albany: SUNY Press, 2006, 61-86. 24. In fact, one wonders if it is possible to deploy Badious approach to art in general, and the poem in particular, beyond a confined set of very abstract poets and writers, such as Mallarm, Beckett, Pessoa, Celan. When Badiou confronts writers whose poetics tend to transgress the boundaries of well-established art forms, things do not unfold as neatly; witness what Badiou says about Severo Sarduy. 25. See Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Adieu lsthetique, Paris: PUF, 2000. 26. In Badiou, and insofar as the poem is the dominant paradigm, the end of aesthetics is called the end of the age of poets. See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany: SUNY Press, 1999 and Lge des potes, in Jacques Rancire, ed. La Politique des potes. Pourquoi des potes en temps de dtresse, Paris: Bibliothque du Collge International de Philosophie, Rue Descartes, 1992. 27. See Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press,1994.

Badiou, Alain. Lge des potes, in Jacques Rancire, ed. La Politique des potes. Pourquoi des potes en temps de dtresse. Paris: Bibliothque du Collge International de Philosophie (Rue Descartes), 1992. -.Court trait dontologie transitoire. Paris: Seuil, 1998. -. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso, 2001, 23. -. Ltre et lvnement. Paris: Seuil, 1988. -. Handbook of Inesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Works Cited

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009

112

Gabriel Riera

-. Logiques du monde, Paris: Seuil, 2006. -. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. -. Thorie du sujet. Paris: Seuil, 1982. -. La vrit, forage et innomable, Conditions. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Carroll, Carroll. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York: Methuen, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2001. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Ramond, Charles (Ed.) Alain Badiou. Penser le multiple, Paris: L Harmattan, 2002. Riera, Gabriel (Ed). Introduction, Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, (2005), 1-20.

SubStance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009