I begin with an anecdote from February 1967, Derrida’s own annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of his first three books: La Voix et le phénomène, L’Écriture et la différence and De la grammatologie. Consulted by Jean Piel on one of the earliest texts sent by Alain Badiou, an article on French Marxist critic Louis Althusser submitted to Critique, Derrida replied that he found it “at least irritating in its tone” and pompous, objecting to “the ‘marks’ [Badiou] hands out to everyone as if it were prize-giving or the Last Judgment.” However, Derrida was also prepared to acknowledge its undeniable importance, let alone since he felt “far from … ‘philosophically’ ready to follow [Badiou] in his arguments or his conclusions.”Footnote 1 Soon before the turbulent May ’68 “events,” which ushered in so many ideological realignments in the contemporary French intellectual panorama, the stage seemed set for what would crystallize, in the next three decades or so, as an opposition of style and politics, between the “philosophers of difference,” to use François Laruelle’s label in his 1986 study,Footnote 2 and a younger Turk, whose philosophical system was to gather momentum abroad around the turn of the millennium, spawning an alternative to what had been called by then “post-structuralist” thinking.
However suggestive Laruelle’s denomination lumping together philosophies of alterity and difference was thirty years ago, it fails to register the work of Alain Badiou within what could be a larger, more flexible and still topical construction of contemporary French thought over the past fifty years. This chapter proposes such a reframing via an encounter between the most seemingly antithetical protagonists. I see a possible convergence in what I call more inclusively the “philosophies of the event.”Footnote 3 An essential reference in the emergence of nouvelle critique since Maurice Blanchot’s seminal postwar essaysFootnote 4 and a bridge between incompatible intellectual trends, the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé serves as a convenient fulcrum throughout this confrontation.
A Singular Union of Differences
There is not much, at first sight, that could legitimately authorize a dialogue between Derrida and Badiou. Unlike Derrida’s constant problematization of language, his deconstructive practice of a “double gesture, a double science, a double writing”Footnote 5 and his conception of deconstruction as “the question of translation,”Footnote 6 Badiou’s anti-nominalism and anti-relativism leaves no place in philosophical investigation for linguistic issues: these, for Badiou are “sophistics” and subordinate the question of truth to that of expression in language conceived as resistant and non-transparent. If anything, Badiou’s dismissal of previous ontologies rests on their common fixation upon the independent materiality of language, as in the “stitching” (suture)Footnote 7 of philosophy to poetry already at work in Heidegger’s hermeneutic prophesying.Footnote 8
As a result of his conjunction of mathematics and ontology in his systematic “return to Plato,” Badiou’s philosophy is highly synthetic and organized by a taut chain of generic concepts, categories and oppositions. A closer precursor here would be Gilles Deleuze, for whom the task of philosophy was to “invent concepts.” Such a conceptual focus departs from deconstruction’s stubborn resistance to univocal concepts, its mistrust toward structures and programs, a suspicion introduced by Derrida as early as the groundbreaking and well-known essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”Footnote 9
Although Derridean deconstruction, pace his detractors, is not synonymous with endless procrastination and “sitting on the fence,”Footnote 10 one has to concede that the structural undecidability of the critical moment, whose other name is différance, this “ordeal of aporia” without which “no decision would ever take place,” even “no responsibility … no event would take place … not even the place,”Footnote 11 estranges it from Badiou’s ethico-political imperative to act fast, strongly and politically, that is to respond to urgency by “taking the plunge.”
Nevertheless, the experience of deconstruction as a faithful relation to figures of singularityFootnote 12 or the emphasis on plus d’une langue (more than one/no more of one language) in which Derrida proposes to offer for once a “single definition of deconstruction”Footnote 13 is not far apart from Badiou’s conception of being as the “pure multiple,” through which he works out the conditions of a “universal singularity” in a truth procedure.Footnote 14 Although Badiou’s claim that “[a] truth procedure interrupts repetition”Footnote 15 appears at odds with Derrida’s original iterability affecting the structure of singularity and of “eventuality” (événementialité),Footnote 16 the faithful’s unconditional conversion to the event producing an “irreducible singularit[y]”Footnote 17 for Badiou ends up sharing some analogies with Derrida’s machinic conception of blind faith.Footnote 18 If Badiou’s universalist philosophy is a “Platonism of the manifold” waged on the joint resources of ontology (or philosophy) and mathematics (or scientific rationality), Derrida’s plural singularity and generalizable inscription of division-as-multiplication also challenges the Oneness, which is the principle of identity in classical thinking.
