Alenka Zupancic Alain Badious philosophy is undoubtedly one of the most powerful conceptual proposals of contemporary thought. It is also a daring proposal, very much in line with Badious fundamental and emphatic afrmation of philosophy as such where the word afrmation can be taken in its Nietzschean sense. This is to say that, in spite of Badious continuous explicit or implicit polemics with and against modern sophists, his philosophical enterprise can in no way be reduced to a reaction to these bad others. Of course, philosophy has its con- ditions: mathematics, politics, art and love. Yet, these are just conditions, they do not provide a foundation for philosophy. Should any of the above-mentioned generic procedures be transformed from a condition to the foundation of phil- osophy then this gives rise to what Badiou calls a suture that can lead to a suspension of philosophy, i.e. to its abandoning itself to one of its conditions. One could thus say that there is also a fth condition of philosophy: philosophy has to pull itself away from the immediate grip of its own conditions, while nevertheless remaining under the effect of these conditions. Although emphatically opposed to fashionable statements about the end of philosophy (and history), Badiou nevertheless suggests that something did happen to (or in) philosophy after Hegel. In a certain sense, Hegel was the last philosopher. Badiou says as much when he states: if philosophy is threatened by suspension, and this perhaps since Hegel, it is because it is captive to a network of sutures to its conditions, especially to its scientic and political conditions, which forbade it from conguring their general compossibility (MP 45/64). According to this account, philosophy after Hegel did not die, it rather suspended itself by delegating its functions to one or another of its conditions: to science (the positivist suture), to politics (political suture) and then, as a kind of reaction to these two sutures, to art (poetical suture). Since Hegel, philosophy thus mostly took place in the element of its own suppression, to the advantage of one of these procedures (science, politics, art). This is also why, according to Badiou, all great philosophers after Hegel were in fact anti- philosophers (Nietzsche, Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger . . .). From this per- spective, the eleven chapters of Badious Manifesto for Philosophy could indeed be read as a reversal of Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: for quite some time, philosophers were trying to change the world, or to justify it (a frequent consequence, according to Badiou, of the positivist suture), or else to merge with it through a poetical experience of Existence and of the Unspeakable . . . and the time has come for philosophers to start to philosophize! Of course, this in no way implies that philosophy should be, for instance, apolitical. On the contrary, no real philosophy is at liberty to choose to be apolitical or indifferent to any of the four generic procedures that constitute its conditions. Nevertheless, it operates in a certain distance from them. This distance is not a distance of disengagement, it springs from the following fundamental axiom: Philosophy is not a production of truth but an operation that starts out from truths (CS 66). As Peter Hallward notes, for all its ambition Badious philosophy cultivates a certain modesty with respect to its conditions. 1 Truths are produced elsewhere: within the four generic procedures, the origin of which is always an event (in the Badiouian sense of the word). Philosophy is thus dened as a conceptual space where the generic procedures, are congured and composed. Philosophy does not establish any truth, but it has at its disposal a place of truths; it does not utter any truths, it utters a thinkable conjuncture of truths. In one sense, philosophy is a scene (or stage) of truths. It is precisely this scene or space that disappears whenever philosophy abandons itself to one of its conditions. Badiou recently coined a very telling expression, la passion du re el, the passion of the real, and one could perhaps say that it is precisely such passion of the real that tempts modern philosophy to abandon itself to one of its conditions, i.e. to look for a direct access to (the production of) truth. On this level, there is an interesting resemblance between Badious project and the project of so-called critical (or Kantian) philosophy, with its two fundamental preoccupations or claims: the interrogation of the conditions of possibility of philosophy and the consequent restriction of philosophy to a clearly delimited eld. The anecdotal aspect of this resemblance, at least, is perfectly obvious. Kant himself had his anti-philosopher: David Hume. Humes objection to the notion of causality could be understood as under- mining the reign of the One as guarantor of the link between cause and effect, thus opening the way, to use Badious terms, for the authority of the multiple. The reaction to Hume that shaped the conditions of thought in Kants time was two-fold: a dogmatic repetition of the old views which refused to hear what Hume was saying, and the rise of scepticism or, if one prefers, of sophism. Kant states himself to be weary of both of dogmatism since it teaches nothing, and of scepticism since it amounts to an abdication of philosophy that, as he puts it very nicely, does not even promise us anything even the quiet state of a contented ignorance. 