Work-in-progress translation of Quentin Meillassoux, Histoire et événement chez Alain Badiou Intervention au séminaire « Marx au XXIe siècle : l’esprit & la lettre » Paris : 2 février 2008 [available
here] I welcome any suggestions. Relatedly, see
this post over at Poetix.
rue Gay-Lussac, May 1968
I would like to present before you the principal theoretical decisions of the philosophy of Alain Badiou concerning the themes of this day: history and event. I do not speak about Alain Badiou as a disciple, since I develop philosophical positions distinct from those of his own: but it seems important to me, if one seeks to enter into a conceptual contemporaneity with the Marxian and post-Marxist exigency of politics and of history, to adopt a view extensive with its system, constructed henceforth around two principal books which are Being and Event (EE) and The Logic of worlds (LM). This philosophy is particularly complex, but it seems to me that one can apprehend it precisely through the two concepts of history and event. I will in effect attempt to make explicit a nodal and apparently paradoxical thesis of Badiou's: namely that there is history only of the eternal, because only the eternal proceeds by way of the event. To put it differently: there is not history of truths, as any truth is strictly eternal, and impossible to reduce to an unspecified relativism.
Badiou thus refuses two antithetic positions: on the one hand that there would be eternal truths deprived for this reason of historicity - a position, say, characteristic of traditional metaphysics - and on the other hand that there would inversely not be any eternal truth, the entirety of discursive statements being irremediably inscribed in a historico-cultural context that strictly delimits the range of the particular instance that it supports. On the contrary, EE upholds that there exist many eternal truths, but that they are not unifiable within a metaphysical system, because they are distributed between the four procedures of truth which are science, art, politics, and love - philosophy itself not possessing the capacity to produce truths. But these truths, moreover, cannot exist in a Sky of Ideas: they are the result of an undecidable event and a fidelity of the subjects which attempt to investigate their world in its light. And LM will quite the reverse go on to say that any process deprived of truth is not historical in the true sense, but is reduced to a simple temporal modification without range for the truth and the subjects which adhere to it.
To elucidate the sense of these statements, we should preliminarily understand the two theses constitutive of a Badiousian philosophy:
1/ mathematics is ontology;
2/ any truth is post-evental.
We will then be able to measure and separate out the precise connection existing between the three principal terms of our intervention: history, event, eternity.
***
1/ The inaugural decision of EE relates to ontology and combines, in this regard, two theses: the affirmation, on the one hand, of its rational possibility (against Heidegger), and the refusal, on the other hand, that philosophy carries its burden (against dogmatic metaphysics). Because it is, from time immemorial, mathematics, and mathematics only, which constitutes, according to Badiou, the discourse of Being qua being. Consequently, ontology is identified with an unachievable science, evolving at the same rhythm as the most fundamental projections of the science which deploys it, and it does so without the knowledge even of the mathematicians. "Knowledge", because only the philosopher can release the ontological significance of mathematics - mathematicians being ontologists who are unaware of themselves as such. Thus the "metaontologic" role of philosophy whose challenge is to locate the place in which mathematics effectively manages to speak Being. Of this the "Platonic gesture" consists, mathématising and not poeticising, as far as Being is concerned for Badiou.
2 Ontology, for our time, is thus identified with set theory, in the sense that it is this theory which reveals to us that any mathematical entity can be thought as multiple. Being, in the most general sense, and most fundamental, is being a set, and therefore a multiplicity. From here arises Badiou's ontological theses: Being is multiplicity - and furthermore: nothing but multiplicity. In other words, Being is multiple with the strict exclusion of its opposite - namely the One. Being is therefore not a multiplicity composed of stable and ultimate parts, but a multiplicity made up in its turn of multiplicities. In effect, mathematical sets have for elements not units but other sets, and so on indefinitely. When a set is not empty, it is composed in its turn of sets of multiples.
Such a type of multiple that no law of the One stabilizes, Badiou names "inconsistent multiplicity", in opposition to consistent multiples, i.e. fixed unities. Being, far from identifiable with the stable base of a phenomenon which would be perishable in regard to it, is pure dissemination, withdrawn from our immediate experience of reality, where we discover on the contrary, in ordinary time, multiplicities of the consistent type (of the man-ones, the god-ones, the star-ones, etc). This is what, although a Platonism, Badiou would want, beyond the heritage of his Master, a Platonism of the pure multiple: ontology must, faced with the apparent consistency of situations, go back to the point the inconsistent being of multiplicities.
