BADIOU'S REDUCTIONS by Terence Blake

INTRODUCTION: MONIST PLURALISM

In a series of leading questions addressed to Lyotard that turn around the notion of pluralism Badiou declares: The only ontology faithful to the Multiple is the mathematics of the pure Multiple (Badiou, Tmoigner du diffrend, p113). Badious dogmatic monist reductionist ontology of pluralism is a relic of a bygone age, not some daring new answer to postmodern relativism. Deleuze, Lyotard, Hillman, Feyerabend have each left accounts of how they underwent a radical transformation in passing from a monist theory of dissensus, multiplicity, and difference to a pluralist practice of theory. Bruno Latour's passage from a pluralism of beings to a pluralism of modes of existence is a recent example of such an evolution. Badiou, however, has undergone no such transformation. Badiou cannot explain his famous four truth conditions. Why are there only four? Latours multiple modes of existence are richer and more extensive. Badiou cannot explain why he does not include religion or spirituality in his list of conditions nor painting, nor why his account of each condition is so reductive. Science reduced to the matheme, artistic creation to the poem, politics to the communist hypothesis, and love to a reworked version of lacanian psychoanalysis! Compared to his fellow pluralists, Badiou does not have the knowledge of science that we find in Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, or Paul Feyerabend. He does not have the knowledge of art and literature that we find in Lyotard and Deleuze, nor of psychoanalysis that we find in Guattari and Hillman. As for politics, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Onfray are far more reliable guides, and far more consequent in their pluralism than Badiou, who can only propose skeletal caricatures of any living practice in these domains. There is a conceptual power and inventivity in Badious work, but is gained only at the price of incredible simplification, reduction, and ignorance. I propose to examine this simplification by an analyses of Badiou's sutures, a seies of philosophical reductions where each of the truth conditions that Badiou recognises is reduced to the exclusive form of one of its possible instantiations.

1) THE SUTURE OF ONTOLOGY TO MATHEMATICS

You must not let yourself be intimidated (Laruelle on Badiou) In a very interesting exchange between Badiou and Lyotard, published in May 1989, Badiou accuses Lyotard of not being faithful to what has become a sort of axiom of contemporary philosophy namely the supposition of a radical originarity of the multiple (Badiou, Tmoigner du diffrend, p109). Typically, Badiou goes on to identify this originary multiple with the inconsistent Multiple that he finds in Cantor. Generously, Badiou declares that he is not alone in endorsing this axiom of the radical originarity of the multiple, and cites certain of his contemporaries with approval: I believe I recognise this supposition in Gilles Deleuze, as well as in Jean-Franois Lyotard, and perhaps it is also what must be understood in the Dissemination of Jacques Derrida, just as much as in Lacans dispersive punctuality of the Real. (p109). However this pluralist openness soon gives way to a dogmatic limitation of the field of pluralism and of ontology: The only ontology faithful to the Multiple is the mathematics of the pure Multiple (Badiou, Tmoigner du diffrend, p113). Thus the Cantorian inconsistent Multiple is not advanced as one instance of pluralism among many, but is posed as the ontological basis for all future philosophising. Underneath the declaration of faithfulness to the multiple, Badiou propounds a single paradigm as not only best case, or even prime exemplar, but more foundationally the unique ontological expression of the radical originarity of the Multiple.

