Frank Ruda Where is „auprés de nous“? On Our Comradeship with the Absolute “Aucune vérité n’est vérité d’un rapport. Au contraire, une vérité est dé-rapporté ou déliée.” (A. Badiou)1 In Immanence of Truths Badiou refers several times, four times actually, and affirmatively to a formulation, a remark, well, to what Badiou calls a “beautiful formula” of Hegel.2 This formula has been employed by him before, not frequently, but sometimes, yet it was not referenced and thus did not appear in any of the two previous Being and Event volumes, nor on that account did it appear in his Theory of the Subject. The remark or beautiful formula that Badiou is referring to reads in its French version as follows: “l’absolu est auprés de nous”3, in English it reads – not unimportantly – the “absolute… is with us … all along”4 and in German it reads as follows: “wenn es, das Absolute nicht an und für sich schon bei uns wäre”.5 The statement is part of a larger conditional sentence that states that something would not be the case if the absolute were not already “bei uns”, “with us”, “auprés de nous”. And it obviously seems to make a lot of sense that in a book – in the Immanence of Truths – which is supposed to argue neither for the universality nor for the singularity but for the absoluteness of truths6 – that is something that can neither be derived from its universal that is generic structure alone, nor from its singularity and singular embeddedness into a specific historical situation but only from its truth-ness, so to speak, from its internal infinity – this formula occurs. It seems very pointed and fitting to refer to a formula which seeks to capture nicely what Badiou thus attempts to demonstrate in this third instalment of his philosophical enterprise: namely that the very truth-character of the fragmented product of a internally infinite practice that he calls truth-procedure and that materializes as what he now addresses as an oeuvre – at least in most cases7 – entails a claim, an index of its own absoluteness. 1 Alain Badiou, Vérité et sujet. 1987-1988, Paris 2017, 22. 2 Cf. Alain Badiou, L’immanence des vérités. L’être et l’événement, 3, Paris 2018, 44, 206, 415, 529. This formulation is from p. 415. 3 G.W.F. Hegel, La phénoménologie de l’esprit, trans. by B. Bourgeois, Paris 2006, 118. 4 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller, Oxford 1977, 47. 5 G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt a.M. 1988, 69. 6 This series is what brings together the three volumes of the “Being and Event” trilogy. One might recognize in the category of absoluteness a specific way of addressing the complex dialectic between the finite and the infinite in a new way. Cf. Badiou, Immanence, 275 and also Alain Badiou, Le fini et l’infini, Paris 2010. 7 In most cases, since, as almost always on this level, things are different with the practice of mathematics, as Badiou indicates several times in Immanence of Truths. 1 And this must mean the following: If there is a truth procedure that in most cases will manifests as a finite, singular and specific oeuvre, for this very oeuvre holds, because it is the work of (a) truth, that it will have been absolute from the very beginning.8 And this is precisely what the reference to Hegel emphasizes. The passage Badiou refers to is from the Phenomenology of Spirit and more precisely from its introduction – so, not from the general preface to what Hegel at this point believed will become his system of philosophy. And in introducing the project of the Phenomenology, Hegel in this very passage argues that we simply cannot follow what he calls the “natural assumption”9. Since if we just follow our natural belief system, we believe that what is absolute could never be close by (us) but must be located somewhere distant. But even worse, not only does our nature tell us that the absolute is in distance to us, it also makes us believe that the absolute is an object. Naturally, we tend to reify the absolute. So, if we say that we want to access or think something absolute, we in our natural common sense understanding treat it as an object, an object of our thoughts for example. Hegel demonstrates that if we take the absolute to be an object, we assume that it is in a distance from us – and vice versa –, and we thereby cannot but also assume that what we need to do is to bridge the gap that separates us from the absolute. So, if we follow our natural assumption we take cognition or thought to be this very instrument that bridges the gap. And by making all these assumptions, we fall prey to an instrumentalist conception of thought. Thinking is now supposed to function like a tool by means of which we are supposed to be able to catch or capture the absolute, “like a bird caught by a lime-twig”10, as Hegel ironically remarks. Or, like a mouse in a mousetrap. But an absolute that we could easily trick and outwit, does not seem overly absolute. 8 It is clear that this idea has been present in Badiou’s work for longer. One may just think of the very concept of the sequence that he has been expounding for almost thirty years. In what way is it related to issues we are dealing with here? Not only is each new step or each evental progression – if one risks this nomenclature – in politics possible only by measuring the limitations of (the means of) the previously taken political forms available (for example as the October Revolution solved the problems of duration and geographical expendability that occurred with the organizational form employed by and in the Paris Commune). But this measurement must necessarily also imply – if what happened say in the Paris Commune was not simply not part of the truth procedure – that already what manifested in was also infinite and we now proceed to a new type of infinity. In this sense: “an idea is always the balance sheet of an anterior idea.” Badiou, Immanence, 480. 9 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 47. 10 Ibid. 2 And the absolute is neither bird nor mouse. As Hegel himself remarks it would rather laugh at our attempted ruse if – and here it comes – the absolute were not “bei uns”, “with us, in and for itself, all along”11. It does not laugh or look down at us because it will have been with us all along. What the English translation here makes at least difficult to see and hear, if it does not disperse it altogether, in rendering the “bei uns” as “with us”, is the that the German word “bei” has a spatial meaning, a spatial connotation. It thus clearly articulates that the relation that we have to the absolute – if it is a relation at all – is a spatial one. Our relation – if it is one – to the absolute is thus, different from what one might immediately assume from almost all standard renderings of Hegel, not a temporal or historical one. The French translation that Badiou uses highlights this spatial aspect more adequately than the English one and this might actually be one of the reasons why this formula, “l’absolu est auprés de nous”, is so beautiful.12 Because it points to our comradeship with the absolute – a comrade being literally he or she who shares the same room or space. But one should here immediately ask the following question: where precisely is the absolute if it is “bei uns”, “auprés de nous”? This is a question that one might not only raise when reading Badiou’s Immanence of Truths but also when reading Hegel. Where is “auprés de nous”, “bei uns”? This is a true, i.e. difficult question since the being “bei uns” of the absolute does not make it overly easy to locate it. To begin giving an answer negatively, what is clear is the following: being “bei uns” the absolute is for Hegel as well as for Badiou not simply ahead of us, before us, “vor uns”, or “avant nous”. It is not a point or endpoint, because it is not an object; neither target that we aim for nor finishing line that we envisage and that we just would so love to reach. Rather that the absolute is “bei uns”, “aupres de nous” indicates a more complex spatial setting. The “bei” in German rather means that the absolute is beside us, at our side; it is as if it were our neighbour – notre prochain – as if it were neighbouring, nearby, maybe close-by, “prés de nous”, or maybe even “proche de nous”, if we want to refer to a formulation that appears in one of the chapter titles of The Immanence of Truths.13 Hegel’s own formulation seems to indicate that we are bordering on the absolute as much as it is a bordering on as. The absolute and us – a borderline couple. 11 Ibid. 12 As it points out that the absolute is precisely the space where there are truths or more precisely and metaphorically, the place all possible form of multiple beings. Cf. Badiou, Immanence, 295. 13 Cf. Ibid., 391. 3 In my reading, one of the tasks and impressive achievements of Badiou’s Immanence of Truths is to demonstrate from what immanent perspective the absolute can be said to be close-by, “bei uns”.