Alain Badiou seemed optimistic over lunch following his lecture at The European
Graduate School (EGS), an institution nestled beneath a melting glaciar near
the quaint Swiss ski-village of Saas-Fee. Badiou, the jovial former chair of
philosophy at Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), Paris, was here to educate and
lecture regarding his long and evolving brand of philosophy, a line that runs
from his birth in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, through the turning point of the 1968
May uprising, and the publication of his 1988 magnum opus, Being and Event.
Badiou's critical theories, especially as outlined in this latter work, have
always been sympathetic to Marxism and Lacanian pyschoanalysis while
establishing a unique blend of hard-leftist dissent developed in part during
his stint as a faculty member of the University of Paris VIII, where he held
debates with colleagues Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
In opposition to the occasionally ungrounded nature of modern philosophy, Badiou
offers a more sobering scientific approach to the modern political condition.
He utilizes mathematics and formal logic, plausibly comparable to Ludwig
Wittgenstein's early elucidations in Tractatus, where language, mathematics,
logic and ethics share equal space in defining the modern condition.
Today, Badiou has just wrapped up a powerhouse dual lecture with fellow Lacanian
Slavoj Zizek, and is ready to offer a few opinions on his philosophy and how it
relates to today's current political climate.
InDigest: What is the overall objective of your philosophy?
Alain Badiou: I think that the fundamental object of my work is to find a new
way in philosophy. Probably today, we have the domination of two ways in the
field of philosophy. On on side, analytic philosophy is in the academic
American field, and the other side, phenomenology, which probably is the most
important way in continental philosophy. The very heart of my work is probably
to find new means to propose a new vision of truth.
ID: How do you define truth?
AB: I think in my conception, truth is a process. And it's not judgment or
something closed, it's always finally something new. Real truth has been, or
is, a new truth. And so the theory of truth is, fundamentally, also a theory of
creation. And it is why the question, for example, of artistic activity is so
important: It is because a work of art, especially a contemporary work of art,
is a process of creation. It's a question of novelty – the question of newness. So we can also say that my philosophy is a new
conception of what is an event.
ID: Is there any practical value for philosophy in regards to politics?
AB: First, we have to understand that philosophy has to be the theory of the new
process, the new trend of politics; and so the theory of local
experimentations. After that we have to understand that philosophy has to be
something like the life animation, or new life, if you want, in the mental
activity in politics. And all that in connection with a new form of creation,
new form of artistic activity, new technology and so on.
ID: Are progress and democracy, as understood in the West, universal principals?
AB: You know the notion of progress is not a simple notion, not at all. During
all the 19th century, intellectuals, artists and political activists were in
the conviction that there exists something like a "political progress". Today,
we know that it's not so simple. We have really to understand that sometimes
under the name of progress, we have, in fact, something that is often against
human life, against human beings, against millions of people of several
countries. The dialectical relationship between progress and tradition is
completely different today as it was during all the 19th century.
ID: What is the position of the individual vs. collective activity toward a new
political program?
AB: I think if great collective innovations and collective processes are in the
form, today, of local experiments, there is no real and fundamental
contradiction between individual life and collective destiny. We have to find a
way that gives to any individual the choice and possibility to participate in
the collective process. Politics is not something like an obligation, or a duty
and so on. It is not an abstraction in regard to human life. We have to think
of politics as a new possibility for individuals, and the possibility that is
simultaneously taking in consideration the human life, the traditions and the
progress.
ID: Capitalism and Democracy are the two major economic forces. Why do they seem
to work, or fold?
AB: I think the pretension of capitalism and western democracy to be the only
paradigm for real politics is an oppression about millions of people, and we
can finally see that it is about infinite war. We have to defend a multiplicity
of possibilities and that the emancipation of all people is not at all in the
field of the western paradigm, but we have to learn about many other
possibilities.
