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Home , Alain Badiou, Jean Hyppolite

Alain Badiou. Badiou and the adherence, more than his political C : Interrogating 1960s commitments or mathematical R French . , ties him to a particular I trajectory of twentieth-century S I Ed. and trans. Tzuchien Tho French thought. and Giuseppe Bianco. London: S Bloomsbury, 2013. 216 pp.; ISBN: Tzuchien Tho and Giuseppe & 978-1441195210 Bianco’s indispensable introduction to the new volume C Badiou and the Philosophers R French intellectual historians have provides more biographical I often viewed the mid-1960s as a information on Badiou than T I period in which the prestige and has ever been available Q profound significance of G.W.F. previously, as well as providing much of the groundwork for U Hegel’s approach to dialectics E was abandoned in favor of a contextualizing his very early work in the political, aesthetic and model adopted from structural # linguistics. While the existential philosophical developments of 1 phenomenologists and Marxist this extraordinarily rich period. As humanists had championed Tho and Bianco recount, Badiou’s Hegel as the great thinker of work has been characterized by, consciousness and negativity, the among things, consistent emergent wave of structuralists admiration for and reformulation preferred to describe fundamental of the philosophical project of conditions of possibility that Jean-Paul Sartre (xiv). At age precede conscious apprehension. 17, in 1955, Badiou first read However, certain elements of Sartre’s early work and decided Hegel’s influence and reception to become a as a remained extraordinarily influential result (xiii). After writing a letter throughout this period, despite to , conveying the apparent dominance of anti- his appreciation and agreement Hegelian thought as developed with her defense of Sartre by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Barthes, , and criticisms, Badiou wrote his first . Attention to this work—not a conventional study legacy might help us understand of philosophy, but rather a novel, the emphatic return to dialectical Almagestes (xiv). Tho and Bianco modes of understanding by Alain describe this somewhat-forgotten Badiou, in the late 1960s and accomplishment as maintaining later. This particular Hegelian key Sartrian theses while

302 Reviews simultaneously engaging with the the that Sartre had so C concerns of the avant-garde Te l admirably described, despite his R Quel group (xiv). This capacity to lack of attention to fundamental I reassert the irreducibility of an questions of historicity and S I intentional consciousness lacking structure, Badiou’s contact with S in interiority—a negating subject— was especially while convincingly absorbing significant. & apparently contrary concerns, such as scientific epistemology and Along with Georges C literary formalism, marked Badiou’s Canguilhem, Hyppolite made R efforts. In particular, Badiou was his mark as what Badiou later I attracted to the Sartre’s later called one of the “protecteurs T I approach to Hegelian in de la nouveauté;” while serving Q his monumental work, Critique of as director of the École Normale U 1 Supérieure, he promoted the new Dialectical Reason. E music of Pierre Boulez as well as However, maintaining the the innovations of the nouveau # commitment to Sartrian themes in roman (xxii). As Badiou later 1 the face of seemingly incompatible put it, “thanks to Hyppolite, the perspectives required a significant bolts on academic philosophy, rethinking. In the mid-1960s, Badiou which were normally shut tight, appears torn between political were released.”2 The core of his reasons to adhere to Sartre’s philosophical significance was problematic (made pressingly in his innovative re-assertion of apparent in Sartre’s demonstration Hegel. Badiou even argued that of commitment in protest to the Hyppolite, in translating Hegel, Algerian war), and simultaneous developed an innovative new experiments with thinkers who philosophy.3 Traditionally, Hegel’s seem very far removed from this influence had been prevented from outlook (xvi). For example, Badiou taking root in French academic was fascinated by Lévi-Strauss’ philosophy, which meant that classic , and wrote his considerable popularity was a dissertation on Spinoza, whose transmitted outside the university, concept of freedom seems almost first in the lectures of Alexandre the antipode of Sartre’s (xvii, xix). Kojève and later in the works of In search of a way to preserve

2 , Pocket Pantheon: Figures of 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey, London: Reason: Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, Verso, 2009, 37. trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Rée, New York: Verso, 2004. 3 Badiou, Pocket Pantheon, 38.

303 Reviews Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.4 first transmitted to him by Sartre C and subsequently by Hyppolite.6 R Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel, Badiou himself declared that he I unlike the preceding French studied Hyppolite’s translation of S I Hegelians, de-emphasized the the Phenomenology for Spirit for S primacy of humanism. While many years before approaching the Kojève and Sartre had argued 7 German original. & for the distinctly human subject as the locus of freedom and The French reading of Hegel C the negation of the given and was often inflected by Martin R determined, Hyppolite argued that Heidegger’s phenomenology. In I the fundamental issues could not the 1930s, Kojève remarked that T be circumscribed by the definition Hegel’s and finitude could I of the human.5 Arguably, this only be understood through a Q version of Hegel was crucial in Heideggerian lens, and Sartre’s U E Badiou’s preservation dialectics, subsequent approach to Hegelian re-invented in an anti-humanist Marxism remained marked by his # mode. It could be argued that the prior encounter with the particular 1 French Hegelians of the 1960s emphasis on nothingness found all had privileged mediators in in Heidegger’s work.8 Hyppolite order to develop their respective was distinguished from these readings. While drew predecessors by an even greater from Georg Lukács’ and Henri commitment to Heidegger’s Lefebvre’s humanist Marxist significance, and in particular approach, and the emphasis on historicity and was inspired by ’s fundamental ontology that was excessive approach to Hegelian previously neglected by French negativity, Badiou’s Hegel was commentators, and the turn towards in place of human

4 See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the subjectivity announced in his Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology famous “Letter on Humanism.” of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Merleau-Ponty later declared that all the great philosophical 6 See Guy Debord, of the Spectacle, ideas of the past century – the of trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone, Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German 1995, and Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted , and – had their to General Economy: A without beginnings in Hegel.” Sense and Non-sense, Reserve,” Writing and , London: trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus, Evanston: Routledge, 2001, 317-351. Northwestern UP, 1964, 109-110. 7 Badiou, Pocket Pantheon, 39. 5 On Hyppolite’s anti-humanism, see Stefanos Geroulanos, “L’ascension et la marionette : 8 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, l’homme après Jean Hyppolite,” Jean Hyppolite, 259. entre structure et existence, ed. Giuseppe Bianco, Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2013, 83-106.