All the long work on elaborating the regional ontologies and the incommensurabilities not just within and between the sciences, but within and between the arts, the spiritual paths, the political movements, the transformative relations of social and personal composition etc. is swept away at one stroke by magistral postulation. One historically contingent regional ontology, ZermeloFraenkel set theory, is enthroned as ontology itself. Of course, this suture of ontology to mathematics is ridiculous, retrograde, reductionist pontificating. Badiou himself does not stick to it at all. By declaring that mathematics is ontology he distracts attention from his other ontological engagements. For Badious ontology is not limited to mathematics, far from it, despite his explicit posture of suturing ontology and mathematics. In appearance, Badious ontology is positivistic reductionism, but on closer examination he is ontologically committed to far more than his explicit ontological (sutural) declarations imply.In fact, having stipulated that mathematics is ontology Badiou feels free to ontologize to his hearts content, and his ontology is a baroque extravaganza, though he call it logic or meta-ontology. In particular, as I pointed out in my last post, Badiou is committed ontologically to the existence of the four truth-procedures, and so owes us an account of why there are only these four, beyond his mere oracular positing. Lyotard in many ways anticipated the critiques that Franois Laruelle has recently made of Badious philosophy. On this question of Badious positivistic suture, Lyotard treats it as a very questionable decision that ignores, obfuscates, and represses the entire continental exploration of regional ontologies (even Althusser, despite his dogmatic positivism, would never have accepted the ontological hegemony of mathematics. For Lyotard, what emerges on reading BEING AND EVENT is the possibility of a non-mathematical ontology, insofar as it poses problem in relation to the initial decision (le cahier du collge international de philosophie 8, p228). Notably, he remarks that the four truth procedures are ontologised, in any reasonable sense of ontology: Under cover of the notion of deciding or interpreting intervention, the four procedures, as you call them, that are the poetic, the political, the erotic and the epistemic, seem to me to escape ontological set-theoreticism (le cahier 8, p228). They are ontological commitments that stand outside Badious self-declared ontology, and the stipulative selection of one of these procedures, mathematics, as the science of being qua being only obfuscates the issue. Further, the whole post-positivist research and reflexion on the disunity of science is ignored or discounted. It is ignored because Badious knowledge of analytical philosophy seems to stop at Carnap and the Wittgenstein of the TRACTATUS. It is discounted because Badiou rejects anything more recent as mere linguistic sophism. Analytic philosphy of science, however, has undermined the positvistic monolithic view of science, and revealed its historical genesis through controversy, dissension, and incommensurable leaps that are intrinsic components of its progress, and not mere socioligically given accompaniments. Lyotard was quite aware of these developments (unlike Badiou he had done the reading) and combined them with the continental work on regional ontologies. His conclusion was antithetical to any reduction of the sciences to mathematics and to any suture of mathematics to ontology, as the only ontology faithful to the Multiple. Lyotard argues that contrary to this monist reduction under all these controversies and in the appearing of new hypotheses or even new objects, it is never a question of anything else than regional ontologies, on the basis of what one could call not a general ontology, but a common historical ontogenesis (Tmoigner du diffrend, p115). Lyotard argues that Badious initial decisions, that the question is that of the multiple and the one, that the more originary notion is the pure multiple, and that mathematics is ontology produce problems that Badiou cannot resolve, but only stipulate his way out of, at the cost of ignoring, or travestying, the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century. He concords in this with Laruelles assessment: Its the style of the will, i.e. of the miracle that Badiou means to introduce into philosophy by his

absolute theses You must not let yourself be intimidated, because that is what is at stake, by this type of dogmatic decision (ANTI-BADIOU, p153).

2) THE SUTURE OF MULTIPLICITY TO THE SPATIALISED MULTIPLE

We have seen that in the name of the multiple Badiou elides the pluralism of regional ontologies and proposes his absolute thesis mathematics is ontology. Being just is multiples of multiples, all the way down. He presents this as the only ontology faithful to the multiple, but this is just dogmatic bluff and bravado. This is a matter of empirical investigation, and Laruelle is right to insist that quantum physics is a better guide to ontology than post-Cantorian mathematics. The ontological elements could at least as plausibly be construed as processes or becomings, i.e. multiplicities containing an intrinsic temporal component. The process-hypothesis is one possible specification of what Feyerabend calls a general methodology (or general ontology, formulation that he avoids because of its possible fixist connotations), as the set-hypothesis is another possible specification, and as such can claim no privileged status. Does Badiou discuss the relative merits of set-ontology and process ontology? Not at all, he poses set-theory as ontology, under the condition of the mathematic truth-procedure. The sciences in their empirical dimension are evacuated by a form of mathematical reductionism, that Badiou presents as the way of the concept in opposition to the way of life. However, Badiou is incapable of understanding Deleuzes idea of multiplicity, which allies both concept and life. For Deleuze, multiplicities are not sets of spatialised elements, except as the product of a high degree of abstraction and stratification. But even here Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that these abstract elements correspond to an insufficient degree of abstraction, because the abstract-machine, which is composed of non-formed elements and non-formal functions, is not yet attained. Badious sets are homogeneous assemblages, and we are back to the Althusserian policing function of philosophy: maintaining the purity of each truth procedure, hunting down illegitimate sutures and mixtures. Deleuze and Guattari are quite clear that for them multiplicity enfolds an intrinsic heterogeneity: Of multiplicities, there must be at least two, two sorts, from the beginning. The quantic superposition of extensive and intensive multiplicities is the originary datum. So Badious little fiction of a distinction between philosophies of the concept and philosophies of life collapses. Deleuze (and Deleuze-and-Guattari) is a philosopher of the pulsation between the concept and life. This is also Deleuzes argument concerning Bergson, whose distinction between duration and space he analyses in terms of the distinction between the two types of multiplicities: extensive and intensive. Thus, even Bergson is not a philosopher of life in the dualistic sense that Badiou tries to impose.

