Spinoza: foreclosing the void

We can now proceed to Meditation Ten, ‘Spinoza’, where the argument takes another of its periodic excursions through an episode in the history of philosophy – like his previous engage-ments with Plato and Aristotle – with special relevance to Badiou’s project. In this case its relevance has to do with the relation – the highly problematical relation, as Badiou sees it – between three chief aspects of Spinoza’s thinking: his rationalist metaphysics, his monist ontology (i.e. his conception of mind and nature as simply two ‘attributes’ of the self-same substance) and, following directly from this, his outlook of strict determinism with regard to the springs of human thought and action. The problem is sharpened by Spinoza’s dedication to a range of (for his time) singularly radical proto-enlightenment projects – undertakings of an ethical, socio-political and speculative philosophic nature – to which Badiou is strongly drawn as a matter of shared intel-lectual and practical commitment, yet which he thinks wholly incompatible with those three primary components of the Spinozist worldview. Thus it offers a focus for the book’s central question: what role or what room can be found for the ‘event’

vis-à-vis the order of ‘being’, or for that which intervenes – in

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however unpredictable or unintended a manner – to disrupt and transform some existing situation?

Another shared precept that brings Badiou very much into Spinoza’s philosophic orbit is the conviction – flat contrary to much present-day thought – that language need not (and should not) be considered the primary concern or the condition sine qua non of philosophical understanding. Thus Badiou has no time for those varieties of pragmatist, hermeneutic, post-structuralist, postmodernist, anti-realist or ‘post-analytic’ approach whose chief common feature – despite their otherwise large divergences of view – is the claim that language in some sense goes all the way down, and therefore that truth (insofar as we can possibly know it) must be construed in dependent or language-relative terms.¹⁶ This is why he is fond of quoting Spinoza’s peremptory rationalist dictum ‘ideam enim veram habemus’

(‘For we have a true idea’), representing as it does a well-nigh scandalous affront not only to these schools of thought but also to thinkers of just about every epistemological persuasion from Kant to the present.¹⁷ It is Badiou’s principled and passionately held conviction that truth can always exceed or transcend our present-best powers of knowledge and must therefore be thought to set the standard for whatever we can rightly (or intelligibly) say about it. From which it follows – contra the above-mentioned schools of thought – that the criterion for what should count as an adequate, knowledge-conducive deployment of language is that it measure up to the requirement of truth, rather than the other way around. Like Spinoza, but unlike many philosophers nowadays, Badiou thinks of language – at any rate in certain disciplines such as philosophy – as properly aspiring to the highest degree of conceptual-semantic clarity and precision, and hence as subject to regulative norms that are not just those of custom-ary practice or communal warrant. Thus Badiou is one of the few present-day commentators who take seriously Spinoza’s attempt, in the Ethics, to lay out his arguments more geometrico, that is, in a Euclidean fashion that purports to arrive at its con-clusions through a process of rigorous deductive reasoning along with the full logico-mathematical apparatus of definitions, axi-oms, propositions, corollaries and scholia.¹⁸

In this respect – as in others – he takes a view sharply opposed to that of his erstwhile colleague and intellectual sparring-partner

Gilles Deleuze.¹⁹ On Deleuze’s account all that creaky Spinozist scaffolding should best be ignored and the Ethics be read not for its (pseudo-)demonstrative logical structure but rather for the moments of passional intensity and highly charged personal reflection that erupt at various points of the text, especially in the scholia. Not that Badiou is in the least inclined to ignore this

‘other’ Spinoza, or to overlook the signs of a restless, unruly, desirous physical being that Deleuze places very much at stage-centre. On the contrary, his reading makes much of those stress-points, anomalous passages and other such crucial (though often disregarded) junctures in the Ethics where the supposedly seamless progression from stage to stage in its structure of argu-ment is interrupted by moargu-ments of a strikingly different, highly charged emotive or passionate character. Thus Badiou, no less than Deleuze, rejects any reading that would focus solely on its logical (or quasi-geometrico-deductive) structure at the cost of downplaying – or ignoring – that other, intensely affective dimension of Spinoza’s life and work. Indeed, it is crucial to his own thinking that Spinoza’s resolutely monist ontology – his conception of mind and body or thought and matter as two