2 Kant decides to carry out his philosophical project, much as Badiou does, in proximity to the anti-philosophy of Hume, i.e. by acknowledging his gesture of dethronement of the One, without accepting its sophistic implications as necessary. He starts off by dening the conditions of possibility of philosophy, insisting that his proposal, although it might look extremely ambitious, arrogant and vainglorious, is in fact incomparably more moderate than both dogmatic and sceptical claims. 3 For sceptics, these pre- tended indifferentists, however they may try to disguise themselves by sub- stituting a popular tone for the language of the Schools, inevitably fall back, in THI NK AGAI N 192 so far as they think at all, into those very metaphysical assertions which they profess so greatly to despise. 4 It is tempting to compare this passage with Badious discussion of the great contemporary sophists who, although they are the rare thinkers of our time, remain caught in the same paradox: It is never really modest to declare an end, a completion, a radical impasse. The announcement of the End of Grand Narratives is as immodest as the Grand Narrative itself, the certainty of the end of metaphysics proceeds within the metaphysical element of certainty, the deconstruction of the concept of subject requires a central category being, for example whose historial prescription of which is even more determinant, etc. [. . .]. The contrite prosopopeia of abjection is as much a posture, an imposture, as the bugle blaring cavalry of the Spirits second coming. The end of the End of History is cut from the same cloth as this End (MP 11/3031tm). Kants own response to the proclaimed impasse or dead end of philosophy is, rst, to establish the conditions of the possibility of philosophy, and then to assign to philosophy its proper eld, preventing it from sliding either into Schwarmerei or into sophistic play. If philosophy steps out the eld that denes it and constitutes its scene or space it can head only for disaster. On this level, i.e. concerning the very philosophical gesture involved in the Kantian project on the one hand and in Badious project on the other, the similarities seem to be more than just supercial. However, it is not the purpose of this chapter to compare Badiou and Kant. Neither is it to establish whether the Kantian gesture was purely restrictive or else if it had the power of effectively re-inaugurating philosophy under new conditions, or in the face of the reconguration of its conditions. (Given the subsequent development of German idealism I would be rather inclined to opt for the second suggestion.) My question concerns the philosophical impact, in the context of the contemporary conguration of philosophy, of the key ele- ments that constitute Badious own denition of philosophy. Philosophy is only possible: (1) under the four conditions which philosophy itself declares us such; (2) by maintaining a distance towards these conditions, which is to say by resisting a suture of philosophy to any of its conditions or by renouncing the claim that philosophy is itself a production of truth. This is what Ive called the fth condition. According to Badiou himself, it is especially this second point that constitutes what is mainly at stake in the contemporary dividing line of philosophy. Most modern philosophers are ready to subscribe (and thus to abandon) their phi- losophy to one of its conditions. One could say that in this case they are, strictly speaking, no longer philosophers, but thinkers. In his book on Saint Paul, Badiou points out how names that designate the four generic procedures are being systematically replaced by other names which aim at effacing the pro- cedures of truth involved in them: culture instead of art, technique instead of THE FI FTH CONDI TI ON 193 science, management instead of politics, sexuality instead of love. One could add to this list: thinkers instead of philosophers. Except that thinkers, in the above-dened sense, are precisely those who usually ght against such re- nominations, especially those concerning the generic procedures to which they themselves subscribe their thought. In this sense scientic thinkers would be the last to fail to distinguish between science and technology, poetic thinkers the last to confuse culture and art, engaged political thinkers the last to abandon the name politics in favour of management . . . On the other hand, more than a few of those who, in recent decades, were happy to be called philosophers have indeed embraced these re-nominations as signs of moder- nity, progress and the ongoing secularization of society. This is probably why Badiou maintains, more or less explicitly, that modern anti-philosophy (and