Badiou - Wittgenstein's Anti Philosophy (2011)

WITTGENSTEIN'S ANT/PHILOSOPHY

ALAIN BADIOU

WITTGENSTEIN'S A NTIPHILOSOPHY Translated and with an Introduction by Bruno Bosteels

VERSO London

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New York

Liberti. Egalite Fraterniti REPUBLIQUE FRAN45 Another way of formulating the antiphilosophical proximity between Lacan and the early Wittgenstein would be to show that for both writers , who are also similarly remarkable teachers, philosophy 's reliance on a metalanguage involves a betrayal of an ethical kind . It is not so much false or mistaken as it is sinful or dishon­ est . Finally, philosophy is an act of knavery or bastardry that consists in the belief that truth can be separated from the effects of language taken as such . "No truth can be localized except in the field in which it is stated ," says Lacan . Only crooks and knaves believe in truth 45

Lacan, The Other Side '?fPsychoanalysis, p. 6 1 . 49

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beyond o r outside language . "There i s n o other meta­ language than all the forms of knavery, if we thereby designate these curious operations derivable from the fact that man 's desire is the Other 's desire . All acts of crookedness are based on the fact of wishing to be someone 's Other, I mean someone 's big Other, there where the figures by which his desire will be captivated are drawn ."46 From the standpoint of the antiphiloso­ pher that Lacan recognizes in Wittgenstein , there is no language other than the language of desire , which also means language faced with the inconsistency of an order that is not-All . "There is no sense except the sense of desire . This is what one can say after having read Wittgenstein ," Lacan concludes . But the non­ philosophical "truth" of this desire , which is what philosophy conceals behind the supposition of a meta­ language , is not another notion of fullness but rather the impossibility of enj oyment, one psychoanalytical name of which is castration : "There is no truth except of that which the said desire hides of its lack, so as to make light of what it does find .'147 Why, then , does Lacan also ascribe a "psychotic ferocity" to Wittgenstein? If the structural analogy is between psychosis and philosophy, based on the fore­ closure of a crucial element of desire or enj oyment that then comes back in the real , does this mean that Wittgenstein in the end is not quite the antiphilosopher

46 47

Ibid. , pp. 6 1 and 62 (translation modified) . Ibid . , p. 6 1 (translation corrected). 50

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that Lacan believes h e could b e ? "Here , in effect , one of the most assured discourses and something or other that is strikingly suggestive of psychosis concur so much that I am saying this on the sole basis of feeling its effect ," Lacan confesses , still referring to the early Wittgenstein . "How remarkable it is that a university like the English university made a place for him . A place apart , it's appropriate to say, a place of isolation with which the author went along perfectly well himself, so much so that he withdrew from time to time to a little house in the country and then returned to pursue this implacable discourse ."48 Here we come upon the limit of the compatibility between Lacan and Wittgenstein . The latter 's implacable discourse is indeed still premised on some kind of fullness that would be available-not to the propositional sense of what can be said but to the showing of the sense of the world-in what he calls the mystical element . The Wittgenstein of the

Tractatus,

in other words , is

still a crook whose antiphilosophical operation falls short of truly undermining the presupposition of some subj ect who is supposed to know. "For Lacan , this continues to be the desire for a total sense . And as a result , Wittgenstein too is finally a philosopher. He maintains the certitude of a possible access to full thought ," as Badiou explains . "He too forecloses that which in enjoyment is irremediably barred , under the name of the mystical element , or of God , or of the 48

Ibid. , p. 6 3 . 51

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sense o f the world . Wittgenstein maintains that true thought is on the side of being. This is why one can find a psychotic ferocity in him . 'Psychotic ferocity' means : the paranoid certitude of he who believes in saving the integral truth."49 For Lacan , however, this does not mean that we should simply move on and replace the earlier with the later Wittgenstein . As an antiphilosopher, the psychoanalyst should stick as closely as possible to the leverage point offered in the

Tractatus, namely, that there is no metalanguage , but

with an eye on a radically different understanding of the act , which would be the psychoanalytical act that alone might cure us from psychosis : "As for the analytic operation , it is distinguished by advancing into the field in a way that is distinct from what is , I would say, found embodied in Wittgenstein's discourse, that is , a psy­ chotic ferocity, in comparison with which Ockham's well-known razor, which states that we must admit ,, only notions that are necessary, is nothing. 50 Finally, what Lacan appreciates in the

Tractatus

is the extent to

which its author is willing to erase himself from his own discourse : "Surely the author has something close to the analyst's position, namely, that he eliminates himself com­ pletely from his own discourse."5 1 This last affirmation may seem paradoxical , insofar as Wittgenstein concludes the

Tractatus by

reinserting himself as the ultimate

49 Alain Badiou, "Lacan , la philosophic, la folie," Conferences en Argentine et au Chili (author's unpublished typescript, October 1 994) , pp. 44--5 . 50 Lacan, The Other Side cifPsychoanalysis, p. 62. 51 Ibid. , p. 6 3 . 52