3 The second task of the philosopher, which is also more specific, consists then, since relieved of the obligation to think Being (as this is the task of the mathematician) to think instead its exception, that is to say the event - what arrives and not what is. The event is an exception to Being not in that it would not be multiple, but in that its multiplicity is ontologically proscribed, i.e. mathematically rejected, at least within the axiomatic standard of sets . The event for Badioiu is in effect a multiple pertaining to itself: a reflexive multiple of equal value to the number of its elements. However, from one of its axioms (the axiom known as foundation), set theory prohibits the existence of these multiples to which the mathematicians have nicely given the name of "extraordinary".
In what way does such a reflexive multiple adhere to the intuition that we can have of an event when we think by this term a pure sudden appearance, whether in art, politics, science, or in our love life? Art, science, politics and love are in effect what Badiou calls "procedures of truth", i.e. the four fields of thought which partake in the occurrence of true events - and by extension - eternal truths.
The example of politics is, as is often the case in the writings of Badiou, the most immediately accessible. What does one want to say to the Right, when one says that "May 68" was an event? By this expression, one does not indicate simply the set of facts which punctuated this collective sequence (student demonstrations, occupation of the Sorbonne, massive strikes, etc). Because such facts, even when joined together in an exhaustive way, do not make it possible to say that there was something like an event, rather than a simple conjunction of facts without specific significance. If "May 68" were an event, it is so precisely because it deserved its name: that is to say that in May 68, there was the occurrence not only of many facts, but equally the occurrence of May 68. In May 68, a site, in addition to its own elements (demonstrations, strikes, etc), presented itself. What are we to make of such a tautology, which characterizes any political event (in 1789, there was "1789", etc.) ? Precisely that an event is the taking place of a pure rupture, that nothing in the situation permits it as classifiable under an indexed fact (strike, demonstration, etc). Let us risk the following formula: an event is this multiple which, presenting itself, exhibits the inconsistency subtending situations, and throws into a panic, in the flash of an instant, constituted classifications. The novelty of an event rests in the fact that it interrupts the normal regime of description and knowledge, which always adheres to the accepted classifications, and imposes the requirement of another type of process by which it will be admitted that some thing, there, in this place, as yet unnamed, has well and truly passed.
It is that an event, in effect, could not concern scholarly discourse, being at the same time new and aberrant in regard to the laws of Being. An event is always undecidable in relation to knowledge, and can thus always be cancelled by those who believe only in the brute facts: is there political revolution, or merely the simple accumulation of disorders and crimes? An amorous encounter, or simple sexual desire? Pictorial innovation, or formless clusters and imposture? Etc. This undecidability of the event is given to traversing the fact that this one is always-already [toujours-déjà] disappeared the moment that it happens, and consequently implies the suspicion that nothing took place, save the mirage of an innovation. The fragile being of an event therefore leaves a trace that only a militant discourse - and not erudition - can prolong: the subject is thus the name of the operational fidelity to an evental trace, i.e. having wagered on the existence of an event, and having decided upon the drawing-out of its consequences. The question of a subject is: "if something indeed took place, how to construct for it a remaining fidelity?" : "how to paint, if cubism is a new form, and not an imposture?", "how to act, if 1789 is a revolution, and not a disorder?", "how to modify our lives within this two, if this encounter proceeds by way of love, and not a passing fancy?", etc.
Another example, given in EE, is that of the "French Revolution": if we seek to demonstrate the existence of this Revolution the same way in which we would try to exhibit an empirical fact, we will undoubtedly fail: because the Revolution is none of the facts which composes it - the General Meeting of States, storming of the Bastille, the Great Fear, etc. - and it is not more their meeting, since nothing in this ensemble imposes by itself the name of Révolution rather only chaos, disorder, or divine punishment. When Saint-Just affirms in 1794: "the Revolution is frozen", what do we say of it, in consequence? It does not speak about an objectively noted fact, but an event attested to not only by its site - the France of 1789 to 1794 - but also and especially by the militant nomination that was its product. Naming the Revolution the Revolution, this indeed affirms the sense that there is to remain a fidelity by way of hypothesis: hypothesis, wager, that something fundamental is in the process of being produced in the political field which is worth the difficulty of a being's fidelity, and inviting the release of what, within the situation, concerns an emancipating truth, in the process of elaboration, and that is opposed to all the forces of the old world.