‘attributes’ of the self-same substance – should be prey to just such uncontrollable intrusions not only from the realm of pas-sional experience but also from the world of contingent histori-cal and socio-politihistori-cal events. After all, Badiou’s entire philosophic project involves precisely this cardinal distinction between, on the one hand, the order of being as revealed or dis-covered through enquiry into the set-theoretical foundations of ontology and, on the other, the order of events as that which inherently eludes any such account and which sets new stan-dards – new fidelity conditions – for the exercise of thought in its other, for example, political, artistic and ethical spheres.

Spinoza famously broke off his work on the Ethics in order to write the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and thereby intervene, to the best of his powers, in the crisis of conflicting religious as well as political allegiances which at that time threatened to overthrow the Dutch Free Republic.²⁰ Badiou’s reading gains credence from this salient fact, along with the extent to which Spinoza’s passions, both positive and negative, were so often evoked by his intense participation in this struggle to preserve the hard-won freedoms of thought and speech. On the other

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hand – against Deleuze – he holds that we shall underrate the ethical and political as well as the philosophic force of Spinoza’s thought if we treat its geometrico-deductive mode of presenta-tion as just a handy formal device or a means of achieving maxi-mum rhetorical and argumentative effect. What Badiou finds so intriguing about Spinoza is precisely this unique combination of a mind fixed upon truths that are taken to hold sub specie aeternitatis, or as always potentially transcending the compass of time-bound human cognition, with an intelligence keenly and deeply aware of its temporal (e.g. cultural-historical and socio-political) involvements.

Spinoza thus stands as a test-case and notable precursor for the two major theses that between them motivate Badiou’s philo-sophical project. His thinking prefigures what Badiou has to say – with the advantage of set-theoretical, Marxist, psychoana-lytic and other kinds of informative hindsight – concerning mathematics as the basis of all ontology and the event as that which redefines our intellectual and ethico-political responsibil-ities vis-à-vis some thereafter strictly binding (since truth-pursu-ant) obligation. In this respect he manages to straddle the two major camps of recent French Spinoza interpretation. On the one side were those – like Althusser and the early Balibar – who recruited him to the cause of a ‘structuralist’ or critical-rational-ist Marxism conceived very much in the Spinozcritical-rational-ist manner of a quest for truth and knowledge ideally unclouded by the effects of false, deceptive, imaginary or ideological belief.²¹ On the other were those, including Deleuze, who reacted strongly against this idea (as much with regard to issues in present-day politics as to issues in Spinoza scholarship) and who swung right across to the opposite extreme of a reading that emphasized the philosophically exorbitant character of Spinoza’s thought and its affinity with such notions as desiring-production, libidinal economy or ‘deterritorialised’ energy-flows.²² As I have shown elsewhere, each of these drastically opposed readings is able to claim a good measure of exegetical warrant through the direct appeal to certain strongly supportive passages in Spinoza’s text.²³ However, what is conspicuously missing from both inter-pretations – and what Badiou sets out to provide – is an ade-quate account of how the method of reasoning more geometrico relates to Spinoza’s treatment of the passions (positive and

negative) along with his response to the pressures and prospects of historical-political life.

Thus Spinoza is a central figure in Badiou’s genealogy of modern thought since he, like Badiou, was above all concerned to understand the relations between truth and knowledge, the-ory and practice, reason as that which aspires to a timeless (pro-totypically mathematical) order of truth and reason as subject to practical constraints when required to adapt itself to chang-ing historical and socio-political conditions. However – and this is where Badiou parts company with Deleuze – we shall be in no position to appreciate the strength or intensity of Spinoza’s political passions and convictions unless we are willing to mea-sure them against the demonstrative force of his reasoning more geometrico and not treat the latter as a mere excrescence or a misconceived attempt to achieve scientific credibility for some otherwise highly dubious premises and conclusions. And again, we shall fail to grasp an important aspect of that reasoning – namely its role as both a critical check upon those passions and a motivating source for them – if we adopt a ultra-rationalist position, like Althusser’s, that very largely ignores both the affec-tive dimension and the circumstantial details of Spinoza’s con-joint life-and-thought. To be sure, there is a strong case to be made for viewing Spinoza as a thinker far ahead of his time and one who moreover managed to elaborate a proto-Marxist theory of truth, subjectivity and ideological misrecognition. This he achieved – so Althusser maintains – through his distinction between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ kinds of knowledge, that is, his account of how ‘confused’ or ‘imaginary’ ideas should properly give way to their ‘adequate’, clear and distinct (since rigorously theorized) replacements.²⁴ Yet as Althusser’s critics have been quick to point out it is hard to extract any convincing account of political agency or motivation from his high-structuralist account of how subjects are passively interpellated by – or recruited to – this or that prevailing ideological formation.²⁵ What is lacking in his general approach to these matters, as likewise in his reading of Spinoza, is what Badiou most importantly aims to provide:

an account of how philosophy might reconcile the claims of conceptual rigour, clarity and precision with an openness to the contingency and unpredictability of real-world events, whether

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in the ethical, political, philosophical, artistic or personal (espe-cially amorous) spheres.

Hence the prominent position of Spinoza as an elective pre-cursor to Badiou’s philosophical project, despite the extreme contrast between Spinoza’s radical monism and Badiou’s com-mitment to an equally radical conception of inconsistent multi-plicity as that which precedes, subtends and surpasses any unity imposed upon it by various operations of the ‘count-as-one’.

Hence also the lesson for those who might be tempted to dismiss Badiou’s writing on set-theoretical themes as at best a somewhat fanciful diversion and at worst a display of gratuitous expertise in a discipline utterly remote from his home-ground interests, that is, politics, ethics, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. They would be wrong about this for a number of reasons, among them – as I have said – the high sophistication and conceptual range of Badiou’s mathematical thought and the extent to which his ontological (i.e. set-theoretical) concerns intersect with his treat-ment of those other themes. For it is just Badiou’s point that they constitute the chief enabling ‘conditions’ for a project that would keep its sights firmly fixed on the standard of truth while none the less taking adequate account of those various kinds of event that can always intervene in such a way as radically to redefine what qualifies as thinking, acting or living in accor-dance with that same standard. This is why he is so critical, even contemptuous, of much that passes for philosophy of mathemat-ics in the recent analytic tradition, focused as it often is either on narrowly technical or on hyper-inflated issues – such as the seem-ingly endless debate around rule-following – that (in his view) merely trivialize the subject and deflect thinking from other, philosophically as well as mathematically more challenging paths.²⁶ It is also why he rejects any version, no matter how qual-ified, of the Frege-Russell logicist programme that would seek to derive all the basic truths of mathematics from a handful of set-theoretical axioms and strictly deductive procedures of proof and demonstration.²⁷

It is here that Badiou’s thinking comes closest to Spinoza even though he rejects the Spinozist idea of a single, undifferentiated order of being (interchangeably ‘God’ or ‘nature’) that contains or subsumes all its various ‘modes’ of objects, beings and events.²⁸ So likewise with the two ‘attributes’ of mind and body which

Spinoza conceives – in company with some present-day physical-ist or central-state-materialphysical-ist philosophers of mind – as merely epiphenomenal, that is to say, as products of our humanly limited powers of apprehension.²⁹ So it is not surprising that Badiou – whose ontology starts out from the notion of infinitely multiple infinities constrained by the stipulative count-as-one in its vari-ous forms – should make a point of staking his distance from Spinoza as the philosopher most committed to a radically moni-stic or anti-dualist, that is, anti-Cartesian metaphysics of mind and world. After all, it was Badiou who caused considerable upset among the followers of Deleuze by claiming that the latter – especially in his thinking about issues in mathematics – betrayed all the symptoms of a covert attachment to the ultimate univoc-ity of being and truth, despite his overt celebration of difference, heterogeneity or multiple and endlessly proliferating ‘lines of flight’.³⁰ I shall not here attempt an adjudication of the issue between Badiou and Deleuze except to say that it reflects their very different views with respect to crucial topics in the history of philosophy from Plato down and – most crucially of all – the relationship between mathematics, philosophy and the various

‘conditions’ that constitute philosophy’s means of access to truth. If there is one point at least on which they agree it is the strict impossibility of thinking the multiple without reference to the count-as-one as that which seeks, albeit vainly, to comprehend the multiple and thereby get a purchase on what would other-wise exceed its utmost capacities of rational grasp.