Even in Badiou’s “foundationalism,” as opposed to Derrida’s ceaseless interrogation of the “mystical” nature of what “founds in foundering,”Footnote 19 there is a place for what punctures and interrupts the system, as in the devastating flash of lightning of the coup de foudre (love at first sight) that founds the couple in love, the Revolution, a groundbreaking scientific invention, an aesthetic masterpiece, or (the conversion to) Christ’s Resurrection. Beyond their differences, and Badiou’s avoidance of “difference” as a philosophical concept altogether, the revolutionary potential of the event remains. It is an event to which one has a duty to testify, as Derrida asserts, or to whose truth one owes fidelity in order to become a subject, as Badiou states.
Il y a lieu: The “Place of the Event” in Derrida and Badiou
Leaving aside passing considerations on Mallarmé’s project of the Book in “Force and Signification,”Footnote 20 Derrida’s first major encounter with the French poet is in “The Double Session” (1970). This essay is a masterly deconstruction of Jean-Pierre Richard’s “thematic criticism” deployed in Richard’s subtle book The Imaginary Universe of Mallarmé. Derrida counters by giving meticulous readings of how poetic figures and motifs such as the blank (the white, spacing), the fold (the re-mark), the hymen, French homonyms like or (meaning both gold and now) and the figure of the Mime all operate differently in Mallarmé’s poetry.Footnote 21 My first port of call is Derrida’s contribution to Tableau de la littérature française (1974), an introductory essay in which he revisits some of the textual examples from “The Double Session,” and that offers a synoptic view of the poet’s centrality in Derridean thought.Footnote 22
Derrida’s introductory question, “Is there a place for Mallarmé in a ‘history of literature’?,”Footnote 23 interrogates the double operation of rupture and repetition performed by Mallarmé’s poetry, especially in Un Coup de dés, whose undecidable meanings and double syntax open a crisis of criticism and suspend taxonomic, hermeneutic judgment. As Derrida states, “Something takes place, something ‘more’ or ‘less.’”Footnote 24 Such an operation disrupts the then fashionable concept of “polysemy” to which Derrida had opposed his “dissemination.” Mallarmé’s text becomes more and less than a simple event: it is an event that affirms the place of eventuality, as we see in the famous formula “rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu” (Nothing will have taken place except the place) from Un Coup de dés.
For Derrida, Mallarmé’s text subverts the logic of metaphor since Aristotle, for whom “not to signify a single thing was to signify nothing.”Footnote 25 This introduces a new crisis: the event of plural signification is a writing that does not so much multiply the sign (the old “polysemy”) as it fractures its integrity by the process of dissemination. Metaphor no longer “makes known the same or the similar.” Poetic language deploys the “idealizing power of the word which makes the existence of the thing appear and disappear by the simple declaration of its name.” Hence the object disappears at the very moment its name is uttered. Mallarmé formulated this process brilliantly in Crise de vers: “I say: a flower! and beyond the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the suave idea itself, the one absent from every bouquet.”Footnote 26
This memorable passage had been singled out by Blanchot as containing the “myth of Mallarmé.” The passage would condense the poet’s conception of an authentic language that distances and silences the object: “In authentic language, a word is not the expression of a thing, but the absence of this thing.”Footnote 27 Such a poetic program predicated on absence thus became a sort of Ariadne’s thread linking together across ideological persuasions and intellectual genealogies thinkers as diverse as Derrida and Badiou.