The subject is thus the invention of a fidelity with what, perhaps, took place, in kind to partially produce, by a succession of finite operations, a truth whose Being is as far as he is concerned always infinite. Because a truth - as with everything that is - is a multiple, but a multiple that Badiou names "generic". This property characterizes a set from which the mathematical singularity escapes any possibility of classification by a continuation of linguistic predicates, even supposedly infinite. You are given an infinite "encyclopaedic" language, able to name and differentiate an infinity of properties: then there will exist for this language, affirms the ontologist (i.e. the mathematician), a multiple which this language cannot name, because it will be made of "a little bit of everything" says Badiou: of "A", but also of "not A" ("A" could thus not characterize it)"B", but also "not B", etc., and so on ad infinitum. A truth is such an infinite multiple, always to come and piercing a hole in knowledge, resulting from a fidelity concerned with the unlimited consequences of an event. Emancipated society, mathematized science, love subverting sexual difference by the invention of a new connection between man and woman, artistic discipline convoking the revolution of a form: such are the four types of truths - produced by the four procedures of politics, science, love, and art - susceptible to the production, always rare, of a subject capable of introducing an exception within the ordinary modes of knowledge, opinion, selfishness, and trouble.
We now understand in what way a truth, being the result of a patient series of local enquiries under the risky assumption of an undecidable event, cannot exist apart from the concrete history of subjects. But in what way can such truths be known at the same time as eternal, and as bearers of history, of the sole true history? It is that a truth carries with it consequences infinite in number: thus an ensemble of limitless lines of enquiries, likely to be prolonged during historical moments, and in profoundly different contexts. In other words, a truth is the bearer of theoretical gestures which compose between them a historicity at once deep and discontinuous. This is why an event always produces, in the minds of those who decide upon on a fidelity, a retrospective genealogy of precursors. The precursor, one knows, it is that which one knows afterwards as what arrived before. However, there does not exist an innovation which does not attempt to forge a historical thickness as far as the unknown quantity, by regrouping episodes of the thought previously dispersed in the common conscience, to make a line heralding its present. There is no truth, however new it is, which does not claim to achieve a thought already germinating about it in a past hitherto ignored, or misinterpreted. A Revolution, as Marx already knew, cannot occur without enveloping tattered rags of the past - politics being one of the major places where the new resumes again with ancestors defeated in their time, and whose torch shines again in the present configuration. But one would say as much of the scientific revolutions: Galileo claims to recapitulate the steps invented by Plato of stereometry against Aristotle's expelling of mathematics in favor of the physis, the inventors of the infinitesimal calculus plunge themselves feverishly into the rediscovered manuscripts of Archimedes, to attempt a revitalisation of their theoretical audacity, the pictorial revolution of the 15th century thinks itself like a Renaissance of the aesthetic exigencies of Greece, etc.
This is why the truths are eternal and historical, eternal because historical: they insist within history, suturing [nouent] temporal segments across the centuries, unfolding always more profoundly the infinity of their potential consequences, traversed by captivated subjects, separated sometimes by extraordinarily remote epochs, but all equally paralysed by the urgency of an eventality which illuminates their present. Truths, because eternal, reappear, but because they are infinite, do not reappear in the form of a simple sterile repetition: on the contrary, it is to excavate in a revolutionary fashion each one with their reactivation. They do not reappear within history, interrupting the becoming of their identities recommencement: it is they on the contrary that make history itself reappear with their reactivation, utilizing through an intervention into the monotonous string of work and days, ordinary oppressions and current opinions, their power of inexhaustible innovation. It is such a segmented history which is opposed to the simple passage of time without signification from which are woven its pointless hours and empty times, which do not deserve manifestly for Badiou the name of history in the true sense.