Thus despite his rejection of Spinoza’s monist ontology Badiou can subscribe unreservedly to the Spinozist dictum ‘For we have a true idea’, and moreover to the Spinozist claim – on the face of it one with radically monist implications – that ‘the order of things’ and the ‘order of ideas’ are in fact one and the same order under different descriptions or aspects.³¹ This follows from his acceptance of mathematical Platonism, construed in a non-standard way according to which – contra the sceptics, anti-realists and conventionalists – there is simply no distinguishing the object-domain of mathematical entities and truths from the various procedures or acts of thought whereby they are brought within range of discovery or formal-demonstrative proof.³² What saves this conception from the much-touted Platonist ‘dilemma’

of objective truth versus humanly attainable knowledge is

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Badiou’s refusal (with good Platonist warrant) to allow any such gap to open up in the first place, along with his equally firm insistence on the way that mathematics – as our paradigm case of truth-oriented thought – typically achieves its most signal advances through a constant dialectic of problem-creating and problem-resolving initiatives. It is in the restless movement between these poles that mathematics exhibits both its own capacity for creative self-renewal and the extent to which its vari-ous formal procedures bear upon other fields of human experi-ence, knowledge and enquiry. This is why, as we have seen, Badiou takes his cue in matters ontological from those passages in Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides where Socrates most directly confronts the aporias of the one and the many, and where think-ing sets out on the long and tortuous path that will eventually lead to the paradoxes of classical set theory and the various attempts (by Russell and others) to resolve or at any rate defuse those paradoxes. Here as elsewhere – for instance in his com-mentaries on Spinoza and Hegel – Badiou’s is essentially a diag-nostic reading which aims to draw out those symptomatic moments of recalcitrant, resistant or non-assimilable sense that signal the presence of a counter-logic at odds with the thinker’s overt professions of intent.

Above all it is Spinoza who provokes this ambivalent response since Badiou is strongly drawn to certain aspects of Spinozist thought – chief among them his axiomatic-deductive style of rea-soning more geometrico – while none the less rejecting his radically monist conception of mind and nature as two ‘attributes’ of the self-same substance, itself manifested in the various ‘modes’ whose seeming multiplicity belies their true nature as so many aspects or phenomenal appearances thereof.³³ For there is an obvious conflict between the central claim of Spinozist ethics, that is, that true free-dom lies in the acceptance of an all-encompassing (even if in large part humanly unknowable) order of necessity and Badiou’s great care to distinguish the realms of being and event. Thus ‘Spinoza represents the most radical attempt ever in ontology to identify structure and metastructure, to assign the one-effect directly to the state, and to in-distinguish between belonging and inclusion’

(p. 113). Such is the result of Spinoza’s radically monist conception when consistently applied to issues in the social, political and ethi-cal spheres as well as in realms – such as the formal and physiethi-cal

sciences – where it fails to account for the creative-transformative power of human intellect and also for the way that such advances are achieved against, despite, or (sometimes) as an unlooked-for result of contingent factors that find no place in the kindsof neatly tailored account that typify the ‘official’ histories of those disci-plines. In short, ‘it is clear that [Spinoza’s] is the philosophy par excellence which forecloses the void ’, and therefore that Badiou will need to demonstrate some flaw – some logical inconsistency or fail-ure to meet its own conceptual requirements – in the Spinozist

sciences – where it fails to account for the creative-transformative power of human intellect and also for the way that such advances are achieved against, despite, or (sometimes) as an unlooked-for result of contingent factors that find no place in the kindsof neatly tailored account that typify the ‘official’ histories of those disci-plines. In short, ‘it is clear that [Spinoza’s] is the philosophy par excellence which forecloses the void ’, and therefore that Badiou will need to demonstrate some flaw – some logical inconsistency or fail-ure to meet its own conceptual requirements – in the Spinozist