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THE SYSTEM & THE ACT OR, PHILOSOPHY AS AMPERSAND JUSTIN CLEMENS
1. We, disciples; us, friends Its great to be speaking here in London today.1 Its a beautiful sunny day, the FA Cup Final is on, and beer prices have just been slashed. We, on the other hand, are stuck inside this dark and miserable room, discussing the work of an abstruse French philosopher who despises sport, while we drink red wine and nibble heavily salted nuts. Antisocial, unnatural, unhealthy, clandestine, and perverse insofar as we are voluntarily submitting our lives to the writings of a new master this, perhaps, is about as close as its possible to get these days to freedom. Of course, such freedom is not only ugly and boring, but potentially self-deluding to boot. Interests are still at stake. You may still have to pay for it. After all, todays very raison dtre is a celebration of the publication of Peter Hallwards anthology of essays on Alain Badiou entitled Think Again, Ray Brassiers and Alberto Toscanos edited collection of Badious Theoretical Writings (sans their proposed Postface, essentially now a Ghostface), and the paperback reprint
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This presentation was given on 22 May 2004 at Goldsmiths College, London, as part of a presentation-discussion that accompanied a triple book-launch. I have attempted to retain something of the impromptu, sketchy nature of the event in the present text. An extraordinary number of Badious official Anglophone commentators, translators and editors were present on the day: Jason Barker, Ray Brassier, Oliver Feltham, Nina Power, Alberto Toscano and myself. Rowan Wilson, from Continuum, was also present. Feltham and I delivered a double presentation; Barker responded to us both; Toscano hosted the session. Mingling with the disciples were people whose names I do not know, several of whom posed difficult questions about Badious work. Perhaps they will prove the true friends of philosophy?

2 of Infinite Thought. So buy the books if you like, pay as much as you have to if you feel you have to but, really, lets hope whats crucial here is that people who would perhaps otherwise never have met and may have absolutely nothing otherwise in common, will be able to discuss, openly, new thoughts of numbers and letters. So I thought that Id like to talk about something thats absolutely at the heart of this launch the rather boring relationship between discipleship, the masters articles, selected anthologies, and a systematic philosophy. Badious great treatise Ltre et lvnement is still unavailable in English; the system-building volume at the base of his reputation is lacking. What is available, instead, are anthologies composed of occasional writings, exclusive interviews, and essays extracted from other volumes, all subjected to the exigencies of commodity-production, legal entitlement and bio-physical limitations. This situation hardly worth mentioning in itself, it may seem, simply the banal conditions of contemporary book marketing should, on the contrary, force us to reappraise Badious own accounts of the dissemination of thought, philosophical thought. Indeed, it seems to me that Badiou is one of the few philosophers to factor in the problem of the dissemination of thought into his thought itself. A tiny article which, to my knowledge, nobody in the Anglophone world has yet translated, anthologised, or even adequately discussed is crucial here. This article, entitled, What is a philosophical institution? Or: address, transmission, institution can be found in Conditions.2 In this article of less than eight pages, Badiou elaborates an entire theory of the transmission of philosophy. Without an
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Conditions, pp. 83-89.

3 institution, no transmission; without transmission, no philosophy. How to think, however, this institution outside, first, established actualities such as the university which captured philosophy after Kant, and, second, without simply abstracting from or returning to classical forms of philosophical institution (the Academy, the Stoa, the Garden, etc.)? Moreover, how to think the role of the disciples or of the friends of philosophy? And so, third, how to avoid characterising a philosophical institution in the religious terms however admirable and radical of a Quaker society of friends? For Badiou, a philosophical institution can have no instrumental value, precisely because one can never apportion ends, aims or finalities to philosophy. Philosophy must, despite its most stringent and rigorous conclusions, testify to what he calls the interminable imperative of continuation(84). If philosophy itself institutes nothing but the void of an address, the transmission of a philosophy requires its disciples to invent new modes of thinking adequate to supporting the singularity of this empty address; these disciples work to transform the emergence of this void address into letters, into marks that subsist and can circulate along routes and through places that previously would have found these marks unthinkable and/or unacceptable. And these letters can only move as conflict, as antagonism, as committed incomprehension: a philosophical disciple doesnt know, wants to know, and knows that, though they can never know they know, they must place their names and bodies behind the work of their own obscure enquiries.3

See, for instance, his Afterword, subtitled Some replies to a demanding friend, in P. Hallward (ed.), Think Again (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 232-237; and his Authors Preface, to Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. R. Brassier and A. Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. xiii-xv.

