Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne
Perhaps some decades are too full or too empty of great books to decide on any outstanding candidate, or perhaps the tenor of the times is against even the principles of such an election. This was not one of those decades. The incontrovertible book of the decade was Logics of Worlds, the philosopher Alain Badiou’s ‘sequel’ to his even-greater Being and Event (1988). There is nobody that this book does not speak to — even if it is only to astonish and offend — and, given its explicitly topological slant, geographers might find it of peculiar use and support in their endeavours (which is presumably why Society and Space has already given over a hunk of attention to this work, as well as to several of Badiou’s most prominent epigones, such as Quentin Meillassoux). Written by a notoriously unrepentant and combative thinker, one of the great French Maoist theoretician-activists of the 1970s, this book draws from near-contemporaneous radical developments in mathematical logic, the arts, politics and love, in order to reconstruct a mind-bogglingly rigorous approach to thinking the structuring of worlds — and the possibilities for their egalitarian restructuring.
Badiou opens the book with a little thought experiment: ‘What do we all think, today? … Today, natural belief is condensed in a single statement: There are only bodies and languages. This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism.’ Against the hegemony of democratic materialism, Badiou arrays a materialist dialectic. The latter differs from democratic materialism in one salient detail: there are indeed only bodies and languages — except there are truths. It is these and only these ‘truths’ (notoriously: politics, art, love and science) that can and do constitute exceptions to the democratic materialism of the present. In Badiou’s parlance, then, calling his project a materialist dialectic not only delivers the rhetorical force of a syntagmatic inversion, but at once renders the process of struggle itself primary. Whereas dialectical materialism, like historical materialism, like our contemporary democratic materialisms, implicitly retained materialism as a substantive, thereby irreparably installing the primacy of substance at its heart, with Badiou the lure of substance is forever banished from materialism.
What, then, is enabled by Badiou’s new construction? Badiou’s materialist dialectic bespeaks a rigorous approach to absolute diversity. What is this diversity? In Logics of Worlds, it is the diversity of appearances themselves, and such diversity and intensity require a philosophical phenomenology. What sort of phenomenology? It cannot be Hegelian, despite Badiou’s reprise of the dialectic, nor Husserlian or Heideggerean. Why not? Because the former’s phenomenology depends on a logic of the becoming of contradictions as totality and teleology. For Badiou, contemporary logic does not tolerate contradiction as dynamism, nor totality as a consistent concept. Even paraconsistent logic, if (allegedly) inspired by Hegel himself, tolerates ‘true contradictions’ only under very specific circumstances; these contradictions, moreover, are not dynamic relations. Furthermore, all forms of modern logic resist the category of the whole, which Bertrand Russell showed to be inconsistent in a famous 1904 letter to Frege. Badiou also rejects the descriptive, ‘poetic’ phenomenology whose peak moment was Heidegger. Such a phenomenology places the emphasis on a linguistic-historical unfolding of the site into which Dasein is thrown, and tends towards an in-principle unlimited hermeneutics of opening to being against its nihilist closure in technology. Nor is Badiou happy with the supposedly naturalistic sciences of the phenomenal world: for him, evolutionary biology remains a wild mess of empirical observations and ideological misapprehensions — and not a real science at all.
In Being and Event, Badiou drew on set-theory in order to establish his claim that ‘mathematics is ontology.’ Mathematics is the paradigm of rationality, necessary for all empirical sciences: it formalises the limits of consistent thought, as it makes fundamental existential assertions (e.g., ‘there exists an empty-set’). But a phenomenology is not and cannot be an ontology in this sense, since it deals with intensities of appearing. Badiou defines logic as the cohesion or consistency of appearing: outside of such a logic, one has only the (irrational) claims of experience or the dissolution of any world. Badiou proposes that the historically-mutable relationship between pure mathematics and logic maps onto the relationship between being and being-there, ontology and phenomenology. Pure mathematics becomes the science of being qua being, being as such, being without its appearance in a world. Pure logic is a science of appearing without its being; or, rather, being-in-its-appearing, that is, localised being, being in sites and situations, societies and spaces. On this basis, Badiou proceeds to construct a non-subjective (and anti-Kantian) theory of the transcendental, which can account at once for the constant apparent changes in divergent worlds, as well as their invariant operations. Mathematics provides an axiomatic ontology, logic a transcendental phenomenology.
But what’s the point of all this abstract gobbledegook? First, it incontrovertibly demonstrates that the various economistic and managerial extraction-machines that dominate the globe today are, despite their own protestations, eminently irrational. Indeed, numbers in the form of statistics are the contemporary ideology, as confected and inconsistent as any traditional ideology (if we knew this already, here’s the proof). Second, it enables a defamiliarizing redescription of situations in such a way as to expose the often-unexpected orders of their functionings: under this rubric, it delivers an unparalleled diagnostic power. Third, it affirms the possibility of structural change happening at highly-localised sites, and the concomitant necessity for subjective intervention and construction of new organisations.
Lamentably, the summary I have just given is less accessible than the book itself. Throughout, Badiou supports his claims by recourse to a stunning panoply of examples, drawn from political rallies and rustic gardens, through ancient battle strategies and classical literary texts, to Sartre, Schoenberg, and Spartacus. In doing so, Badiou provides tools for thought that are at once eminently rational, incisive, and universally applicable — and that are, to pick up on a famous image of Walter Benjamin’s, irrecuperable by the reactionaries. No other book from the past decade comes close to Logics of Worlds’s range, originality, vision, clarity, commitment and inspiration — nor its consequences.