its thinkers) have been for quite some time the only guardians of the philoso- phical ame, so to speak. If philosophy did not die, but has continued to live in the element of its own suspension, this is largely the merit of anti-philosophy, i.e. of thinkers. Now thought (la pensee) is not a special prerogative of philosophy, it belongs essentially to all generic procedures or procedures of truth. In this sense, phi- losophy could be said to be the thought of thought, and in this respect Badiou is in fact closer to Hegel than to Kant. His attempt to delimit a eld of philosophy proper does not consist in inviting philosophy to restrain itself from certain kinds of statements, forbidding it to go beyond a certain limit: the space of philosophy is not created by drawing limits around its eld, but simply by afrming the very space of reexivity of thought. To say that philosophy proper is the thought of thought does not mean or imply that it is in the position of the Other of the Other. Quite the contrary: philosophy takes place within the constitutive (and inherent) reexivity of thought. The relation of philosophy to its conditions is not simply that of certain conditions that have to be satised in order for philosophy to be possible. Although this is also true to a certain extent, the main accent of Badious proposal is elsewhere: it is the thinking within (the dimension of truth produced by) its conditions that constitutes the condition of philosophy. Philosophy is work that takes place at a distance from its conditions, yet within the realm of these conditions. One way of understanding more precisely the conceptual stakes of this fth condition leads to an interesting question that we have so far left unanswered. We saw that Badiou himself maintains that something did happen in the nineteenth century, just after Hegel (MP 49), something that changed the course (as well as the nature) of philosophy. But what? Could one try to determine what exactly happened? Badiou does not address this question directly. He often hints, however, that it has to do with a destitution of the One, i.e. with the replacement of the authority of the One with the authority of the multiple. He also hints that (the development of) capitalism had an important role in this: It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital: it exposes the pure multiple as the foundation of presentation; it denounces every effect of One as a simple, precarious conguration; it dismisses the symbolic representations in which the bond [lien] found a semblance of THI NK AGAI N 194 being (MP 37/56). One could say that what happened in the nineteenth cen- tury is that a slow but massive shift took place from one dominant social bond to another. Yet what is at stake in this shift of the social bond is not simply the alternative between or the replacement of One with multiple. In order to appreciate this properly it is important to determine what exactly the expression authority of the One refers to. There is, rst of all, an important difference between what Badiou calls the authority of the One and what he calls the count for one. The latter is simply the condition of any thinkable situation or thing: whereas the purely multiple is inconsistent and is a pure excess beyond itself, all consistent thought supposes a structure, a counting- for-one, such that every presented or presentable multiple is consistent. Every presentable multiple is presented, in other words, precisely as a set or consistent being-together of a certain collection of elements. In this respect, the counting- for-one (and with it the notion of one) is perfectly compatible with the notion of pure multiplicity. However, excess beyond itself, which is the very being of Being as purely multiple, also takes place on the level of what is already counted-for-one, i.e. on the level of presentation, within a set, or within what Badiou calls a situation (which is just another word for set): it takes place as the excess of the parts of a given multiple or set over its elements: if we have a multiple of, say, ve elements, the possible combination of these elements i.e. the number of the parts exceeds by far the number of elements (more precisely, this number amounts to two to the power of ve). This excess, that Badiou also calls lexce `s errant, a wandering excess, is one of the crucial notions of his ontology, for he holds the wandering [errance] of the excess to be the real of being (MP 61/81). What he calls the state of a situation (playing on the double meaning of this word) involves the operation whereby this excess itself is counted-for-one, and thus xed (or made consistent). The count-for-one itself, which takes place on the level of presentation, is thus counted-for-one. This is what Badiou also calls representation, or meta-structure. Now, what is involved in the expression the authority of the One is something quite different than the count-for-one which makes any multiplicity presentable or intelligible, as well as something other than a state. Badiou usually employs the statement the One is not as synonymous with God is