Badiou mentions the famous passage several times. One occurrence that interests me comes from the chapter “On Subtraction” in Conditions (1992) and bears on “[t]he site of the true, subtractively edified.”Footnote 28 I return to the concept of subtraction, one of Badiou’s essential operations in poetic language, but first I would like to show how Badiou derives from Mallarmé’s poetry a conception of the event consonant with Derrida’s problematics. With politics, science and love, poetry is one of Badiou’s four generic conditions for truth.
Already present throughout Theory of the Subject from 1982,Footnote 29 Mallarmé takes full center stage in an 1986 essay with an unmistakable Mallarméan ring, “Is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice?”Footnote 30 The essay provides a matrix for a meditation on the poet in Being and Event (1988), before being developed in Conditions. I survey the key points in the initial essay alongside Being and Event.
In the essay, Badiou calls Un Coup de dés “the greatest theoretical text that exists on the conditions for thinking the event.”Footnote 31 The question par excellence in Mallarmé’s poetry, in which “[a]ny poem … describes the place of an aleatory event,” is not “what is being?” but “what is it ‘to take place’?”Footnote 32 As in Derrida, for reasons pertaining to his understanding of truth as invariant but constructed through determinable procedures, Badiou’s reading of the French symbolist poet allows him to distrust the doctrine of polysemy.Footnote 33 Purely aleatory yet “no less a fixed multiple,” the throw of the dice “symbolizes the event in general” and “make[s] an event of the thought of the event.”Footnote 34 Through a special procedure or “intervention,” one must decide that the event belongs to a situation. However
the event is undecidable. It belongs to the place, or it does not: this undecidability being a matter of principle.
What results from this is that an event whose content is the eventuality of the event … can only take the form of indecision.Footnote 35
One cannot miss the strikingly Derridean overtones of the formulation. For Badiou, then, “Poetry is the stellar assumption of that pure undecidable”Footnote 36 whereby the “auto-foundational interruption”Footnote 37 of an absolute aleatory event (the throw of dice) inaugurates, in Mallarmé’s words, a “memorable crisis.”Footnote 38 But whereas Derrida’s eventuality dwells on the conditions of decidability “in the first place,” Badiou produces a forceful interruption that precipitates truth. The “crisis” is precisely what must precipitate decision rather than paralyze it. Both the initial essay and the chapter in Being and Event conclude on a maxim used to define ethics in Theory of the Subject, here reiterated to translate Mallarmé’s “All thought emits a throw of dice.” One must “(d)ecide from the point of the undecidable.”Footnote 39
For Badiou, the lesson of Un Coup de dés is as “a decision in thought, that is, … a decision of the poem, which is an encounter or trial with chance.”Footnote 40 Where Derrida “retreats” before the instituted place to an indeterminate, ante-primal (avant-premier) site called khora,Footnote 41 Badiou’s event is grounded in the situation: the event has a site in the situation even though it is supernumerary or supplementary to it. It is in this intervention, this “taking place,” that Badiou’s event is foundational. The fact that the event exceeds being and what Badiou calls the “subject” (a term always problematic for Derrida) is inaugurated by the i(nte)rruption of the event. The subject is subtracted from being. It is what one becomes by being faithful to the truth of the event. The supernumerary event is therefore nothing but a “completely precarious having-taken-place.”Footnote 42 Thus both Badiou and Derrida recognize the necessity of surprise, “grace” or even a miracle in the structure of eventuality. In order to take place, Badiou’s event must be “surprised by the paradox of the multiple.”Footnote 43For Derrida, an event likewise “implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable”;Footnote 44 indeed, it must arrive as “untimeliness of the infinite surprise.”Footnote 45
In Derrida’s post-Heideggerian deconstruction of ontology, the emphasis shifts from the il y a (there is) to il y a lieu, a simple phrase that in French both points to place (lit.: there is “place”) and signifies eventuality (avoir lieu) as well as ethical necessity (il y a lieu de). Derrida’s fascination with the inaugural event of the non-place of place, the “evental supplement” (in Badiou’s terms) of/to place that founds place itself, can be read in his frequent returns to khora, Plato’s atopos that marks the anteriority of a place divested from the reassuring trappings of a definite essence,Footnote 46 but also, in a more insistent inflection, in his recurrent musings on the philosophical force of Mallarmé’s poetry, as in the following passage from Cinders in which he again cites the celebrated line from Un Coup de dés:
Cinders there are [Il y a là cendre], this is what takes place in letting a place occur, so that it will be understood: Nothing will have taken place but the place [rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu]. Cinders there are: Places there is (il y a lieu).Footnote 47
Where Derrida’s eventuality of place emphasizes restance (the erasure of the trace as remainder) against essence, Badiou’s event “supplements” being.Footnote 48 Badiou’s event emerges from the void in the midst of being,Footnote 49 and thus forces us to invent a new way of being subject to its truth. If for Badiou the event is the “generic” designation of a rupture within a known, given structure, for Derrida it is exemplified in the singular form of a gift (don), forgiveness (pardon), debt and duty, promise, hospitality, responsibility, secrecy, decision (and, thereby, critique), invention, but also the miracle of translation.