304 Reviews Heidegger’s impact was such that and as philosophy could still afford C Hyppolite described himself as to be effortlessly endogamic” R struck by “Heideggerian lightning” (xxxi). I (xxi). S I Badiou first corresponded S with Hyppolite in 1963, sending him To the extent that Badiou & a copy of Almagestes and conveying and Hyppolite disagree, it is with his excitement about Hyppolite’s regard to the nature of history and historicity; while Hyppolite C forthcoming work, Existence et R maintains that mathematics, for Structure (xxvii). Clearly, Badiou I hoped that Hyppolite would provide example, is unphilosophical in its T the necessary groundwork for a relation to history, Badiou rejects I truly contemporary formulation of this thesis (xxxv). Fundamentally, Q dialectics. In Badiou’s interview for Hyppolite can only U E with Hyppolite, conducted two be historical, while Badiou will years later, we can find a very strive towards a notion of that overcomes history (xxxvi). # early record of Badiou’s evolving 1 approach to Hegel’s significance. As Hyppolite puts it, “When We can find Badiou continually we contemplate a system of intrigued by a Hegelian approach philosophy, it is the path taken by to truth while resisting some the philosopher, it is the manner of the Heideggerian emphasis in which she gains access to on historicity insisted upon by truth, and it is also the way that Hyppolite. In a series of televised she touches it [truth] of course!” interviews with major French (5). Rather than a history of error, philosophers, Badiou interviewed for Hyppolite, “the philosophical Canguilhem, Foucault, Raymond systems of the past represent a Aron, Paul Ricœur, , first degree of thinking” (3-4). In and , in addition to Hyppolite’s definition of philosophy, Hyppolite. Taken as a whole, this it is an “existent metaphysical volume reads as a fascinating thinking” that links “a matter and snapshot of French thought in a form” (4). For him, philosophy the mid-1960s, just before the can think being and content, while structuralist wave of 1966 produced mathematics and logic are purely a less classical brand of “theory.” formal (4). As Tho and Bianco put it, “this For Hyppolite, each philosopher collection of interviews is also a uncovers a fundamental truth representation of the last period within his own epoch, and where French philosophy as French cannot be falsified (6). Badiou,

305 Reviews however, raises the question of Hyppolite and Badiou is the C ’s justification of slavery. former’s tendency towards a R Hyppolite agrees that this example historical relativism, in contrast I demands the consideration of the to Badiou’s desire to posit truth’s S I “existential roots” of a philosophy attaining of an absolute. However, S (6-7). He declares that while Hyppolite insists that is philosophy cannot be reduced perhaps the crucial philosopher, & to , it must be seen as suggesting that some philosophies related dialectically to the non- may provide the keys to others C philosophical roots that sustain (10). This anticipates Badiou’s R it (7). While Hyppolite insists own famous insistence of the I on philosophy as embedded in importance of Plato, against T I its time, Badiou counters that various modern anti-Platonic Q this understanding of “history” movements. U has little to do with the ordinary E connotations of this word, to such In a subsequent discussion conducted for the television a degree that it is dispensable (7). # Hyppolite argues that a historical series, Hyppolite and Badiou 1 understand of philosophy and return to many of these issues, in being must reveal the possibility conversation with Dina Dreyfus, of a multiplicity of understandings Foucault, Canguilhem, and Ricœur of being, and even those that (79). Hyppolite and Canguilhem are opposed to one another; as express total agreement, which he puts it, “the nature of being is surprising given the Hegelian should be such that it renders this commitments of the former and diversity or even this opposition the scientific epistemology of between philosophical systems the latter (81). They are in accord possible” (9). Badiou responds on the question of a multiplicity to this amalgamation of Hegel of truths, which Canguilhem and Heidegger by emphasizing finds proven by his historical the significance of Marx, and the inquiries and Hyppolite supports non-Marxist conclusions that on the basis of his readings of Hyppolite has drawn. In response, Hegel and Heidegger. Foucault Hyppolite replies that the relations affirms the suggestion that while of production and their technical science aims to produce a single conditions must be considered explanation, philosophy must rely as among the non-philosophical on a polysemic notion of truths roots of the various historical (85). From a twenty-first century philosophies. Fundamentally, perspective, it may appear that the then, the disagreement between distinction between Badiou and

306 Reviews these other great philosophers of C the 1960s was his resistance to a R discourse inspired by Heidegger’s I multiplicity of pathways and his S I obstinate commitment to S that cannot be historicized. & Rather than Heidegger, Badiou would pursue a complex and C unusual approach to Hegel and R Marx that he believed mirrored I some of the insights of the Chinese T thought of the time. In his a volume I produced in the mid-1970s, The Q Rational Kernel of the Hegelian U E Dialectic, Badiou aimed to assert the universality of these ideas # by placing them in relation to 1 the analysis of Zhang Shi Ying, a Chinese Hegelian Marxist. In his demanding and groundbreaking Theory of the Subject, a series of seminars conducted from 1975 to 1979, Badiou continued to expand an anti-historicist and anti- humanist approach to dialectics as a destructive negation of its conditions. Read in context, this new approach to novelty and changed is indebted to both Sartre and Hyppolite.

Andrew Ryder

307 Reviews