not, or else as directly synonymous with the death of God. Yet at the same time he also identies this statement with what is involved in his own fundamental ontological stance: a multiple is always a multiple of multiples (of multiples, of multiples . . .), and the eventual stopping point can in no way be a one but only a void. However, I would maintain that the One is not (in the sense of God is not) cannot be situated on the same level as the positing of a void as the stuff that being is made of. The reason for this is that as Badiou himself points out 5 God is dead is not an ontological statement but a statement that belongs to an evental horizon or, more precisely, to its closure. In other words, I would suggest that we take the formulation authority of the One to refer to a structurally as well as historically determinable social bond, and not as pri- marily referring to a conceptual choice between One and multiple. The authority of the One is a social bond which roughly corresponds to THE FI FTH CONDI TI ON 195 what Lacan conceptualized as the discourse of the Master. The Masters dis- course is not exactly a state in Badious sense. In it, the wandering excess is xed, not by being counted as one, but by being subjected and attached, as Other, to the agency of the One. The authority of the One is not based upon a totalization of a multiple, it is not a forcing of the multiple by the One. It is based upon relating the One and Other in the element of their pure disjunction. The Masters discourse functioned so well and so long because it succeeded in transforming the weakest point of a given multiple (the point of its very inconsistency) into the strongest lever, as well as the source, of its own power. What was entirely mobilized or absorbed in the One was not the colourful multiplicity of Being, but the point of its potential generic power: its loose end, the point on account of which no multiplicity can be intrinsically counted as One. The important thing to remember in relation to the Masters discourse (or the authority of the One) is that the agent of this social bond is not the excessive multiplicity counted-for-one, it is not a unied totality of the excessive mul- tiplicity, but an (empty) signier of its impossible totalization. In other words, the way multiplicity is attached (and xed) to the One is that the One gives body to, or incarnates, the constitutive void of the multiple. This is how the master signier, as agent of this social bond, xates the excess, assigns it its place and keeps it there. What happens with the destitution of the authority of the One is that the bond between the One and multiple, the bond that was there in their very disjunction, dissolves. The result is that the excess, as the very real of Being, emerges as a free-oating element and appears in a form of a passionate detachment. For what happens is not that excess loses its signier or repre- sentation (since it never really had one), what it loses is its attachment to the One. One could say that a spectre of excess starts haunting the society, in its different spheres; and its spectral form is in no way insignicant. The Masters discourse (or, if one prefers, the authority of the One) is a social bond in which this excessive element is, if one may say so, in the ideal place, in the service of the hegemonic power of the One, which reigns by assuming the very exces- siveness of excess. What happens with the destitution of this bond is, so to speak, that the ghost of excess escapes from the bottle. This process could be said to have started with the French Revolution, to have reached its full extent in the nineteenth century, and to have continued through a part of the twen- tieth century. The nineteenth century in particular was deeply haunted by this excessive element in all possible forms, from the conceptual to the phantas- magoric. Perhaps no single phrase can capture, so to speak, the spirit of the thought of this period (regardless of different schools and orientations) better than this: there is something rotten in the State of Things. Some thinkers of the time attributed this rot to the still-remaining pockets of the authority of the One, believing that redemption would come only with their denitive elimination. Others, on the contrary, saw the origin of discontent in the very destitution of the authority of the One. But we can say, without oversimplifying things, that virtually all serious thinkers sought to think at a maximal proximity to, if not in a direct confrontation with, this excess. A tarrying with the excess thus THI NK AGAI N 196 became the most prominent gure of thought. Utopias, designed to eliminate social and other injustice, mostly proposed to achieve this by eliminating this very excess. To a certain extent, even Marx was tempted by the possibility of eliminating, once and for all, the excessive, disharmonious element of society the element in which he himself recognized its truth, its real and its symptom. As for Nietzsche, one could say that a tarrying with the excess constituted the very core of his writings, although he certainly did