Jean-Jacques Lecercle - Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature

Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature

Plateaus New Directions in Deleuze Studies

It's not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

Series Editors

Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Editorial Advisory Board

Keith Ansell Pearson

Ronald Bogue

Constantin V. Boundas

Rosi Braidotti

Eugene Holland

Gregg Lambert

Dorothea Olkowski

Paul Patton

Daniel Smith

James Williams

Titles available in the series

Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy

Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze

Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton

Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism

Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence Deleuze and Philosophy

Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature

Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History

Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense

Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity

Aidan Tynan, Deleuze's Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms

Visit the Plateaus website at www.euppublishing.com/series/plat

BADIOU AND DELEUZE
READ LITERATURE

Jean-Jacques Lecercle

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 2010, 2012

First published in hardback by Edinburgh University Press 2010

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 3800 0 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4905 1 (paperback)

The right of Jean-Jacques Lecercle
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction

Tell me which literary texts you read and how you read them and I shall tell you what kind of philosopher you are and how important your philosophical contribution is.

Alain Badiou begins the introduction to his magnum opus Being and Event by positing three numbered theses, or assumptions, about the current general state of philosophy. In a pastiche of the philosopher's practice, I shall start by stating my own three assumptions, or theses.

Thesis one. Badiou and Deleuze are two of the most important contemporary philosophers. This is the weak version of the thesis, which, I am afraid, is trivially true. All you have to do in order to ascertain this is to browse among the philosophy section of any Waterstone's bookshop. A few years ago, the shelves were filled with books of philosophy of an impeccably analytic cast, where applied ethics vied with the philosophy of mind. Today, Wittgenstein and Cavell (who is not even an analytic philosopher) are lone survivors in a sea of translations from the French or German: Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Blanchot and so on to the end of the alphabet. Badiou and Deleuze figure prominently in that glorious list. There is hardly a text by Deleuze that has not been translated into English and translations of Badiou are coming thick and fast (the massive second part of his magnum opus, Logic of Worlds, published in 2006, has already been translated). A strange statement for a philosopher who claims that what he has in common with Deleuze is the rejection of all thought of the end (as in the phrases the end of philosophy or the end of history) and of finitude, but a statement that must be understood in the light of his conception of history as a dotted line of historical sequences that produce eternal truths but that are themselves deciduous. I happen to believe that Badiou's claim, large as it may seem, is justified that there is such a thing as a moment in French philosophy and that Deleuze and Badiou are its major representatives. In saying this, I have already moved towards my second thesis.

Thesis two. Badiou and Deleuze form a pair, which is a form of unity, the unity of a set, and a pair of opposites, which is a form of distance or separation. We could describe this in the language of Deleuze: they share a plane of immanence, where their individual lines cross (in agonistic strife), then converge and are entangled (in a philosophical correspondence), while remaining entirely distinct and ultimately separate. We shall need a concept to describe this form of relation which is a non-relation (and certainly a non-relationship) the Deleuzian concept of disjunctive synthesis will do the philosophical work that is needed. But we can also, more traditionally but perhaps more perspicuously, describe this situation in the language of Bourdieu (which in this case is not incompatible with the language of Deleuze): contemporary French philosophy is a field of forces, in which Badiou and Deleuze occupy two opposite places that function as poles and, by acting as attractors, structure the field. As we can see, my second thesis is as strong, and potentially as unpalatable, as the first. But there is a third thesis, which is perhaps even worse but which actually impelled me to write this book.

Thesis three. The best way to enter the (non-) relation between Badiou and Deleuze is through the way they read literature. Again, The weak version of the thesis is even more trivial than this: in showing an interest in art (Deleuze wrote extensively on painting and the cinema, Badiou has an essay on dance in his handbook) as well as literature, Deleuze and Badiou play the usual role of continental philosophers who, unlike their analytical counterparts, never hesitate to wander beyond the narrow limits of their favourite subjects: Heidegger and Adorno, Foucault and Derrida, as the French language has it, ne sont pas en reste (they, too, wrote extensively on literature).

But there is a strong version of the thesis. It can take two forms. The first states that literature plays a crucial role in the contents of our philosophers respective positions. For Badiou, literature is a condition of philosophy. Sometimes it is included in the field of art, one of the four fields (science, politics, art and love) in which events occur and procedures of truth are conducted literature is a source of truth, unlike philosophy, whose more modest task is to compossibilise, to think together the truths produced in other fields. Sometimes, the conditions are, through synecdoche, reduced to two: the matheme and the poem, mathematics and literature. In both cases thinking the poem is, for the philosopher, of the essence. For Deleuze, literature is a constant source of thought experiments, it is one of the fields in which thought is at work, perhaps even in an exemplary fashion, as the literary text is a locus where the shift between interpretation (What does it mean?) and experiment (How does it work? Let's put it to work!) is least expected and most fruitful. This is why Proust, Lewis Carroll and a host of American writers are as important to philosophy as Hume and Spinoza. The second form of the strong version of the thesis goes one step further. In a pastiche of Deleuze's attitude, it is not interested in the contents of the philosophical positions of the two philosophers, even where they directly concern literature: it seeks to ask their texts the wrong