So it is not publicity at which such institutions aim, but inscriptions, knotted, difficult, forever being done, undone, redone. It is only by such means that a philosophy becomes what it is in institutions by which it can encounter other philosophies. Hence a philosophical institution is not the guardian of philosophy, but of its historicity. It is thus the guardian of philosophies. It is the knotted plural of philosophies as resistance in time, which often means: resistance to the times.(87) It is in such institutions-in-process that disciples read, translate, re-edit the texts of the master; squabble about the philosophy in question; relate it to classical problems in the history of thought; relate it to other philosophies; to the world as they find it transfigured in the unprecedented dark light of these new little letters, etc. But, in what one might call this adherence (I do not use the word fidelity, for reasons which will become apparent) of the disciple an adherence which does not, of course, preclude vicious and unforgiving attacks on their masters texts they can tend towards becoming policemen of the state of philosophy, the place in which all the elements of (a) philosophy, having been torn from their original situations, are turned into new sets, verified, legitimated, included. Using the terms of Badious own schematising of set-theory, one can say that disciples do the work of the state of philosophy: the transformation of whats presented into representation, through their ceaseless unbinding, and re-countings of the philosophers words. In this sense, the operations of disciples can be schematised by the power-set and union operations of set-theory; if disciples are the source of philosophys growth and dissemination, they are also potential agents of its totalization. The putative universality of philosophy must always run the risk of totalisation. As Badiou notes,

5 explicating St. Paul: Philosophy knows only disciples. But a subjectson is the contrary of a subject-disciple, because it is that by which life begins.4 As Badiou says in his Authors Preface to Theoretical Writings: in what sense can this present book really be said to be one of my books? Specifically, one of my books of philosophy? Is it not rather a book by my friends Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano? After all, they gathered and selected the texts from several different books, which for the most part were not strictly speaking works but rather collections of essays (xiv). If the question of forms of writing is critical in this context, it is because a philosophical institution must always bind itself to the singularity of a philosophers dicta, and it is thus no accident that Badiou himself is very attentive to such a necessity. Each philosopher invents or constructs his or her own form (and the aforementioned Preface accordingly opens with a list of major philosophical forms). I want to suggest that, although Badiou is a systematic philosopher, his own system is one which frustrates the difference between central works and occasional essays. Recently, Badiou has started to refer explicitly to this work of discipleship under the rubric of friendship, a very interesting nominal shift. If its probably a bit rich (presumptuous?) for a living philosopher
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A. Badiou, Saint Paul, ou la fondation de luniversalisme ((Paris: PUF, 1997), p. 63.

6 to refer to his living disciples as disciples, and if the rubric of friendship itself has an impeccable philosophical pedigree, this nonetheless opens a question as to the true subjects of thought. In fact, I detect a double division here within Badious thinking of an institution: the division between master and disciples, on the one hand, and between friends and enemies, on the other. This, however, suggests another way of thinking about the relation between master and disciple, a wavering and uncertain line of division within philosophy and its institutions. Some indications: 1) the difference between friends and disciples; 2) the difference between philosophy and history of philosophy; 3) the difference between situation and state; 4) the difference between forms of writing and their re-presentation. After all, for Badiou, the very exemplum of a subject engaged in a militant fidelity to an event is Saint Paul, the greatest of all disciples, the one who invents the first known universal institution in human history. It is not Christ who is the hero of subjectivity for Badiou, but Paul. And since, as Badiou insists at the beginning of Being and Event, a contemporary philosophy must circulate between ontology, modern inventions of subjectivity and its own history, the disciples and their work must be treated as integral to the elaboration of philosophy itself. A philosophy must attend to the problem of its own institution, to philosophical institutions, to the creation of new forms of institution. It must attend to the problem of friends and disciples. Following this mobile line takes us directly to questions at the heart of Badious philosophy, to the concepts of act, activism and system.

7 2. System-Act Since we are here to celebrate Badious philosophy and its transmission, let me note what seems an interesting omission. To my knowledge, there is as yet no index or glossary listing for the terms system or act in any of the translations, anthologies or other secondary literature in English on Badiou, including the major monographs.5 I thus intone, with all the smug self-satisfaction and fatuity of a genuine academic pedant, that I hope this deleterious situation will eventually be rectified, preferably sooner than later. For it seems to me that, for Badiou, philosophy must be systematic, or it will not, will no longer be philosophy at all. Indeed, as he puts it in Manifesto for Philosophy: An infallible sign by which to recognise that philosophy is under the nullifying effect of some suture to one of its generic conditions is the monotonous repetition of the statement according to which the systematic form of philosophy is henceforth impossible. This anti-systematic axiom is today systematic.6 This little quote should alert us that there are at least two forms of thought of system: 1) the philosophically affirmed; 2) the sophistically
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Cf. J. Barker Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2002); A. Badiou, On Beckett, ed. and trans. N. Power and A. Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003); P. Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2004); P. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); A. Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. and ed. O. Feltham and J. Clemens (London & New York: Continuum, 2003). 6 Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie, p. 45.