3) THE SUTURE OF INVENTIVE PROCEDURES TO TRUTH

Badiou postulates, as usual he has no real argument, four truth procedures that provide the conditions for any philosophy worthy of the name. Once again his intellectual practice goes against the stated aim of elaborating a pluralism capable of illuminating our modes of existence, their struggles and inventions in brief, a thought faithful to the multiple. The selection of truth procedures out of many possible candidates, the description of each procedure, and even their unification under the denomination truth procedure, all go against the proclaimed fidelity to the multiple. I think that Levi Bryant has usefully described this situation with his distinction between theory and meta-theory: The meta-theory of a theory here one should think of De Mans model of reading consists of the thinkers theory of his or her theory or account of what they are trying to do in the theory. A thinkers meta-theory may well, as in the case of Althusser, propound a vision of his or her theory as radically democratic and egalitarian, the theory itself may contain authoritarian and litist elements that favorise a practice in contradiction to the meta-theory. I argue that the same

discordance can be found between Badious pluralist pronouncements and the concrete architecture of his theory. Thus I have no quarrel with Bryants account of his reception of Badiou, with the proviso that here he is expressing his conceptual-affective response to the meta-theory. I myself read Ltre et lvnement when it came out in 1988, at a time when I was feeling glum about the intellectual scene in France and regretting my decision not to return to Australia but to make France my home. I remember being wildly excited and telling everyone that they had to read this amazing book, admiring the intellectual passion, the conceptual power, the synthetic beauty of his prose. Here was a new pluralist (I had read his other books before, and had not been impressed). But I was also aware from the beginning of the many discordant notes to this purported pluralism, and the dogmatic posing and treatment of the four truth procedures was one of my bugbears from the start. Does ethical invention exist? Can internal tensions and contradictions, experimentation and creative possibilities lead us to invent new ethical responses? Can profound social, psychic, cognitive and technological change induce a transformation in our ethical sensibility and practice? If so, can the same be said in the domain of spirituality, does spiritual invention exist? What about philosophical invention? Or even ontological invention? Badiou does not want to consider these questions on the same level as his treatment of the matheme, the poem, invented politics, and love. This re-commensuration of incommensurable evental procedures under the unifying category of truth (eternal truths, universal truths) is correlated with the posing of philosophy as a different sort of practice, over and above the evental procedures, and naming their truths, as the four truth procedures do not make use of the category of truth to produce their truths (Badiou, LENTRETIEN DE BRUXELLES, Les Temps Modernes 526, p11). This transcendent role of philosophy more than compensates for the destitution of its capacity to produce truths (this may seem evident to some, however we must remember that love produces truths but philosophy doesnt). Philosophy declares that mathematics is ontology, declares that there are four and only four truth procedures, declares that these procedures produce eternal and universal truths, declares that science is reducible to the matheme, art to the poem, politics to its willful invention, and the psyche to love as explained by Freud and Lacan (dogmatic monist thinkers of the idealist unconscious). This betrayal of both pluralism and immanence and the restoration of the superiority of philosophy is the objection that Deleuze and Guattari make in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, when they diagnose under the appearance of the multiple the return to an antiquated conception of superior philosophy. They remark that philosophy is not only conditioned by the four truth procedures but that it imposes its own conditions on the procedures, i.e. that art is fundamentally poem, and science set-theoretic, and that love is Lacans unconscious, and that politics escapes doxa-opinion. This is also the objection of Lyotard, who prefers to talk of different rgimes of phrase rather than of Badious different rgimes of truth, taking the example of ethics (but applying it to art and politics as well): One does not judge what is just in the same way one judges what is true. And scientists themselves know this, when they are not mad, i.e. when they do not try to extend a procedure which is valid for their stake, stating what is true, to other stakes (Tmoigner du diffrend, p115-116). The different rgimes are not different rgimes, or procedures, of truth each rgime has its own stake. Once again, for Lyotard as for Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is not over and above the evental procedures, but is one procedure amongst many: And thus once again one finds multiplicity, and it cannot be reduced to the diversity of regional ontologies (ibid, p116). Science, on this account is the rgime of regional ontologies, and not just that of the matheme. Pluralism requires further that the plurality of procedures embody a plurality of stakes, such that only one rgime is subject to the stake of truth. As the hegemony of truth cannot be maintained, Badiou no longer has any argument why ethics or religion or sport cannot be conditioning procedures for philosophy, nor why philosophy should be assigned the superior role of declaring the