not seek to eliminate it. In his recent book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday life: Reections on Freud and Rosenzweig, Eric Santner develops a reading of these two authors around the central notion of a constitutive too muchness 6 which corresponds perfectly to the notion of wandering excess. In literature, the explosion of a wandering excess is even more directly perceptible: the undead dead, spectral, unplaceable gures and Things, from Frankenstein to Dracula, passing through all kinds of phenomena that Freud treated under the title of Das Unheumliche, the uncanny. Not to mention that one of the most popular serials of the middle of the nineteenth century was Euge`ne Sues The Wandering Jew (Le Juif errant another name for lexce`s errant?). And at the same time this (wandering) excess was increasingly becoming recognized as, precisely, the real of being, and also as the locus if its truth. If, for modern (anti-)philosophy, Hegel became one of the most criticized (if not directly loathed) of philosophers it is precisely since it seems that, in his speculative edice, everything adds up: there are no loose ends, no scars (the wounds of the spirit heal without scars), no cracks. In short: no wandering excess. Philosophy in general did not escape this mocking contempt: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in (our) philosophy. Or, in another version of this objection: instead of disclosing it, philosophy conceals the real of being, its cracks and its critical points. Freud liked to quote the last verses of the following Heine poem that summarizes this objection splendidly: Life and the worlds too fragmented for me! A German professor can give me the key. He puts life in order with skill magisterial, Builds a rational system for better or worse; With nightcap and dressing-gown scraps for material He chinks up the holes in the universe. 7 The post-Hegelian philosophy (or, if one prefers, anti-philosophy) started off with this fundamental claim: symbolic representations which were traditionally considered as access to the truth and to the real of Being in fact alienate us from Being and deform it (or our perception of it). And classical philosophy (or metaphysics) was suddenly recognized as the queen of this representative misrepresentation. Indeed, if one were to name one central issue that distinguishes the rise of modern thought it is perhaps none other than precisely the issue of repre- sentation (and the question of the One and/or Multiple is part of this issue), its profound interrogation, and the whole consequent turn against (the logic of) THE FI FTH CONDI TI ON 197 representation. This is perhaps most perceptible in (modern) art, which fron- tally attacked the notion of art as representation. Gerard Wajcman was right when he dened the central problem of modern art as follows: How to nd access to the world in some other way than through image? How to aim at the world, at the real, without at the same time interposing the screen of repre- sentation? 8 In politics, this also was a central issue: who represents people and how they can be properly represented? Why are some represented and some not? And what if the very idea of representation is the source of societys evils and its alienation? The realm of politics is especially interesting in this respect since the introduction of a representative system coincided with the very questioning of its pertinence. Something similar took place in respect to the generic procedure of love: a simultaneous demand that love be properly represented by the institution of marriage (the new imperative that one should marry out of love), and a massive observation that this is in fact impossible, i.e. that marriage can never truly represent the real of love. It was this general interrogation of representation and, to put it simply, the conviction that the real of being escapes representation (or else is falsied, distorted by it), which drew philosophy towards embracing the immediacy of one or another of its conditions. Paradoxically, Badiou emphatically shares this view of representation, although he is as emphatic in rejecting the consequences that philosophy drew from it. Philosophy embraced the immediacy of its conditions since this immediacy seemed to be the only bond remaining between thought and being. It is not so much that philosophy was seized by a passion for a direct access to the production of truths (as I suggested earlier) as it is that this direct access seemed to remain the only possible bond between philosophy and the ontological layer of its conditions. The either/or of modern (anti-)philosophy sprang from what appeared as the very impossibility of a position that could satisfy Badious fth condition (again, that philosophy has to pull itself away from the immediate grip of its conditions, while nevertheless remaining under these conditions). Before, the scene for such composing of truths was provided by the faith in representation. I use the word faith deliberately, since the correlation of an object and its representation presupposed an Other vouching for this