Pli 10 9 Badiou.Pdf

Alain Badiou 175 PJi10 (2000),174-190. of contradictions over against the unilateral entities and fixed categories through which metaphysics allows something like a submission to death to prosper. Let us call this the dialectical trial of any metaphysical immobilism or 'eternitism'. In this trial Hegel is a key witness for the prosecution, but also Marx and Nietzsche, as well as Freud and Lacan. 4. Finally, that which discerns under the name of metaphysics the Ij Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics nihilistic disposition of the entire history of the West. 'Metaphysics' I stands here for a prescription of the history of being such that to desire its ,I'l reversal one must engage in an interminable hermeneutic wait. Let us call ALAIN BADIOU I'll this the historial trial of metaphysics, which in the end can only oppose to I metaphysics' rampant technical reign the reserve of the poet or the 11"1 1 announcement of a return of the dead gods. 11 Anti-metaphysics is thus to be found in four guises: critique, I,ll Our question can be simply stated. What does "metaphysics" name in any positivism, dialectics, and hermeneutics. If, against the vacuity of the discourse that declares a crisis of metaphysics (in the best of cases), or the metaphysical concept, it functions through a discipline of limitation, it is end or even the profound non-sense of metaphysics (in the worst)? What the essence of critique; through a discipline of mathematized i" type of thought does this word, "metaphysics", refer to, for all those who experimentation, it is positivism; through the overcoming of the principle i!" claim to critique or reform its effects? of identity that grounds metaphysics, it is dialectics; finally, if it functions Let us recall that the theme either of an obsolescence or of a necessary through a deciphering of the history of being that culminates in an "I: and radical transformation of that which is sustained by the name epochal diagnosis, it is hermeneutics. , "metaphysics" runs, uninterrupted, from Kant to the present. It is In all four cases, to say that the violence of these claims is certainly useful to submit these verdicts to revision. We should keep a symptomatic is to state the case mildly. One might even see these claims I:'II sample of the modern anti-metaphysical spirit in mind, if for no other as extorted from philosophy in the mode of the cry, of the insult, or of III reason than to be baffled by how such a negative certainty is answered by venomous mockery. Let us listen to them, one last time: Ill, the interminable and uncertain history of the perpetual reconstitution of Let us begin with Critique. Who would expect from that eminently metaphysics. reasonable philosopher, Kant, peremptory and contemptuous statements , Almost three centuries have gone by in which the opera of the end of such as those which, for example, point out the metaphysician's metaphysics has never been absent from the repertoire, albeit in irresponsibility? Thus we come across the assertion in the Prolegomena extremely varied productions: it is truly of considerable interest to know [§52b] according to which, I quote: "One can tinker around with ~ the different fates that have befallen this libretto. metaphysics in sundry ways without even suspecting that one might be 1 We shall group them under four main headings: venturing into untruth".1 The metaphor, as we can see, is not far from an !r! 1 'I 1. That of the interruption and adjudicative limitation of metaphysical indictment of the common metaphysician as a swindling craftsman. For i!1 ambitions. Let us call this the critical trial of any dogmatic metaphysics. Kant the metaphysician is and remains a swindler if he imagines he can The canonical reference here is Kant. actually propose something truly new. With regard to the concept of 2. That of the exhaustion, not only intellectual, but also political and substance for example, that is, with regard to the very heart of classical historical, of the supposed virtues of metaphysics, to be finally replaced metaphysics, Kant does not hesitate to declare, in the very last section of by a rational positivity which takes the empirical sciences as its paradigm. the same prolegomena: "through all this analysis nothing is achieved, Let us call this the positivist trial of any metaphysical imaginary. One can nothing created and advanced, and, after so much bustle and clatter, this here follow Auguste Comte, but also the early Wittgenstein or Camap. I Immanuel Kant. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ed. and Trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: 3. That for which metaphysics is nothing but a mutilation of a Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 94. [All footnotes are by the translator. Thanks to Miguel de complete form of thought, which assumes the living, concrete becoming Beistegui and Stephen Houlgate for help with locating the Heidegger and Hegel references.] Alain Badiou 177 176 PIi 10 (2000) Preface' to the Cours de Philosophie Positive. There he writes, science is still where it was in Aristotle's time".2 We can ask ourselves if comparing the dangers he faces from the clerical party to those he faces at Kant does not in fact, with his rather laboured, emphatic style, add to this the hands of the metaphysicians: "Towards the metaphysical party, very bustle and noise even though, with a self-assurance which should whether governing or aspiring to, my necessary position, albeit relative to also elicit commentary, he nonetheless does claim to be putting a stop, a less pronounced collision, is, at base, even more dangerous for me."s once and for all, to the bustle in question. In any case this is the And he gives his reason, which in my opinion has lost none of its injunction which opens the Prolegomena, which should be quoted in full, relevance: "More enlightened and more supple, this equivocal party [...] for so much pride is a rare thing indeed: "My intention is to convince all is just as interested as the purely theological pretenders in preventing, by of those who find it worthwhile to occupy themselves with metaphysics any means necessary, the social installation of the true modern that it is unavoidably necessary to suspend their work for the present, to philosophy.,,6 consider all that has happened until now as if it had not happened, and Here we are. One of the common meanings of the term "metaphysics" before all else to ask the question: 'whether such a thing as metaphysics designates, beyond the discursive apparatuses of the reigning philosophy, is even possible at all",.3 a fearsome force, whose area of influence is much vaster than the As we can see, the introduction to a critical metaphysics, which is an University, a conservative force that blocks a strategic passage: the exposition of the transcendental as such, is undertaken according to an passage between philosophy and social order. A force that, as Comte anti-dogmatic line of violence whose very necessity should be put into argues, attempts to hinder, by any means necessary, the "social question. installation" of anti-metaphysical philosophy, whether this philosophy be The positivists are no less acrimonious, even when, like Auguste critical, positive, dialectical, or hermeneutic. Comte, they hold metaphysics to be a temporarily useful but already Somewhat blurring the outline of this essay, allow me to remark that it obsolete state of thought. Whilst Kant is enamoured of the image of is just such a force that in a very different (one might even say opposite) metaphysics as an interminable and fruitless battle, as a conceptual register Heidegger diagnoses under the name of metaphysics. Whether it struggle over so much wind, Auguste Comte introduces the image of is a question of the unrelenting and sterile irresponsibility, indicated by metaphysics as mental illness. Thus in the Discours sur l'Esprit Positif, Kant, or of the equivocal and devastating pathological force, named by he declares that "ultimately, one can view the metaphysical state as a sort Comte, Heidegger is more prone to raising the stakes than to any form of of chronic illness which naturally inheres in our mental evolution, both restraint. It is only at this price, after all, that he can include Nietzsche individual and collective".4 This propensity to pathologise metaphysics himself, and ultimately Nietzsche above all, within metaphysics. For and to prescribe a brutal therapy to deal with its most acute cases has Nietzsche is indeed the philosopher who has given the prevalence of a been hugely popular, to the present day. One can no longer count the metaphysical disposition with regard to being the name it ultimately physicians crowding the bedside of the man either sick with metaphysics, deserves: the will to power. Against this Heidegger shows himself to be or sick from the sickness of metaphysics itself. no less violent in his words than his predecessors. In the fourth book of It's true that for Comte (but is it so different for Kant? And will it be his Nietzsche, Heidegger does not hesitate to call "machination" the so different for Wittgenstein, or Heidegger?) the metaphysical state is not hegemony of Being under the sway of the metaphysical structure. And he simply a mental disposition. It is also that which an entire intellectual adds: "When meaninglessness comes to power by dint of machination, group lays claim to, a group whose social power is not to be the suppression of meaning and thus of all inquiry into the truth of Being underestimated. Indeed, if the critique of metaphysics can so quickly turn must be replaced by machination's erection of "goals" (values).,,7 violent, it is because political determinations are always at stake.

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