With “the interruptive vitality of the event”Footnote 50 is opened up what Derrida frequently called, from the late 1980s onward, “an experience of the impossible.”Footnote 51 This summary of the ethico-political stakes of deconstruction can be attuned to Badiou’s thoughts on emancipatory politics.Footnote 52 For Derrida, “[t]he event’s eventfulness depends on this experience of the impossible.”Footnote 53 In particular, the impossible possibility of the gift (don, présent) makes us aware of the precarious link between the present and the event: the event can only take place if it does not appear as such, an onto-phenomenological play of appearance-disappearance that sounds like the drama of the event’s aphanisis (the disappearance of the subject) staged by Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés for Badiou.Footnote 54
On the temporal level, Badiou’s pure event has no duration for it has only the retroactive temporality of the Freudian après-coup, the deferred action. The pure event is as instantaneous as an aleatory flash of lightning that one must interpret from the traces it leaves behind, and also through its opening of an historical epoch.Footnote 55 Similarly for Derrida, alluding to the dislocation of the contemporaneous and the impossibility of presentation, the formulation of the impossible “resembles a structure of temporality, an instantaneous dissociation from the present, a différance in being-with-itself of the present.”Footnote 56
Where Badiou and Derrida clearly part company is in their divergent conceptions of the trace. The trace is the remains left by an anterior event to be “forced” into knowledge through the truth procedure that the event initiates for Badiou, but it is always already inhabited by différance for Derrida. Such a retreat into a “desert in the desert” in Derrida complicates Badiou’s evocation of “the desert of the site” or “deserted horizon” of “unpresentation” in Un Coup de dés.Footnote 57 It would be misleading to draw too tight an analogy between the supplementary movement of localization in Badiou and Derrida’s concept of the “desert within the desert” developed in “Faith and Knowledge,” or the idea of a hollowing out of place without place for Derrida.Footnote 58
Subtractions
Being and Event is Badiou’s first attempt to resort to mathematical ontology to think the pure multiple and apprehend “the radically subtractive dimension of being.” For Badiou, “being qua being does not in any manner let itself be approached, but solely allows itself to be sutured in its void.”Footnote 59 Hence we find a chapter on “The void, subtractive suture to being.” Thus, although the phrase barely occurs verbatim and is hardly given definitional contours, a subtractive ontology is adumbrated whose major operation, together with dissemination, will inform Badiou’s unbinding of being-as-radical-multiplicity from the One, including in later essays such as “The Question of Being Today” and “Kant’s Subtractive Ontology.”Footnote 60
Badiou returns to subtraction in Conditions at the intersection between philosophy and first poetry, then mathematics. The chapter “On Subtraction” confirms it as the key operation in his system. As Badiou repeats, the poem, as an exercise of thought, subtracts; it is even the very act of this subtraction.Footnote 61 Subtraction is the generic operation affecting names and traces in three different types of negation: vanishing, cancellation and foreclosure, corresponding to three objects of thought: the event, the undecidable and the unnameable.