truth of the truths produced by the other inventive evental rgimes.

4) THE SUTURE OF BEINGS TO ONE (SPECIFICATION OF) BEING

Along with the annihilation of regional ontologies in favour of mathematics as ontology, the homogenising of multiplicities via their spatialisation, and the placing of inventive procedures under the commensurating hegemony of truth as both universal and eternal, Badious thesis on Being, which seems to engage him in dialogue with the philosophical tradition, amounts to nothing less than the return to a pre-heideggerian naivet about Being. As Laruelle remarks Badious ontology is ambiguous in that it postulates the simply philosophical destruction of the ontological Difference as difference (ANTI-BADIOU, p105). This ambiguity is another instance of what Levi Bryant termed the tension between meta-theory and theory. In Laruelles rendering of the same idea as applied to the ambiguity of Badious ontology: it does not say what it is and is not what it says it is, it claims to be an ontology but realises itself as ontic experience and thought, coinciding with a determinate knowledge produced by the sciences (ANTI-BADIOU, p115). This determinate knowledge of ontology, produced by the Cantorian revolution, is no longer philosophical but mathematical. Being has been subjected to ontic and epistemic captation by way of the mathemic suture. Lyotards critique is in a similar vein in that he calls for a suspension of judgement when faced with the decision in favour of a specification of Being: I try as far as possible to avoid the term of ontology. He has no objection to the notion of regional ontologies, but once again is mistrustful of an enterprise that could present itself as a pluralism but hide an ontic and epistemic captation of Being. Lyotard thinks that this captation is impossible, and betrays a transcendent positing of Being as one, which only negates the real multiplicity of inventive rgimes. Against this dogmatic attitude, Lyotard affirms a more prudent and more modest attitude, this reserve, this ignorance, this remainder, that we do not know, when we say that there is being, if it is one being, and that we will never know (Tmoigner du diffrend, p116). This sceptical attitude towards the dogmatically posed unity that the very use of the word being risks imposing reserves judgement on the pretention to know that any absolute thesis of Being comports: All that we can know is that there are occurrences. I favour this word, it has the modesty to say that in effect something is happening But that nothing indicates that it comes from some One (ibid, p116-117). Badiou claims to be faithful to the multiple, but his fundamental categories undermine that explicit commitment, and his pluralism is fragilised by this pragmatic contradiction. Lyotard remains faithful to the multiple to the point of wishing to abandon ontology rather than allow its ontic and epistemic capture: What I criticise in ontology is not the hypothesis of being but it is the presupposition of the unity of being that I criticise (ibid, p116).

5) THE SUTURE OF THE PSYCHE TO THE LACANIAN SUBJECT

Recently, in France, we have seen a proliferation of very violent, and particularly inept, attacks against psychoanalysis. These attacks represent a general danger for intellectuality (JACQUES LACAN, PASS PRSENT, Alain Badiou and lisabeth Roudinesco, p103, my translation). The main target of this grandiose declaration is Michel Onfrays book Le crpuscule dune idole The Twilight of an Idol, published in 2010, which contains a sustained critique of Freuds version of psychoanalysis and of the fallacious legends about his life and work promulgated first by Freud himself and then by his followers. The book is teeming with arguments and documentation, but its reception by the French intelligentsia was generally hostile: sweeping condemnation combined with character assassination. Elisabeth Roudinesco, the co-author of this dialogue on Lacan, was very outspoken in her denunciation of Onfray and his book, but preferred insult to argument.