But if we want to give a rigorous form to this intuition of historico-eternal truths, it is necessary for us to now turn to the second volume of EE entitled LM. Because it is in this second work, published in 2006, that Badiou thinks in depth the concept of world, i.e. of truths and their context of appearance. LM will thus enable us to think connection between a truth therefore posed like an immutable inconsistency of the multiple, and the extraordinarily varied historico-cultural contexts in which the same truth can be revealed to these subjects that are separated by an elsewhere.
The Logic of Worlds
Let us begin by exposing the general direction of the work of 2006.
Which principal objectives respond as an extension of Being and Event, through to The Logic of Worlds? The preface of the work releases two in particular.
The prime objective is to adjoin to a theory of Being , a theory of appearance. It acts in effect, for Badiou, as the confrontation of a problem left in suspense in EE, namely: how is it that Being - pure inconsistent multiplicity - somehow manages to appear as a consistent world? The ontological multiples in themselves are deprived of the order manifested for us in the empirically given: they are only multiples composed in their turn of multiples. A building is a multiple of bricks, which in turn are a multiple of molecules, made of a multiplicity of atoms, themselves decomposable into a multiplicity of quarks - and so on to infinity, since the ontology of Badiou does not hold to the data of current physics - to make of any entity a pure multiple in which no fundamental unit is ever encountered. It is always the count which introduces the One: a house, a brick, a molecule are one because they are counted for one. But this introduction of the One by the count is done setting off from a being in which thought never meets anything other than multiplicities without end. The problem is then to understand why Being is all the same not presented through any such inconsistent multiplicity: because there are many things which come to us through bonds intrinsic between them in the given, as stable units on which we are able to construct a background: material objects, communities, institutions, bodies. These units are not provided in their entirety by an arbitrary act of the subject who brackets them by exterior unity in the count, it really governs if not Being then at least its appearance, its sensible donation.
Consequently, a question of the transcendantal type arises: how in the order of appearance is it possible if these do not proceed by way of Being taken in itself? But if the question raised by Badiou is transcendental, the proposed treatment could not be Kantian. Because Kant's response to the fact of phenomenal order consists in the exhibition of a priori forms of a constituent subject. However, in the writings of Badiou, inasmuch as they are materialist, the subject is never constituent, but constituted. As one saw, the subject is rare, generally nonindividual (the political subject can be a party, a revolutionary army, the subject in love is a couple, etc.); it is sequential (it is finished in time), and it always depends on the taking-place of an event which it cannot itself produce.
If in appearing it can have consistency, this can thus result only from an asubjective order, which is at once in connection with being - since it is always being which appears - and all the same distinct from it - since its order does not itself result from multiple-being. It is thus a question of thinking the singularity of its appearing with respect to being, and of thinking the bond, in spite of everything, of the latter to the former. However, consistency appears according to extremely varied logics, contrary to an ontology subjected to only traditional logic. Indeed, the theory of sets is the regime of all or nothing. In the ontology of the multiple, it is one of two things: either a set A is an element of a set B, or else it is not: the thesis is either true or false, and there is not a third option - tertio non datur. But appearance is far from always obeying the law of the excluded third: the many colored thickness of the given imposes on us balanced judgements, "more or less" true, with complex degrees of probability, all that faces realities escaping a strict disjunction from affirmation and negation. In short, the given constrains us to associate with a mathematics of being a logic of appearance able render intelligible the diverse consistencies revealed in our experience.
It is thus necessary to mobilize a logic likely to "capture" the innumerable modes of possible appearances for being and give some sort of pliability and nuance to visible things. But seeing as how such appearance will always appear as being, this logic will be a mathematized logic, a logic penetrating mathematical procedures: and much like the theory of categories introduced by LM, a mathematical logic able to theorize innumerable classical or non-classical universes. The technical aspect of these logics is much too complex to be exposed here. But it is important to have in mind the idea which governs the installation of these formalisms: Being in itself is immutable being - as inconsistent multiples - appearing in a large number of distinct worlds which for them are governed by very diverse logics. By "world", one can say that Badiou intends a context in the most general sense: a world, it can be one period, one moment of artistic history (dodecaphony), a battle, a culture, etc. The worlds can thus be successive in time as well, as synchronic, and it is the same being that can appear in a thousand manners, in a thousand different worlds at the same time. The central question of LM will then be to show how a truth appears in a world and in particular how the same truth - transhistoric, transworldly, all things considered eternal - can appear in distinct worlds. This appearance of a truth in a world, Badiou names a subject-body: the mode of appearance in a given world of a subject developing its fidelity with the trace of an event.