correlation and its unchangeableness. This Other (or, perhaps better, this other One), by xing the relationship between, for instance, words and things, corresponds to what Badiou calls representation as meta-structure. For this is exactly one of the ways we could resume Badious distinction between presentation and representation: presentation involves naming the things (or elements), whereas representation involves xing the relationship between things (or elements) and their names. For Badiou, representation also constitutes the crucial operation of the institution of a state, and as such he views it as repudiation of a truth procedure. Hence Badious principled position against representation and the state a position he adopts while remaining, at the time, well aware of the difculty of simply putting an end to all representation (or all state). Badiou acknowledges that the state is co-original to any situation, which is to say that there is always both presentation and representation (EE 110). The end of representation and THI NK AGAI N 198 the universality of simple presentation (an egalitarian counting-for-one) remains a goal that bears some resemblance to the Kantian notion of a reg- ulative idea, i.e. an idea that cannot be realized but in view of which one orientates ones engagement in reality. This question of presentation and representation (and their distinction) is indeed a very difcult one, and con- stitutes a perhaps not yet entirely worked-out aspect of Badious conceptual edice. At the same time, it is undoubtedly one of its central aspects. If nothing else, it is essential for the very possibility of philosophy (its fth condition), for it seems that philosophy as composition and conguration of truths (produced elsewhere) cannot exactly be said to be a simple presentation. More: could one not say that what comes the closest to philosophy as simple presentation is precisely what Badiou calls modern anti-philosophy? Philosophy as presenta- tion is nothing other than philosophy abandoning itself to its conditions, philosophy as an immediate part of procedure(s) of truth (or else as a sophistic game of endlessly surng on the waves of the wandering excess). So are we then supposed instead to embrace representation as the meta- structure which alone could guarantee a space or scene for philosophy proper? Of course not; this would be falling back to the essentially premodern (or pre- Hegelian) position. The answer which I will only try to sketch or roughly indicate here rather lies in acknowledging something that Badiou strangely refuses to acknowledge or at least to adopt. Something that happened in linguistics and gained a denite form in psychoanalysis (more precisely, in the Lacanian use of lin- guistics). Something that can in no way be dismissed as yet another expression of the linguistic turn and even less as a poetic turn. Something that is as important for contemporary philosophy as is Cantors secularization of the innite: an entirely new conception of representation. A conception which is not that of representation as meta-structure, and does not involve the idea of the signier (or name) representing an object for the subject. A conception which strikingly meets Badious own demand of destitution of the category of object while preserving the category of the subject (cf. MP 723/912). A conception that nds its most concise formulation in Lacans statement: a signier represents a subject for another signier. This was a major breakthrough of contemporary thought, a breakthrough that could in fact provide philosophy with its fth condition, i.e. its own distinctive conceptual space. For in this conception, representation is not a presentation of presentation or the state of a situation but rather a presentation within presentation or a state within a situation. In this conception, representation is itself innite and constitutively not-all (or non-conclusive), it represents no object and does not prevent a continuous un-relating of its own terms (which is how Badiou denes the mechanism of truth). Here, representation as such is a wandering excess over itself; representation is the innite tarrying with the excess that springs not simply from what is or is not represented (its object), but from this act of representation itself, from its own inherent crack or inconsistency. The Real is not something outside or beyond representation, but is the very crack of representation. THE FI FTH CONDI TI ON 199 The problem of representation as meta-structure, and the consequent imperative to restrain oneself from representation or to pull oneself away from the state, is something that belongs to a different ontology than the ontology of the purely multiple, of innity and of contingency. It could only concern a universe in which the evental statement God is dead for whatever reason does not hold true. In an innite contingent universe (or situation), by contrast, there is no necessity for the counting of the count itself to be situated on a meta-level. It can very well be situated on the same level as the counting-for- one itself, only separated from