8 disavowed. It also seems to me that this distinction doubles another, the state of the world itself. As Badiou notes early in Saint Paul, the hostility of the contemporary world to philosophy is evident in the repression of the very names of philosophys conditions. Thus culture obliterates art, technology obliterates science, management obliterates politics, and sexuality obliterates love: The system: culture-technics-management-sexuality that has the immense merit of being homogenous to the market, and of which all the terms, at least, designate a rubric of commercial presentation is the nominal modern recovery of the system art-science-politics-love, which typologically identify truth procedures.7 Thus the unavowed system of anti-systematic thought is in some way homogeneous with the system of the times; declarative systematic thought (philosophy) attempts to rupture with the system of the times. Or, again, the latter attempts to take account of the thoughts that do attempt such a rupture (the four conditions). System or the ambition to create a system is integral to philosophy. Not every system is philosophical, of course, but every philosophy, every true philosophy, must aim at systematicity.8 So Badiou himself attempts to be a systematic thinker. This begs the question: What is a philosophical system according to Badiou? What must a philosophy do to be systematic? What conditions must it fulfil? One can take a number of routes to answer this question. The first is: what does Badiou explicitly say about whats

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Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 13. Certain commentators have recognised this implicitly, without necessarily expanding on what system designates for Badiou. See, for example, If Badiou breaks with both conventional and contemporary permutations of the category of truth, it would then go without saying that what he offers is something that makes little sense outside the overall system of his philosophy, S. Gillespie, Beyond Being: Badious Doctrine of Truth, Communication and Cognition, Vol. 36, No. 1-2 (2003), p. 11. My emphasis.

9 required for a philosophical system? The second is: what does Badiou himself do in the pursuit of this ideal? What is the relation between the declaration and the act of philosophy in his work? How does he himself discuss this relation, if at all? How does one build up a system? Significantly, one of the places in which one can look for answers to this question is in Badious accounts of other philosophers. In his book on Deleuze, Badiou maintains that the three major principles of Deleuzes thought are: 1) metaphysics of the One; 2) ascetic ethic of thought; 3) abstract and systematic. Deleuze himself underlines the last of these, in the context of a discussion of the end of metaphysics. For Deleuze, Leibniz was the first patent thinker of system, and Deleuze identifies himself with this tradition. Why is Leibniz so important in this regard for Deleuze? My belief is that the hinge is the concept of compossibility, the assurance of the noncontradictory, the best selection. Deleuze, of course, rewrites compossibility in his own way, as univocity without unity, without the Will of God: To the degree that the world is now made up of divergent series (the chaosmos), or that crapshooting replaces the game of Plentitude, the monad is now unable to contain the entire world as if in a closed circle that can be modified by projection. It now opens on a trajectory or a spiral in expansion that moves further and further away from a center.9 In my opinion, the Deleuze-Leibniz lineage provides a double resource for Badiou. Despite his many critical pieces directed towards Deleuze, and his ongoing delimitation of the Aristotelian-Leibnizian heritage of logic, Badiou is in accord, first, with the absolute necessity for
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G. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and trans. T. Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 137.

10 philosophy to be systematic and, second, that this systematicity engage the compossibility of the discontinuous. 3. Philosophy is the ampersand Hence the importance of the and in the title of Being and Event; and is precisely the philosophical injunction, the injunction of system. Chez Badiou, being is dealt with by mathematics, while events are the province of the conditions. Neither are, strictly speaking, the proper job of philosophy. What philosophy must do is construct a way of bridging the gap without reduction. Philosophy is the ampersand.10 As Benjamin Noys puts it: Despite the tendency of Badious work to appear as a self-enclosed and even impenetrable system his work is much more open than has been commonly supposed.11 But let there be no confusion: there can be no simple opposition between a closed system and an open becoming. Whether covertly moralised or not, such denominations are insufficient to treat the novelty of a philosophical system in act. Badious system is produced in an endless circulation through the conditions, returning to them again and again, in different forms (extended treatises, handbooks, articles, oral presentations, etc.), constantly permitting them to norm and re-divert existing propositions of his philosophy.
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For different conceptions of the and, see G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 16; J. Derrida, The Supplement of Copula, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982); and J-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), e.g., Parataxis thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defying it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention), p. 66. 11 B. Noys, Badious Fidelities: Reading the Ethics, Communication and Cognition, Vol. 36, No. 1-2 (2003), p. 43.

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If one must be an activist (a militant) in a truth process, the creation of a philosophical system is itself a protracted act and this act itself is something that scrambles the polarities of closed and open, centre and margins, structure and occasion, continuation and punctuation. It thus seems to me that there is no principled difference between the original meditations of and in Being and Event and the articles recollected in Theoretical Writings: all are part of the ongoing act of system, whether or not Badiou himself actually envisaged these articles one day sitting together in an English translation. This act is novelty itself, insofar as no existing names or concepts are adequate to capturing the shape or rhythm of its elaboration. This system-act, integral to the definition of philosophy, is what tries to validate the contemporary compossibility of philosophys conditions that is, their heterogeneous sheltering, a void peace of their discontinuity. In other words, there is no philosophical system without disciples, or, at least, a seething and active host of bizarre patchwork creatures traversed by the mobile line of the friend-disciple division. If they can get it together, knotting inscriptions against the tendency to representation, a new philosophical institution may well emerge. To parody the jingle from the popular Australian soap-opera Neighbours (with all the horrors that the very word and concept may conjure up): thats when good disciples become good friends....