The second objective of LM consists in being opposed to a dominant paradigm of contemporary thought: "democratic materialism". Democratic materialism can be summarized by the following statement: "There are only bodies and languages". A decision that returns within much post-Deleuzean vitalist philosophies, as with postmodernity, with their attendant historical and linguistic relativism. Badiou, substantially, takes aim at any kind of linguistic relativism, cultural or historical: any belief that there is no truth likely to traverse the particularity of a period, a milieu, is but linguistic play. Democratic materialism, he says in this sense, is the only true historical materialism. This is certainly why there exist many exceptions to history in the writings of Badiou: "History (with a grand H) does not exist" a twice written reprisal, the first time in Theory of the Subject, notably to challenge a totalizing Hegelian history - even Marxist-Hegelian - and a second time in LM to essentially challenge the absorption of eternal truths in a contemporary historical relativism.
To this democratic materialism, Badiou opposes a syntagm which he says itself "returned from the dead" - that is to say "dialectical materialism" ( which is distinct, however, from the old Marxist "materialist dialectic"). His materialism can be called "dialectical" in the following way: in that it exceeds a duality - that of the bodies and languages of democratic materialism - by a third which some exclude, that is to say: "There are only bodies and languages, but also truths". These truths, that Badiou always names "eternal", are certainly made only of body and languages, but the infinite being of a truth is always in excess - although the relativists dissent, saying that existence is a perishable material by which the visible is given. Because the worldly, historico-cultural context in which these truths appear, and which is in effect related to the languages and the cultures of their times, cannot begin to be trans-historical, as Badiou illustrates, in the foreword of LM through the close analysis of several examples, in the four procedures of truth.
To counter the historical relativism induced by democratic materialism, and its refusal of any hierarchy of ideas, one can in effect look to what exists as invariant within disparate worlds.
Let us take the mathematical example, a very seminal procedure of thought for Badiou. That is to say the arithmetic theorem which states, in contemporary terms, that there are an infinity of prime numbers. It is known that Euclid had already demonstrated this theorem in the Elements, and one could thus deduce from this the restlessness of an eternal truth, intangible and unchanged by history, as true for a Greek as for a contemporary, and concealing the same kernel of significance for one as for the other. But the partisan of historical relativism, as self-styled "anthropologist of cultures" will underline our naivety, making apparent that the equivalence of two statements, present in two different cultural worlds, do not have a common truth - which already revealed by a difference in their formulation. Euclid, indeed, could not demonstrate the infinity of the prime numbers, since infinite arithmetic did not have any meaning for a Greek. It simply demonstrated that prime numbers were always higher in quantity than a given (finite) quantity of prime numbers. Other differences in formulation will end up convincing our relativist that the two statements support an incommensurable truth.
Badiou retorts that this naive illusion is on the side of the anthropologist, and not of the mathematician. Because the Greeks had discovered, via this theorem, a truth essential for number. The demonstration of Euclide, in effect, proceeds as a demonstration that any whole number is decomposable into prime factors. But Badiou insists that this truth always governs contemporary mathematics, in particular modern abstract algebra. This covers, in a given operational domain, the definition of operations similar to those of addition or multiplication, but also proceeds to break up its "objects" into primitive objects, in the same way that a number is always decomposable into prime numbers. There is thus, across the centuries and cultural and anthropological worlds, these truths which, though eternal, are not fixed but produce the sole authentic history: that of fertile theoretical gestures, always recommencing in diverse contexts, with the same fidelity, and yet at the same time the results of innovators.
Let us take another example, which this time will show how the subject-body [corps-sujet] functions and that which Badiou names the resurrection of a truth.
