Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-26-2014 12:00 AM Experiencing Nothing: Anxiety and the Philosophy of Alain Badiou William E. Rankin IV The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Antonio Calcagno The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © William E. Rankin IV 2014 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Rankin, William E. IV, "Experiencing Nothing: Anxiety and the Philosophy of Alain Badiou" (2014). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2501. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2501 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EXPERIENCING NOTHING: ANXIETY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALAIN BADIOU (Thesis format: Monograph) by William Rankin Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © William Rankin 2014 Abstract This thesis proposes to supplement the philosophy of Alain Badiou with an existentialist account of anxiety. After identifying a “phenomenological deficit” in Badiou’s thought, I argue that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre provide the conceptual resources for theorizing the affective emergence of subjectivity from within the confines of a determinant situation. My contention is that anxiety is the rare and unsettling experience of nothing that makes apparent the underlying contingency of all situations, thereby prompting new modes of subjective behavior. To this extent, I treat anxiety as the in-situation experience of an event that may occasion the transition from a determined-individual to a determining-subject. Keywords Badiou, Anxiety, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Gillespie, Lacan ii Acknowledgments I would like first and foremost to thank my supervisor, Antonio Calcagno, whose combination of insight, generosity, and patience made this a far better thesis than it might otherwise have been. A special thanks is also due to Scott Schaffer, whose friendship and humor did so much to tame my own anxieties over the past two years. To those at Hendrix and Western with whom I’ve argued far too late into the night: thank you; you are all, ultimately, what made this possible. I'm honored to consider you both teachers and friends. I dedicate this text to my parents, for every reason under the sun. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv Abbreviations of Works Frequently Cited ......................................................................... vi Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 19 1 Ontology and the Phantom of Inconsistency ............................................................... 19 1.1 Multiplicity and the Count-as-One: Emerging From the Void ............................. 20 1.2 The Inexistence of the Void .................................................................................. 24 1.3 Anti-Void: The State of the Situation ................................................................... 28 1.4 Events and Evental Sites: Balancing on the Edge of the Void ............................. 33 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 37 2 Three Valences of Anguish: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre ...................................... 37 2.1 Kierkegaard ........................................................................................................... 39 2.2 Heidegger .............................................................................................................. 46 2.2.1 Fear and Anxiety in Being and Time ........................................................ 47 2.2.2 The They [Das Man] ................................................................................. 49 2.2.3 Anxiety in “What is Metaphysics?” (1929) .............................................. 52 2.2.4 The Basic Structure of Heideggerian Anxiety .......................................... 53 2.3 Sartre ..................................................................................................................... 55 2.3.1 Anguish in Being and Nothingness ........................................................... 57 2.4 Existential Anxiety: Counting Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre as One ......... 59 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................... 63 3 Anxious Subjects .......................................................................................................... 63 iv 3.1 Two Variants of a Single Phenomenon: Anxiety without Lacan ......................... 65 3.2 Ideology and Anxiety ............................................................................................ 82 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 87 4 What is it to Live Anxiously? ...................................................................................... 87 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 90 Curriculum Vitae .............................................................................................................. 95 v Abbreviations of Works Frequently Cited Alain Badiou TS Theory of the Subject BE Being and Event E Ethics LW Logics of Worlds Søren Kierkegaard CA The Concept of Anxiety SD The Sickness unto Death FT Fear and Trembling Martin Heidegger BT Being and Time BW Basic Writings Jean-Paul Sartre BN Being and Nothingness SM Search for a Method Jacques Lacan SVII Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis SX Seminar X: Anxiety Sam Gillespie MN The Mathematics of Novelty All other citations follow standard MLA guidelines, noting year and page number where appropriate. vi We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die. W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety vii viii Introduction In 1967, Alain Badiou, then only thirty years old, joined the editorial board of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, a student-led journal housed at the École normale supérieure that privileged the “scientific” analysis of objective structures over and against those theories based on the categories of lived or individual experience.1 Against the phenomenological-humanism that then dominated the French intellectual landscape (e.g., the work of Sartre, Camus, Merleau- Ponty, de Beauvoir, Fanon, and Lefebvre—all of whom, in one way or another, maintained a tenuous theoretical connection to the experiential philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger), the members of the Cahiers turned instead to an Althusserian- and Lacanian-inspired understanding of science as that which could penetrate the ideological illusions that govern human reality. To their mind, phenomenological experience was invariably determined by a pre-existent structure that circumscribed its limits in such a way as to ensure the reproduction of the status quo —in other words, that human experience was ideology. Therefore, they believed, only science, i.e., the objective analysis of formal structures stripped of all reference to individual/ideological experience, offered any hope of positively transforming their contemporary political situation. Consequently, in order to “redefine a genuinely emancipatory politics,” Badiou and the young men of the Cahiers’ project believed it was imperative to remove the illusive category of experience from theoretical analysis all together (E 6-7).2 This was the essential ambition of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse: to develop a comprehensive theory of structural transformation without any reference to the supposedly deluded psychology of an individual, relying, in its place, on the strictly formal interplay of structure and subject as theorized by Althusser and Lacan.3 1 The following brief gloss of the Cahiers por l’Analyse, relies in large part on the comprehensive history of the journal provided by Knox Peden and Peter Hallward in their two-volume collection, Concept and Form (2012). 2 In his 1955 memoir, Claude Levi-Strauss, himself an important forerunner of the Cahiers, stresses the need to finally reject the “continuity between reality and experience” assumed by phenomenology and “fulfilled by existentialism,” and instead to “repudiate experience” which constitutes