Badiou himself, as his book on Deleuze shows, is not so good on argument. Deleuze and Guattaris ANTI-OEDIPUS was published in 1972, is it to be included in the violent but inept attacks on psychoanalysis? is it to be condemned as a danger to intellectuality? Badiou thought so in 1976 when he reduced the message of ANTI-OEDIPUS to flow like pus. The intellectuality of that pusillanimous pamphlet, entitled The Flux and the Party, hardly leaps to the eye. Badiou does not like process, flow and proliferation, and much prefers points (of decision) and tenacity (his fidelity). He makes a timid gesture in his account of love: by love I mean the amorous process itself such that the two is intrinsically at stake therein (LENTRETIEN DE BRUXELLES, Les Temps Modernes, 526, p15). In this text, published in 1990, Badiou talks about love as a process, the singular promotion and institution of the Two, and claims that nothing much has been said about it, I am convinced that it concerns almost a new object, that must be constituted (p16). NB: everything that Badiou likes is (almost) a new object. All talk of mutiplicities recedes into the background here, in favour of the Two. Intrapsychic plurality with its numerous sub-personalities, the embeddedness of the loving subjects in multiple assemblages, the existence of what Critchley calls loving communities, all this disappears in the name of a platitudinous abstraction.

CONCLUSION
Alain Badiou has expressed in its purest form a type of ontology that considers the world outside dialogic interaction with human beings, their traditions and their research. His ontology presents the elements of the world as specifiable independently of the research process and thus not subject to diachronic evolution and evaluation. This synchronic ontology conceives of the world as an unknowable noumenon that exists independently of our intervention, indifferent, ghostly, withdrawn multiplicities. Badiou onlyseems to have overcome the limits of this sort of thought that he himself brought to its purest expression, as he is willing to talk of the event and history. Yet even if Badiou is ready to confront history with talk of the communist hypothesis, he is nowhere willing to talk of the set-theoretic hypothesis. Here all is settled, there is no question of emitting an hypothesis subject to empirical research: mathematics is ontology, and that is that. I think that this ontology is unsatisfactory because of its incoherent combination of pluralism and monism, and of synchronism and diachronism. Paul Feyerabend gives us a sketch of a different sort of ontology than that of Badiou, an ontology that is itself subject to the process of research instead of lording it over the sciences, the arts, love, and political struggle. Bruno Latour goes in this direction, that of a diachronic ontology, and expresses the fairly obvious demand that religion be included among the various truth-procedures or modes of existence that are also, as Mehdi Belhaj Kacem points out, modes of prehension (using Whiteheads term). Franois Laruelle made use of science to rid philosophy of its synchronic pretentions, and has now opened his philosophy onto the whole field of prehensions, including religion (gnosticism and mysticism), art (photography), literature (science-fiction), politics (democracy), psychoanalysis (non-analysis). Bernard Stiegler underlines the catastrophe visible inside Platos own works of the replacement of the preceding traditional diachronic cosmology by a new tyranny of thought and action based on the establishment of a synchronic ontology. Stiegler can be seen as developping a form of pluralism where the various modes of existence are subtended by a multiplicity of processes of individuation. Lyotard in a text in TOMBEAU DE LINTELLECTUEL, gave a list grouping together Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, Serres and himself as thinkers of incommensurability and thus of pluralism. This was to combat the primacy given to consensus in the communicational philosophy influenced by Habermas. This pressure towards consensus, and so towards monism, as norm of thought continues today. In France I find a set thinkers who permit us to struggle against this monist pressure: Franois Laruelle, Bernard Stiegler, and Bruno Latour. Badiou, however, provides us with a synchronic mirror-image of such a diachronic pluralism: attractive in its pluralist motivation, his work ultimately disappoints us in its repeated monist sutures.