It still concerns a political example, that of the revolt of a handful of gladiators around Spartacus, analyzed on several occasions in LM. One knows that following this revolt, the slaves composed bodies in great number around a primary insurgence, instead of being dispersed according to the will of their owners. Badiou sets down that the trace of the event-revolt, that to which the insurrectionists dedicate their fidelity, holds in a simple statement, namely: "We, slaves, we want to return to our home." The slaves coming together in an army constituted from that moment on a new type of body-subject related to the production of a new present, characterized by what the event suddenly made foreseeable as distinctly possible: even now, to cease being slaves, and to return home. This body-subject is the appearance of a true subject within the world of Roman enslavement a century before Christ. And this subject is not an individual, but an army: a particular body, a collective, dedicated to an uncertain event - the capacity at this time of these slaves to cease being slaves in their present, and to behave as liberated men, Masters of their fate.
The consequent fidelity of this subjectivé body is that the army implemented by Spartacus is then deployed within time, according to a succession of decisive alternatives that Badiou names points. By the term points, it is necessary to understand that what confronts the global situation are choices or an engaged "yes" and "no": "Is it necessary to go towards the south, or to attack Rome?", "Is it necessary to face the legions, or to be concealed?", etc. The organization, the deliberation, and the discipline which will aid the body-army in treating the situation point by point constitutes the true becoming-subject of this body, its capacity to produce the yes or no of a new present issuing from the evental trace. This body, it should be added, is always organized, i.e. articulated in differentiated bodies ready to specifically address such and such a point of the situation: thus the military detachments directed by Spartacus for opposition to the Roman cavalry. That the subjectivé body is organized means as well as this body is essentially "cleaved", "erased" - i.e. it is never completely adapted to the effective situation. It is divided into an organ appropriate to the negotiated point, and "a vast inert component". Vis-a-vis the Roman cavalry, this unadapted component will - opposed to the body of disciplined gladiators - constitute the disorder of the group induced by the cosmopolitanism of the slaves, the women, the rivalry of the chiefs, etc. But this last component will reveal on the contrary the ferment of a new egalitarian organization, deliberative of sides, facing the elitist arrogance of the gladiators.
The form of the subject's fidelity thus consists of the subordination of a cleaved body to the trace of an event by which is constituted, point by point, a new present.
The subject called "reactive" is of such a kind of enslavement that this time, not daring to revolt, resists the innovation of the event, not only under the terms of the old inertia but above all by the creation of "arguments of resistance adjusted to the innovation itself.". Because there are many things that Badiou calls "reactionary innovations" producing original intellectual dispositifs, the only object of which is to support the refusal of a present fidelity. Lastly, the obscure subject is that which, such as the patrician of ancient Rome, aims at the pure and simple abolition of the new present. The obscure subject always has recourse to the invocation of a Body transcendent and pure, a full, ahistorical Body (City, God, Race), whose only end, by the mobilization of its phantasm, is to destroy the real body - the cleaved body issuing from the emancipating event.
Thus, one sees taking shape what Badiou nominates as the three possible "destinations" of the subject: the faithful subject organizes the production of the evental present, the reactive subject, its refusal, the obscure subject its occultation.
But there is finally a last destination of the subject, a fourth destination, which consists in organizing the resurrection of the evental present: whether it is Toussaint-Louverture, leader of the revolt of the black slaves of Santo Domingo and nicknamed "black Spartacus", or whether Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, leaders of the Spartakist Revolution, the Spartacus-event does not cease reappearing, by way of eternal truth, in different worlds, according to radically distinct contexts, and yet always as this same statement that servitude has ceased which affirms in a present the time of a fidelity. In other words, even as the theoretical gesture of Euclid or Archimedes can reappear in a fecund way, across the distance of centuries, even as the fights carried out by vague men, finally defeated and even crushed by overpowering Empires, see their struggles honoured with a name - which is theirs, Spartacus - and so much that the name becomes common to any slave, by others revolting over the distance of millenia. [At the end of a film by Kubrik, based on a novel by Howard Fast: once the slaves have been defeated, every participant in the revolt responds to the Roman legionnaire asking for Spartacus: "I am Spartacus". It appropriates for a present - a present now eternal - a proper name which is now the generic name of any slave involved in struggle.]
It is finally necessary to underline the major characteristic of an events emergence in a world: the maximal appearance of the inexistant of a situation. There is indeed a whole gradation of eventality in LM, a whole hierarchy of the emergence of novelty in a world. An event in the strongest sense is given the name of singularity by Badiou: and a singularity, as I said, has as its proper criterion the appearance in an intensive mode of what until that point - though in its being it was already present - was invisible in the situation. Therefore let us try to clarify this characteristic of the event, and its enigmatic property: the blinding present of its inexistant.
