Calcagno - Badiou and Derrida: politics, events and their time

BADIOU AND DERRIDA

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BADIOU AND DERRIDA

POLITICS, EVENTS AND THEIR TIME

ANTONIO CALCAGNO

Continuum International Publishing Group

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www.continuumbooks.com

Antonio Calcagno 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9617-2

ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9617-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Calcagno, Antonio, 1969

Badiou and Derrida : politics, events, and their time / by Antonio Calcagno.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9617-1

ISBN-10: 0-8264-9617-2

1. Political science-Philosophy. 2. Badiou, Alain. 3. Derrida, Jacques. I. Title.

JA71.C28 2007

320.0922-dc22

2006034646

For Fadi Abou-Rihan

tuo

Contents

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the careful and patient nurturing of my philosophical teachers: Jay Lampert and Caroline Bayard. I thank them for their generosity and am grateful for their gifts of spirit. I am also indebted to my friends Camilla Mryglod and Kathy Daymond for helping me write and produce this text. The Universities of Guelph and Scranton are to be thanked for their invaluable intellectual and material support. Roy, Assunta, Daniel and Lucia have always encouraged me and have greatly assisted in sustaining my own research over the years. I would also like to thank Continuum for agreeing to take on this project. I am forever grateful for the kind and loving encouragement of Fadi Abou-Rihan. He watched this text grow into being, providing invaluable commentary and assistance.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the kind permission of the following journals for allowing me to reproduce in part some of my previously published articles.

Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou: Is there a Relation Between Politics and Time?, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 30, no. 7, 2004, 799815.

Can Alain Badious Notion of Time Account for Political Events?, International Studies in Philosophy, vol. XXXVII/2, 2005, 114.

Part One

Introduction: time and politics

From its beginnings to its more recent incarnations, philosophy has sought to think through the nature of and the relationship between time and politics. For example, Platos political writings place a heavy emphasis on time, especially time eternal. The good society, that is, the good polis, will be fashioned and modelled according to the permanent and unchanging true nature of the eternal forms. Eternity plays two fundamental roles in Platos political vision. First, it is offered as the key to guaranteeing permanence and unchangeability, especially in light of the restless and relentlessly changing political world that Plato lived through a world marred by the abuse of the thirty tyrants, sophistic politicians (as opposed to men of politics) and the unjust execution of his teacher Socrates. Eternity, and the concomitant permanence and unchangeability that come with it, are seen as an alternative to the everyday politicking and scheming that, according to Plato, corrupted Athenian politics during his lifetime. Second, eternity, understood as infinite time, ensures the possibility that there would one day come a time when Platos prescriptions could come about. Plato writes,

Accordingly, if ever in the infinity of time, past or future, or even today in some foreign region far beyond our horizon, men of the highest gifts for philosophy are constrained to take charge of a commonwealth, we are ready to maintain that, then and there, the constitution we have described has been realised, or will be realised when once the philosophic muse becomes mistress of a state. For that might happen. Our plan is difficult we have admitted as much but not impossible.

Emerging French thought of the last decade or so is no stranger to the debates on the nature of and relationship between politics and time. This work will have as its focus an examination of recent developments in French thought as making significant contributions to the perennial philosophical problem of the nature of and relation between politics and time. Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou have devoted significant consideration to the problem of time and politics, especially in their more recent works.

This book tries to achieve two things. First, it makes a contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy as this is the first book, to my knowledge anyway, that tries to bring together in a scholarly way the more recent work on politics by Derrida and Badiou. The latter is slowly emerging as a central figure in French philosophy as well as in Anglo-American philosophy. With the recent publication (2006) of his Logiques des mondes {Logics of the World) Badiou has amplified and amended various claims made in his great opus Being and the Event. Derrida, prior to his death, was developing and expanding his idea of the democracy to come as a political expression of his decon-structive programme. Both thinkers have devoted a substantial amount of their oeuvre to politics and the question of the nature of the political. My work would be a first in that it will comprehensively show how the two philosophers political views diverge and converge, thereby providing a comprehensive exposition of their respective political systems.

Second, and most importantly, my work advances a theory about the relationship between political events and time that can account for both political undecidability and decidability. Both Badiou and Derrida give the event a central role in structuring politics and political thinking. For Badiou, events make politics possible and thinkable. They give both a decidable and intelligible structure to politics while still accounting for indeterminacy and multiplicity. Derrida, unlike Badiou, believes that events themselves are structured by the double bind of possibility and impossibility, radically calling into question the very naming of events or even giving them any definite or set meaning as does Badiou. I argue that Badiou can overcome the Derridean aporia of the double bind. Central in this overcoming is the notion of time as a subjective intervention. Derridean time as temporally and spatially differentiating cannot sufficiently account for the fidelity to and legacy of events as temporally rupturing despite Derridas claims to the contrary as proposed in his notion of heritage. Though Badiou can be employed to overcome Derridas political aporia, Badiou himself has to account for an appropriate or strategic pre-political time that allows him to formulate his view of time as a subjectivating intervention. I argue that an amplified and developed notion of the Greek idea of the