About the same time, in “Language, Thought, Poetry” (1993),Footnote 62 a title deliberately evocative of Heidegger’s most sustained reflections on poetry (Poetry, Language, Thought), Badiou redefines the two poetic methods outlined in Conditions. Moving from Mallarmé to Rimbaud, he renames Rimbaud’s “interruption” as “dissemination,” thus adding to the essence of poetry the two joint procedures of his mathematical ontology in Being and Event. Doing this, Badiou further reroutes Derrida’s strategic deconstructive operation. After reiterating that “[t]he poem presents itself as a thing of language, encountered – each and every time – as an event,”Footnote 63 and calling the poem, in Mallarméan terms, “a purity folded in upon itself,” “[f]olded and reserved,” “a reserved and refolded word,”Footnote 64 the essay then articulates its central tenet: that of the “unstitching” of an imaginary object relation from the poem’s symbolic language. Thus, for Badiou, the poem is a thought without knowledge because, in being subtracted from reality, it does not relate to an object and even denies it by means of two contrary operations: subtraction and dissemination. They are defined as follows:
Subtraction organizes the poem around a direct concern with the retreat of the object: the poem is a negative machinery, which utters being, or the idea, at the very point where the object has vanished. … Dissemination, for its part, aims to dissolve the object through an infinite metaphorical distribution.Footnote 65
In the subtractive operation of the poem, the object is forced “to undergo the ordeal of its lack” (Mallarmé), whereas in dissemination “the poem loses the object in the pure multiple” (Rimbaud), “not through the effect of a lack, but through that of an excess.”Footnote 66
By a curiously parallel movement, if Badiou seemed to appropriate Derrida’s dissemination for his own mathematical ontology applied to poetry, conversely, soon after, Derrida began evoking subtraction in relation with the “desert in the desert.” For Derrida, this “abstraction of the desert” or “deserted re-treat” would be a “place that could well have been more than archi-originary, the most anarchic and anarchivable place possible.”Footnote 67 As we can glimpse from these scant phrases and echoes, the difference is that Badiou’s subtraction performs a more classically negative, or mathematical operation, whereas Derrida’s formalization of abstraction as subtraction, his retreat to an ante-primal secret non-place, is paradoxically affirmative. This relates both to his work on Blanchot’s figure of “X without X,” the affirmation of passion and passivity, “a double pas without negation of negation and without denegation,” and to his related attempt to demarcate deconstruction from negative theology.Footnote 68 And although Derrida’s blind faith without/before credit or knowledge is comparable with Badiou’s fidelity and truth beyond knowledge, it is mostly in the motif of déliaison or unbinding that the former’s abstracted religion without religion, or the extirpation of a primordial, desert-like messianicity without messianism,Footnote 69 revealability without revelation,Footnote 70 “between event and possibility or virtuality of the event,”Footnote 71 as well as his unbinding of the social nexus or bond, will meet Badiou’s own insistence on political unbinding.
Politics of Unbinding: Badiou after Derrida
In Badiou’s philosophy, the strangely absent category of religion subsumes the four génériques in which the event can take place insofar as the truth procedure initiated by the event presupposes in all a quasi-theological stance, involving such manifestations as conversion, fidelity (or, conversely, betrayal), belief and faith, grace, love and hope, etc. Similarly, alongside the foregrounding of questions of ethics and politics, Derrida’s thinking underwent an idiosyncratic turn to religion, from “How to Avoid Speaking” and “Circumfession” onward, which culminated with the theme of religion without religion in “Faith and Knowledge.”
Derrida’s religion without religion also operates as the etymological matrix for the “bond without bond,”Footnote 72 as does social unbinding (déliaison),Footnote 73 a dissociation or absolute interruptionFootnote 74 that would make possible a gathering together without/before the formation of a socius (link), the sociality or community that erases subjectivities in the name of a promised collectivity and revealed universality.