To understand this point, it is necessary for us to start by clearly distinguishing being and existence in Badiou.
Let us initially attempt to apprehend the bond between the being of a multiple, and its appearance. The multiple-being of a being is that which, to him, is eternally actual and motionless, without variation. It is important to underline that for Badiou, Being is static: these are multiples always disseminated infinitely, seized in their immutable nature by this science of the motionless that is mathematics, the true ontology. It is such an eternal inconsistency of being which in some way rises to the surface with the event, along with its capacity to upset classifications and the well ordered consistent distinctions of ordinary knowledge. Appearing, on the other hand, is what, as diffracted in an infinity of aspects and fragile conjunctions, does not cease multiplying in the diversity of worlds where it is locally ascertainable. The same being (identical by way of its multiple-being) can thus appear in different multiple worlds in very different and likewise fragile manners.
For example: the ordinals, immutable in respect to their mathematical being, can appear in the world in manners as different as the pagination from a book, a percentage of vote, the metric line of verse, etc. In each case, we are dealing with the immutability of number, but number assumes a greater or lesser importance according to the situations: crucial in the vote, anecdotic in the pagination of a novel. The being of number is immutable, and its appearance, like its intensity, is variable. In the same fashion, the same man will appear in a different way in his professional environment, his musical passion, or among his personal relations. To the immutable analysis of its ontological being (a multiple is composed of its elements, always the same) is juxtaposed the local analysis of its being in distinct worlds.
Badiou names existence the intensity of appearance of a being in a world. As I said, the specificity of existence consists in what, contrary to being, it admits of infinite variations from one world to another. The same multiple will be able to exist maximally in one world and very faintly in another, where it will be as if effaced. By this, Badiou captures the fact that the same being exists in a more or less intense way according to the contexts in which it appears. One will say as well that the syllabic number, very present in an Alexandrine poem, is very far from present (though nevertheless always there) in a free verse poem; or, of a person, who is radiant among their colleagues, is as if "effaced" when seen with family.
Thus, Badiou tries to show that an innovation is not so much the creation from nothing of a novel being, but, starting from an event which throws our ordinary knowledge into a panic, is the imminent arrival of an intense something already-there, but whose existence, in appearing, was profoundly denied by the situation. This is the case with the slaves, where their humanity is denied by societal enslavement, denied to the point of making them mere men with speaking instruments, or bipedal oxen, and who suddenly appear alongside Spartacus with dazzling intensity, in the heart of a historical situation which until then included them without perceiving them. The slaves were there, or it could almost be said since always - always being that of the ancient Mediterranean societies - but their constant being was given a place of only minimal appearance: the slaves are but do not exist, until their revolts recommence again in the century before Christ, and which culminates in years 73 to 71 before sinking back into the night. Here/there is are what signifies: to make appear maximally the inexistent characteristic of a situation.
Badiou gives another example: that of the Parisian proletariat during the Commune. Let us conclude with this examination, which will permit us to expose his typology of the different types of eventalities.
In Book V of LM, Badiou in effect details the way in which a composition of appearance inherently changes with the emergence of a truth in a world. In EE, Badiou was satisfied with an ontological characterization of the event through the reflexive multiple. This time three types of eventality will be distinguished using a (phenomeno-)logical description of their appearance: the occurence, the weak singularity, and the strong singularity.
It is then neccessary to initially distinguish evental changes from simple temporal modifications which are, for them, subjected to the laws of appearance. Thus, to describe the varying degrees of identity between appearing in a public demonstration does not amount to its merely restoring an image fixed at a given moment, but implies as well a detailed account of the temporal variations of these degrees in time, of the initial reassembling of the demonstrators and their final dispersion. There is no event in this type of change, which is not the introduction of a reflexive multiple. A world without any event is not a fixed world, but a world which follows the ordinary course of things and their modification.
