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do we gain or lose by calling these acts "poetic"
in one case and "archiaesthetic" in the other?
Or, in the case of Lacan, by calling his defini
tion of the act "archiscientific" rather than either "scientific" or "psychoanalytical"? Or fmally, in the case of Nietzsche, by calling his mad dream of an act "archipolitical" rather than speaking of a "grand politics"?
In terms of the concrete intelligibility of a concrete situation, what are the effects of the introduction of all these prefixes with which the philosopher somewhat obsessively polices and draws the boundaries around the specifi
city of his own act?
These questions obviously cannot be answered in the space of this introduction and I leave them to be devel
oped elsewhere, by others or by Badiou himself. Here,
I will limit myself to mentioning two contemporary voices that at a minimum might help us clarify the stakes that are involved.
Stanley Cavell is the first to put us on track in a recent essay with the highly Badiouian-sounding title
"The Wittgensteinian Event." In this essay, from
Philosophy the Day A ft er Tomorrow,
he outlines a potential program of study that would seem to come extremely close to Badiou's orientation in his year-long seminars on antiphilosophy from the early 1 990s. What is more, although he prefers to talk of a "counter-philosophical"tradition in which to include not the earlier but the
later Wittgenstein, Cavell even provides a list of exam
ples almost identical to Badiou's, give or take a couple, based on his personal predilection:
It sometimes seems imaginable to me that the
InvestiBations
will come to be thought of as belonging to a more or less honorable line of counter-philosophical works whose palpable philosophical eccentricity ensures their marginality to a central philosophical curriculum-along perhaps with Montaigne's or Emerson's
Essays,
Pascal'sPensees,
Rousseau'sPromenades,
Friedrich Schlegel'sFraBments,
Kierkegaard'sPhilosophical FraBments,
Nietzsche's
Zarathustra,
works ineradicably tinged with the philosophical whose life, nevertheless, largely depends upon their interesting those beyond the call of professional philosophy. 56Cavell himself, however, promptly rejects this line of study on the grounds that it would fail to grasp the genuine innovation of Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy:
Such a development would, to my mind, lose a singular feature ofWittgenstein's later work (most famous from the
InvestiBations),
a feature of unfailing fascination for me, which is precisely its
5 6 Stanley Cavell, "The Wittgensteinian Event," Philosophy the D <yr Afier Tomorrow (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 1 9 3 .
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demand for an existence at once inside the profes
sion of philosophy and outside of it. The specification "at once" is critical in this formula
tion; it declares that something essential to the work's fascination is missed if one seeks to keep the palpably philosophical stretches, concerned with problems of meaning, reference, under
standing, states of consciousness, language games, grammar, and so on, free from the patently and unembarrassed literary responses to itself, where we are asked to consider such matters as a fly trapped in a bottle, a beetle in a box, talk from a lion, the teeth of a rose. 57
I take these lines to imply that the use of prefixes such as anti- or counter- but also archi- , even when there exists a venerable line of thinkers for whom this usage might be justified, loses sight of the productive equivo
cation that lies at the very heart ofWittgenstein's own use of the term "philosophy," which in effect oscil
lates-without visible discontinuity-between "palpably philosophical stretches" and "patently and unembar
rassed literary responses to itself."
To be sure, Badiou himself is perfectly aware of the double valence of the term "philosophy" for Wittgenstein,
57 Ibid. Rorty, in his review of Cavell's own early work on Wittgenstein, at one point raises a similar criticism: "One would have thought that, once we were lucky enough to get writers like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche who resisted professionalization, we might get some criticism of philosophy which did not remain internal to philosophy." Rorty, "Cavell on Skepticism;' Consequences <1 Pragmatism, p. 1 8 1 .
as ill the following key statement from the
Tractatus,
repeatedly invoked in Badiou's essays below: "Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an act."58This claim obviously holds
both
for Wittgenstein's own understanding of what he does, including at the level of formal or even literary experimentation,and
for the discourse traditionally handed down under the name of philosophy. In both cases we are dealing first and foremost with practical interventions rather than with purely theoretical or doctrinal statements. Now, introducing the term "antiphilosophy"
into this debate certainly enables a helpful delimitation of the different values assigned to the act of traditional philosophy and the act of Wittgenstein's critique or denunciation thereof. The latter, after all, consists in uncovering the element of crookedness with which tradi
tional philosophy claims
not
to be an act but a theory. The neologism "antiphilosophy" even enables us to grasp the moral or ethical hierarchy that is presupposed in this delimitation: traditional philosophy disavows its own nature qua act by nonsensically passing off non-thoughts as though they were thoughts, that is, as though they were purely doctrinal propositions endowed with sense, whereas the diagnostic of this tradition, which Badiou proposes to relabel antiphilosophical, shows the absurdity hidden in this disavowal.