In the chapter on “Politics Unbound” in Metapolitics, Badiou puts analogous questions to the thought of the political, which needs “unstitching” from political philosophy since the latter is on the side of “inactive judgment” and reflection (whereas metapolitics allows retention of the pure political act), on the side of doctrine and institutionalization versus fidelity and belief. Badiou inquires why the subsumption of politics under the totalizable figure of the bond – immediate (the masses) or mediate (the party) – induces state cult and bureaucratic submission, and claims that, even at the heart of mass movements, political activity should fundamentally be an unbinding for the truth procedure initiated by the event to be meaningful and durable.Footnote 75
Badiou’s position, which is perfectly congruent with Derrida’s, is that politics must always endeavor “to deconstruct the bond, including the one within the mass movement,” since unbinding allows for the affirmative multiplicity of versatile abilities and receptivity to the event.Footnote 76 Both Badiou and Derrida, each in his own way, strive for the universal or generalizable that would inscribe singularities, allowing the free inhabiting of a place in “non-belonging,”Footnote 77 rather than for the communitarian consensus that ultimately negates them.
Whereas Badiou’s imperative cutting of the ethical knot stands as a guarantee for immediate political action, Derrida’s insistence on an aprioric plurality of choices aims to conjure up the aporetic experience of the ethical decision within the quasi-originary yes to the other. As Žižek succinctly remarks, “Badiou is clearly opposed to the Derridean ethics of openness to the Event in its unpredictable alterity.”Footnote 78 What is needed for Badiou – indeed what the event “eventuates” – is the leap out of the void of the situation. If différance as justice enjoins the ethico-political duty to preserve the gap between the redemptive promise of an impossible possibility always to come (avenir) and the “positive” event,Footnote 79 for Badiou, “[t]he Truth-Event is, at its most radical, a purely formal act of decision.”Footnote 80
The shared program of déliaison is but one sign of the increasing rapprochement between Derrida and Badiou as the general philosophical and critical configuration changed throughout the 1990s. With the years 2000–02 came, in Peeters’s apt phrase, “The Time of Dialogue,” the time of a renewed exchange when, as Derrida put it to Badiou himself, “we have the same enemies.”Footnote 81
The reconciliation and postmortem promise to pay tribute were acted on in a 2005 anniversary conference in Paris and subsequent commemorative writings. Originally titled “Derrida, ou l’inscription de l’inexistant,” Badiou’s sober but poetic evocation ranged from a retrospective glance at Derrida’s aloofness from “the truth of the red years between 1968 and 1976,” which pitted Badiou’s “metaphysics of radical conflict” against Derrida’s peaceful “patient deconstruction of oppositions,” to a belated realization of the singular place of Derrida’s thought.Footnote 82 In particular, Badiou singled out Derrida’s “passion of Inexistance,”Footnote 83 a restyling of his own concept (see the section “The inexistent” in Theory of the Subject) to acknowledge the unique contribution and event of Derridean différance.Footnote 84 For Badiou, at stake in Derrida’s writing as a thought-act “is the inscription of the impossibility of the non-existence as the form of its inscription.”Footnote 85 Derrida’s desire in writing is to “localize” an impossible vanishing point that is outside-place (hors-lieu) in place, to locate the inexistent of a place.Footnote 86
In proposing the centrality of the “event” in my articulation of the French philosophical moment of the 1960s and beyond, I do not wish to simply pay lip service to the political debates that raged during and after May 1968’s so-called events. France has known a short-lived sociopolitical fulguration whose revolutionary promise marked this generation of differently active, militant philosophers to which Derrida and Badiou, but also Deleuze, Lyotard et al., belonged. I hope to have given evidence of the urgency of opposing to the configuration of French philosophers grouped under the banner of difference a more historically turbulent yet also more topical “pass-word” of “event.” Its greater flexibility, the new possibilities of confrontation it still offers, would allow Badiou’s heterogeneity within the former framework to find the place it deserves, while opening up Derrida’s difference to other philosophical motifs.