it by an irreducible interval (and it is this interval that Lacan calls the Real). Moreover, this is precisely what makes a situation innite. What makes it innite is not the exclusion of any operation of representation (which would want to count it for one and thus to close it upon itself) but its inclusion. What makes any particular presentation innite is precisely that it already includes representation. This conception also allows for an effect of unication (or xation) taking place, yet a different one from what Badiou calls state. Lacan links it to his notion of the quilting point (point de capiton). This unication of a (potentially) innite set is not the same as in the case of meta-structure. S 1 as point de capiton is not a meta-signier in relation to S 2 , to the virtually innite battery of signiers and their combinations that Lacan also calls knowledge. S 1 quilts this set not by counting the count itself, but by presenting the very impos- sibility of an immediate coincidence of the two counts, i.e. by presenting the very gap between them. In other words, S 1 is the signier of the impossibility of the two (counting and counting the count itself) to be One. It is the signier of the very gap or interval or void that separates them in any process of repre- sentation: a void that is precisely the cause of the innite layering of repre- sentation. For Lacan, the Real of being is this void or interval or gap, this very non-coincidence, whereas the wandering excess is already its result. S 1 presents this void by naming it, it does not represent it. Lacans S 1 , the (in)famous master signier or phallic signier is, paradoxically, the only way to write that the One is not and that what is is the void that constitutes the original disjunction in the midst of every count-for-one. The count-for-one is always already two. S 1 is the matheme of what one can describe as the One is not. It writes that the One is not by presenting the very thing that prevents it from being One. This is what S 1 says: the One is not; yet what is is not a pure multiple, but two. This is perhaps Lacans crucial insight: if there is something on which one could lean in order to leave the ontology of the One behind, this something is not simply the multiple, but a Two. This, of course, is directly related to the point in which Badiou recognizes a major contribution of psychoanalysis to the conditions of philosophy: psycho- analysis is the rst (consistent) thought of the generic procedure of love. Which is to say that it is the rst thinkable articulation of a Two that would neither be counted for one nor would it be the sum of one + one. A Two that would be counted for two in an immanent way (. . .), where Two is neither a fusion nor a sum; and where Two is thus in excess over that what constitutes it, without there being a Third [term] to join it. 9 THI NK AGAI N 200 This singular notion of the Two is very much related to the question of representation, i.e. of the possibility for the counting the count itself to be situated on the same level as the count (and not on a meta-level), yet dislocated in relation to it. For this is precisely what it implies to think a Two that would be counted for two in an immanent way. Badiou was not only the rst philosopher explicitly to conceptualize this singular notion of the Two in philosophy, he also reminded psychoanalysis of the production of this truth that it sometimes tends to forget. By conceptualizing it within philosophy, i.e. within the space of a general com- possibility of truths, he gave contemporary philosophy one of its most precious concepts which, although it comes from a singular generic procedure, has its universal value and is in no way limited to that procedure. I would also add that with this concept, Badiou addresses the question of representation from a new and different angle, an angle which avoids the difculties sketched out above and which, at the same time, directly concerns the conditions of philosophy. If philosophy is to take place within the space of the innite process of truth without itself being a process of truth, if it is to be situated on the same level as generic procedures yet at a certain distance from them (i.e. dislocated in relation to them), then it has to rely precisely on such an immanent count-for-two as is at work in a Badiouian conception of the Two. This would imply, of course, that one of the four conditions of philosophy (love, with its immanent count-for-two) is also its fth condition, the con- dition that denes the very relationship of philosophy with its conditions and keeps it from merging with them, as well as from appearing as their inde- pendent sum. As a thought that operates within the eld of four generic procedures of truth, without simply merging with this eld and becoming indistinguishable from it, philosophy presupposes a sce`ne du Deux, a stage/scene of the Two. In other words, in the conguration of conditions of philosophy, one of its conditions the immanent count-for-two, which Badiou recognizes in the gure of love has itself to be counted-for-two. THE FI FTH CONDI TI ON 201