The first type of evental change, which is of weaker range, is the occurrence. This one is an event of which the appearance in a world is of low intensity, and whose consequences in this world will be derisory, even null. Badiou acknowledges, in the same way, the triumphal declaration over the central Committee of the Commune on the very day of its crushing by Versailles. It is a true historical event, but without any consequence nor continuation: an event at the threshold of its abolition affirms its will-have-taken-place without which there would be nothing for what immediately follows, save its repression of itself. In opposition to occurrences, the strong singularity is an event of maximum intensity, that brings to existence a non-existent characteristic of the site which supports the event. Let us always take the example of the Commune, as an evental production in the world: "Paris after the Franco-Purssian war". On March 18, 1870, when the people of Paris prevent the government from seizing the guns of the national Guard, along with the act of fleeing the City, on that day arises from the workmen and the socialist militants the political capacity to exert power by themselves. There is then the proper inexistent of the site which supports the event: the "day of March 18", that is to say the workers political capacity, existing then maximally in the consequences of the founding act of 1870. Consequences which will irrigate the struggles of revolutionaries for a century. Lastly, between the two, the weak singularities are events whose range is intermediate: such, according to Badiou, is the foundation of the Third Republic, turning upon a real popular movement, but rapidly confiscated by the politicians as already attested by the time, and which therefore does not reveal the inexistent peculiarity (the political capacity of workers) of the object-site.
All things considered, the differing evental intensities are discriminated by their capacity, within the various procedures of truth, to make a being shine which until that point was constrained and inexisted and that, once it has maximally appeared, forces us to retrospectively reconsider the entire history of its predecessors: the slave, the proletarian, are today according to Badiou the workers without-papers [sans-papiers] (only named "without-papers" in the media, as a way of obliterating their condition as workers, and to make of them potential delinquents) - these are the political invisibles who, at the moment when they are deployed at the outposts of history, entirely reconfigure its logic with the eyes of contemporaries, and contribute in giving a new aspect to the present as well as the past, repainting them with the colors of their struggle. But one would say as much of art, love or science, whose innovations are often rediscoveries of what, without being an entirely absent characteristic, existed only minimally until their maximum appearance in the event of an avant-garde, a discovery, or an encounter.
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In conclusion, one can wonder about the disconcerting bond between the Badiousian conception of a truth and the Christian conception of the Incarnation. In EE, meditation 21 devoted to Pascal opens on thought 776 (éd. Lafuma): "The history of the Church must properly be called the history of truth". And in fact, one can say that Badiou accords to Pascal to have seized, and with him Pauline Christianity, to which was expressly devoted a book, that which one could call the "genuine proceedings of the truth". Because if Christianity is founded on a fable, according to Badiou, its force comes from having seized if not its contents then at least the real form of any truth: it proceeds by way of a event not demonstrable by a constituted knowledge - the divinity of Christ - of which one would know more than the trace - the testimony of apostles, of evangelists, etc., but its being is already abolished, crucified, and even its body has already disappeared, while the belief starts to emerge that it will have taken place. And the Christian truth is the ensemble of enquiries of fidelities, i.e. their intervention in the Palestinian situation, then Middle-Eastern and Roman, in the light of their having held the place of Christianity. Lastly, universal history, for the Christians, is nothing other than the ensemble of enquiries of the Church-subject over the course of centuries, made of schisms and heresies, therefore of research into the formula and action of a fidelity to the absolute event of man's divine creation. Out the Church, not of history, and not of hello, only the monotonous chaos of passions and perditions.
Badiou is thus here in extreme fidelity... - with the structure, if not the contents - of Christian eschatology. It is by no means the denial of this dream, as it is he who makes of Paul the "founder of universalism": that which seized the first militant nature, and not the erudition, of truth. In this sense it without doubt represents one of the possible evolutions of Marxism, shared since the beginning between critical thought and revolutionary eschatology. A great part of the ex-Marxists renounced eschatology, considering that it was effectively religious residue, a principal source among the promethean disasters of real socialism. The singularity of Badiou seems on the contrary to consist of this: that he isolates from Marxism its eschatologic share, separates it from its pretension, that he considers economic scientificity illusory, and delivers it, burning, on the disseminated subjects of all kinds of struggles, political as well as amorous. With the place of the religious illusion of eschatology dissolved by criticism in the writings of Badiou, eschatology becomes irreligious so that the event can deploy its critical power on the colorless present of our ordinary renouncements.