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referent o f all o f the book's propositions up t o that point , which as a result appear to be as nonsensical as those of traditional philosophy : "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way : anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsen­ sical , when he has used them-as steps-to climb up beyond them ."52 In reality, this reference to the singu­ larity of the subj ect of the enunciation is an integral part of the writerly style of each and every antiphiloso­ pher, from Kierkegaard 's diaries to Lacan 's seminars. Instead of pretending that the voice of being or some other objective order directly speaks through him , as philosophers gladly do in the well-nigh hallucinatory discourse of ontology, the antiphilosopher speaks only in the name of his own tormented subj ectivity, as torn between salvation and sin , or between saintliness and suicide , as is Wittgenstein . What is more , he is willing to fade away, or to become nothing more than a trace or residue-a little piece of waste-in his own discourse. In this regard , the antiphilosopher resem­ bles not only the analyst but also the poet who similarly accepts the absenting of the author as a necessary condition for the act of poetry. As Mallarme writes : 5 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LOOico-Phi1osophicus, trans. D . F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 200 1 ) , 6 . 54. See also Cora Diamond's reading of this important passage in terms of "what Wittgenstein demands of you the reader of the Tractatus, the reader of a book of nonsensical propositions," namely : "You are to read his nonsensical propositions and try to understand not them but their author; j ust so, he takes himself to have to respond to the nonsense uttered by philosophers through understanding not their propositions but them." Cora Diamond, "Ethics, Imagination, and the Tractatus," The New Wittaenstein, pp. 1 5 5--6 . 53

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"Impersonified , the volume, t o the extent that one separates from it as author, does not demand a reader, either. As such , please note , among human accessorie s , i t takes place all b y itself: finished , existing."53 Is this not also the staggering ambition that is palpable in the

Tractatus? In the case of Wittgenstein , however, the operation of reducing the subj ect to a mere vanishing point that fades away into discourse does not go all the way down , at least not in the eyes of Lacan . In other words , the author of the

Tractatus is

not as radical or as insurrec­

tionary an antiphilosopher as the psychoanalyst claims to be. In terms of our opening anecdote , we could say that Wittgenstein does not submit fully to the chal ­ lenge of the othe r 's spittle in the elevator ; in his own terms , it is not exactly the subj ect but only his propositions that are allowed to drop completely, like the famous ladder after it has been climbed . And so, in light of this two-pronged settling of accounts , the following becomes the double task that 5 3 Stephane Mallarme, "Restricted Action," Divaaations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2 007) , p. 2 1 9. Wittgenstein, though, not only inserts a fundamental reference to the speaking I ("me") at the end of the Tractatus; he also famously hopes to find at least one reader for it: "Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it" (Preface) . Even so, Badiou is surely justified in what follows to compare the form and structure of the Tractatus to Mallarme's A Throw '!! Dice, while the antiphilosophical insistence on the need to change life would be more akin to Rimbaud. For a different take on Wittgenstein's role for contemporary poetics , see the canonical work of Marjorie Perloff, Witteenstein 's Ladder: Poetic Laneuaee and the Stranaeness '!! the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 996). And, closer to Badiou on the question of style, Antonia Soulez, Comment ecrivent Ies philosophes? (de Kant a Witteenstein) ou Ie style Witteenstein (Paris: Kime, 2003). S4

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Badiou i s u p against in his reading ofWittgenstein . H e must first o f all come t o terms with the fact that, for a self-professed antiphilosopher

such

as

Lacan , the

Cambridge professor is still too much of a philosopher, whose prose shines forth with a streak of madness . And , second , he must also absorb the possibility that , for a pragmatist-sophist such as Rorty, the later Wittgenstein is no longer a philosopher but perhaps just a polemicist, whose writing brilliantly, if also loosely, revitalizes the tradition of literary satire . The point is to grasp these two orientations in tandem and apply them to the

Tractatus. Wittgenstein the

writer of

genius does indeed take whatever can be said about the world-in logic or in natural science-as the subj ect matter of this ambitious work, but from within the realm of the sayable that is thus exhaustively outlined , the ultimate aim o f th e operation i s t o traverse this material in the direction of a silent act or mystical element in which the psychoanalyst will have recog­ nized the psychotic excess of an unsayable plenitude .

55

v

Referring one last time to Miller's anecdote , we are now in a position to raise a set of concluding questions , all of which in a sense are prompted by a figure in the story that has not yet claimed our attention , namely, the bystander in the elevator who is surprised by the analyst's phlegm : •

Can this third party remain neutral or must he or she necessarily choose one of the sides involved in the spitting contest? Those of us who lay no special claim to being either philos­ ophers or antiphilosophers , for instance , are we by default bound to be treated as mere sophists , cultural relativists , or democratic materialists forever at the mercy of Badiou's unforgiving Platonism?

•

When all is said and done , is this battle fought on the exclusive terrain of philosophy or are there also lessons that non-philosophers in a generic sense can draw from this , for exam­ ple, about ways of grasping the political , 57

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artistic,

scientific ,

and

other

events-or

acts-of our time? (After all , even Rorty agrees with Badiou that philosophy could be defmed in Hegel 's terms as "its own time apprehended in thought."54) •

What is the difference , anyway, between an act and an event? Are these two terms synony­ mous , as many a reader might have concluded from Z izek's work in its ongoing dialogue with Badiou (whom the Slovenian at one point calls "the theorist of the Act"55) ? If they are not synonyms , are they two different types of occurrence , or rather two different modes of treating one and the same type of occurrence , say, a musical performance o r a political revolt? What are the consequences of separat­ ing such modes or types by naming them either "philosophical" or "antiphilosophical"?

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If Mallarme and Wittgenstein , for instance , both have their own definition of the act, what

54 Rorty, Consequences