58 Wittgenstein, Traetatus Logieo-Phi]osophieus, 4. 1 1 2 (I have translated Tiitigkeit here as "act" rather than as "activity," following the example of Badiou who in turn relies throughout his study on the unpublished French translation of the Traetatus prepared by Etienne Balibar: "La philosophie n'est pas une theorie, mais un acte"
for Wittgenstein's "Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tiitigkeit'') .
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Badiou's introduction of the prefix "anti-" thus would merely seem to highlight a line of demarcation that already runs implicitly through Wittgenstein's use of
"philosophy." The value of the prefix would be mainly heuristic and it could easily be discarded, like a ladder, once it has helped us uncover the tensions that are internal to Wittgenstein's use. And yet, adding a neolo
gism where previously we only had a single ambivalent term could very well have the opposite effect from what the so-called antiphilosopher intended, namely, the effect of reaffirming the discourse of philosophy
instead of submitting it to the implacable violence of a madman who lets Ockham's razor run amok and go wild on this same discourse. No sooner do we intro
duce the term antiphilosophy than we also seem to give a strong aim or directionality to this razor's movement, with the focus shifting inexorably against the inherited discourse of philosophy. (Maybe the unsavory choice before us, as always, is between psychosis and neuro
sis?) But this turning-against philosophy can always be understood as a gearing-up-toward, if not a kneeling
down-before, the honorable tradition fathered by Plato or Parmenides.
Barbara Cassin, in a set of pre-emptive answers to Badiou, gives voice to precisely this kind of objection.
"Philosophy will always-already have won out over antiphilosophy as soon as it baptizes it 'anti,' " she writes, echoing something of Cavell's skepticism regarding the reconstruction of a "counter-philosophical" line of works :
The philosophy / antiphilosophy binary will have been a pure product of philosophy, one that philosophy will present as always-already having a structuring effect. It is this effect of
always-already
(which authorizes the always-already of being or of Being, of truth or of Truth, of the real or the Real) that the second discourse, named "anti
philosophy" by philosophy, renders manifest. 59
However, as we saw earlier, the discourse of logology also relies on the effect of an always-already, namely, the always-already structuring effect of the equivocal language enacted in puns, homonyms, and so on. How, then, should the reader respond to this gigantomachia in which philosophers , sophists, and antiphilosophers always already seem to have gained the upper hand over their adversaries?
The least one can do as a reader, I would propose, is measure the degree of rigor and commitment with which Badiou in his unpublished seminar and in the two essays that follow engages with the work of Wittgenstein. If, after that, the unsuspecting bystander
59 Cassin, "Post-scriptum sous forme de quelques propositions au futur anterieur pour repondre a ce qui suit," II n j a pas de rapport sexueI, p. 96. Cassin is here responding in advance to Badiou's reading of Lacan in his text "Les formules de ' L'Etourdit'" that immediately follows hers. Her own proposal would avoid such binarism: "What I call 'logology' rather than antiphilosophy loathes all binarism that always makes the other fall on the other side,' thus reassuring the preeminence of the one (the one that will then be designated with the philosopheme : 'pure being as unbound multiplicity' ) according to the model of sense (all that is outside of sense possesses sense or is futile) from which it is precisely a question of separating oneself" ("Post-scriptum," pp. 96--7) .
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in the elevator still wishes never to have gotten involved in the spitting contest to begin with, there is always the option of next time taking the stairs.
* * *
Just one terminological note might be in order to 1 · th f "( ) " d " . " . h exp am e uses 0 non sense an meanmg m w at follows. Whereas the German