Decades ago, Richard Pithouse and I were reading Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, and discussing his ideas with our comrades in Abahlali baseMjondolo. If you’re picking up a trace of Badiou’s set-theory-as-ethics in this quote by the organisation’s General Secretary – “Every human being, everywhere, must be counted as a human being” – then this might explain it. Thapelo Mohapi, who offered this counter to the xenophobia of South Africa’s Operation Dudula, wasn’t part of our original discussion group, joining Abahlali years after those first conversations. But the trace seems to persist.
If you were going to pick a Badiou text to fuel social movement discussions, Being and Event would probably be a poor choice (since you’re asking, Metapolitics is a much kinder introduction). B&E has pages like this:
So I was particularly excited when Rob Wallace announced an open series of discussions on his Farming and Event posts. It was a chance to learn from folk taking Badiou for a stroll in the Midwest. The conversation was terrific, as it always is around Rob. I’ll say a little less about that, since it’s not mine to share – keep an eye on Rob’s Patreon, and support him if you can.
But I can share my reflections on what I picked up. One of the problems I was trying to resolve through these workshops was how to reconcile Badiou’s animosity toward Spinoza. I’ve studied Spinoza for ages, and I’m a fan. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on Spinoza’s ecological thought, which was met by faint praise from an examiner who was baffled about why I wasn’t as interested as he was in G. E. Moore’s applicability to environmentalism. Oxford analytical philosophers don’t get out much, and that’s usually a good thing.
Badiou borrows Spinoza’s geometrical method, but doesn’t miss a chance to put the boot into Spinoza’s use of mathematical thinking. This is particularly galling given that recent philosophers have revisited Spinoza and returned with terrific radical analyses. Having meditated on Rob’s deeply thoughtful analysis, I realised that Badiou’s Spinoza is a useful figment of his imagination. True, Spinoza has to deploy God to patch a circularity in his argument, but that God is a very odd one. In general, Spinoza is not guilty of most of the philosophical crimes with which Badiou charges him.
And still Badiou’s caricature is helpful. For Badiou’s Spinoza, who thinks that the world is one unified substance, there’s no ‘outside’ through which rupture is possible – if all the world’s the same substance, how does one break with it? Badiou counters that, actually, rupture is where we all need to be, if we’re looking for a way to break with the bourgeois ideology that structures reality. If every stable situation is a “consistent presented multiple,” the operation that gives a multiple its consistency is the “count-as-one.” However, for a situation to be stable, there must be a second operation, the “state of the situation,” which counts not just the original elements but all the subsets of those elements. This second count secures the situation’s consistency, guarantees that every part belongs to the whole, and thereby forecloses the “void”—the local inconsistency proper to any situation. But it’s only in breaking that local consistency that we can find a broader equality.
Understanding this helped me get my arms around the ‘Being’ bit of ‘Being and Event’. In our South African use of Badiou, we found the Event stuff more useful, with its ideas of rupture, fidelity and equality. But having sat with the workshops and listening to Rob, I think I get why Badiou needed to ground the argument in (imagined) errors and mystifications of Spinoza’s geometrical practice, so that the call for rupture within Being can be understood more universally as a call for equality everywhere.
There’s much more to say about this. Rob’s first post is fascinating, and I’m very much looking forward to part 2.