THE CENTURY Alain Badiou Translated, with a commentary and notes, by Alberto Toscano polity First published in French in 2005 by Editions du Seuil as Le Siecle and © Editions du Seuil, 2005 This English translation © Polity Press, 2007 This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London (www.frenchbooknews.com) •• institut francais n ~ Ouvrage publie avec l'aide du Ministere franc;ais charge de la Culture - Centre national du livre. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture - National Centre for the Book. Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-IO: 0-7456-3631-4 ISBN-13: 978-07456-3631-3 ISBN- IO: 0-7 456-3632-2 (pb) ISBN-13: 978-07456-3632-0 (pb) Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Berling by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Malaysia by Alden Press Malaysia For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk Contents Translating the century vii Dedication xiv 1 Search for a method 1 2 The beast 11 3 The unreconciled 26 4 A new world. Yes, but when? 39 5 The passion for the real and the montage of semblance 48 6 One divides into two 58 7 Sex in crisis 68 8 Anabasis 81 9 Seven variations 98 10 Cruelties 111 11 Avant-gardes 131 12 The infinite 148 13 The joint disappearances of Man and God 165 'European nihilism' and beyond: commentary by Alberto Toscano 179 Notes 202 Remarks on the translation 217 Select bibliography 224 Index 226 Translating the century These thirteen lessons on the twentieth century were originally intended to be accompanied by a facing English translation. Rights and ownership intervened to foreclose that possibility. In the spirit of that original project, and by way of introduction, I would like nevertheless to include in this monolingual edition a reflection born of the initial plan that I shared with Alain Badiou. Since the lectures to follow aim to cleave as stringently as they can to the century's own propositions, it might be pertinent to ask what the century itself has to say about the question of language in general, and of bilingualism in particular. While in many respects the century's philosophy has been marked, bar a few renegades and 'extremists' (I have in mind espe­ cially that brilliant and sombre Neo-Parmenidean from Trieste, Carlo Michaelstadter and his 1910 book La persuasione e la ret­ torica), by something like an apotheosis (if not a proto-theology) of language, an equation of philosophical with linguistic reflection (from the pedestrian propositions favoured in Cambridge to the tellurian homilies ofTodtnauberg), the century's wordsmiths have been far more sceptical, experimental, or even despairing about the powers of language, be it ordinary or prophetic. In concordance with the ever-increasing and often austere attentions that the arts of the century lavished upon 'medium', though perhaps with far more intimate and contorted repercus­ sions, poets and novelists multiplied the ordeals undergone by lin­ guistic material; just to consider the conventional armature of punctuation, so brilliantly explored by Adorno, the century's lit­ erature enacted both its suppression (Beckett's How It Is comes viii Translating the century to mind) and its seemingly erratic1 'agrammatical' proliferation ( see1 for example1 the stories of Arno Schmidt). However, this endemic manipulation or flaunting of conven­ tions was always accompanied not just by a reflective purification of medium (the belaboured narrative of aesthetic modernism) but by a veritable hatred of language. From William. Burroughs's dis­ quisitions on the 'word virus' and the prospects of an 'electronic revolution', to the sundry experiments (seldom compelling) in concrete poetry1 language was attacked for being the very sub­ stance of convention itself, for its complicity with man's enslave­ ment to utility, for its participation in the more or less surreptitious political control of human action and publicity. The twentieth century was also, after all1 the century of prodigious, ramified investigations into the complicities between recording and control, inscription and domination. Part of Samuel Beckett's enduring force lies precisely in the unique and exacting way in which his work combines1 on the one hand, a formidable experimentation with syntactical and elocu­ tionary devices and, on the other, a deep-seated, programmatic mistrust of the written word. Beckett channels these seemingly disparate demands through the strategy of bilingualism and self­ translation (moving in the inverse linguistic direction, the obvious comparison would be to Nabokov's aristocratic delight in the infi­ nitely layered fashioning and manipulation of linguistic worlds1 with its labyrinthine complexity and ludic attention to detail - an aesthetic demeanour mostly untrammelled by the tortures of the Beckettian voice). One doesn't have to (though one certainly should) frequent The Unnamable or the Texts for Nothing in order to get a taste of Beckett's intimate hatred of language (a hatred entirely propor­ tionate to1 and exacerbated by, his heterodox erudition). Already in his notorious letter to Axel Kaun of 1937, Beckett writes (orig­ inally written rin German, I give this quotation in Martin Esslin' s translation): It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own Translating the century ix language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate lan­ guage all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer · today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested. Note the urgency with which Beckett raises the question - which his entire work will endeavour to answer - of the capacity of literature to be as worthy of its time as the other arts (which only intensifies the irony of depicting the task of literature in an anticipation of Lucio Fontana's punctured, 'spatialist' canvases, or even Alberto Burri' s burnt plastic openings). It is almost as if the burden of literature were compounded by this 'vicious nature of the word', as if the purification of its material required even riskier operations than those of the other arts (because the writer is ensnared or possessed by his own medium, constitutively inca­ pable of abandoning it). Hence the call for a creative, resourceful hatred, an 'efficient misuse'. Beckett's much debated bilingualism is part and parcel of this programme, which he brilliantly dubbed as that of 'literature of the unword'. A programme, it should be noted, which he adamantly distanced from that of Joyce. In Joyce's perversely erudite 'corruption' of the English language, the young Beckett (in x Translating the century his single extended essay of 'criticism', 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce', from Disjecta) already discerned something that would end up serving as the counter to his own linguistic strategies of 'leastening' and 'worsening': a saturation and corporealization of language, the transformation of the store of universal language into an inexhaustible, quasi-somatic reservoir of affective materi­ als, symbolic allusions, delectable opacities. Now, it is telling that from his beginnings as a writer - the period where he brashly laid down some of the ethical and aes­ thetic parameters that would later silently guide his punitive regimen of experimentation - Beckett already formulated the question of writing, and of his relationship to Joyce, in terms of what was to be done with the English language. First of all, he saluted Joyce's disdain for the ersatz humanist search after a uni­ versal tongue, in terms of his kinship with Dante: 'They both saw how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation to a universal language. If English is not yet so definite a polite neces­ sity as Latin was in the Middle Ages, at least one is justified in declaring that its position in relation to other European languages is to a great extent that of mediaeval Latin to the Italian dialects.' For both there was no access to. a universal language, but only a universalizing gesture: the inventioµ of a language bearing a deter­ minate relation to the multiplicity of spoken tongues and the capacity for thought and speech.