Deleuze: The Clamor of Being Book

This is an interesting, if rather troubling work of interpretation. Badiou here radically reinterprets Deleuze's philosophy as something very different than what Deleuze or his more traditional commentators had ever proclaimed it to be- a neo-idealist thought that radically reimagines, rather than rejects, Platonic idealism. Badiou openly does this so as to show that Deleuze, whether he knows it or not, is a problematic, if not utterly failing, neo-idealist. To Deleuze's deeply flawed idealism, Badiou contrasts his own, clearly superior, neo-Platonic philosophy.

Badiou anticipates that readers will find his Deleuze hard to recognize, and might object that his method is rather self-serving. He doesn't really apologize so much as to say that Deleuze has it coming. There is, perhaps, a degree of truth to this. Deleuze's interpretations of earlier, canonical philosophers are brilliantly inventive, but hardly slavishly loyal to the spirit of the authors he is discussing. Deleuze takes concepts introduced by earlier philosophers and rearranges and reinvents the philosophies he writes about, rather like a jazz musician improvising around and recreating a tune. It is true, and perhaps methodologically questionable, that Deleuze does not acknowledge his own creative process when discussing, for instance, Nietzsche but surreptitiously impregnates an old philosophy with his own.

Badiou's method is much more above board. Indeed, as always, I greatly enjoyed his challenging yet almost conversational writing style. Yet, if Deleuze shows through his writing the way that one system of thought almost subconsciously begets another, Badiou seems to me to be offering a problematic at best, perhaps intentionally distorted presentation of his subject- Deleuzean philosophy- just to show how Badiou better addressed questions that Deleuze denied even having an interest in.

Badiou claims that what he sees as Deleuze's many epigones underestimate the role of Deleuze's concept of the univocity, or oneness, of being in his oeuvre. Indeed, for Badiou, Deleuze's commitment to a renewed concept of oneness is the key to his thought. Everything, for Badiou's Deleuze (henceforth BD) is always already contained, in the One-All. That is to say that for BD being occurs the same way in all of its manifestations. Deleuze's "epigones" like, Badiou complains, to talk about their hero's supposed love of multiplicity, and Badiou of course acknowledges the important role of multiplicity in Deleuze's work. In fact, he sees the role of multiplicity in Deleuze's and his own works as being one of the main things that links the two thinkers. However, Badiou understands Deleuze's multiplicities as only expressions of the One. We beings are but momentary manifestations of Being. Multiplicity is of the order of simulacra- the world of beings.

Rather than the radically desiring subjectivity often ascribed to Deleuze, Badiou argues that thinking, in Deleuze's work, chooses its subject, not the other way around. Badiou will allow that for BD, one must, as in the work of Kierkegaard, choose to be chosen, accept the terrifying responsibility of thought that the One offers some beings. Indeed, rather than an ecstatic subjectivity, thought demands a rarified ability to overcome the self and submit to the process demanded by the machinations of the One-All. BD's concept of Being can be characterized as a double movement from the one to the All and from the All to the one. The philosophical intuition of Being is an adventure, a quest, in which one subjectively reproduces the movement of Being through this intuition. The results of this quest are the senses of meaning that collectively form the simulacra known as beings from the non-sense of Being.

As previously mentioned, one of the major ways that Badiou will criticize Deleuze's thought in this work, and make a contrast with his own, is in their extremely different attitudes towards Plato. Badiou correctly assesses that Deleuze assails Plato for denigrating simulacra to the ideal and its manifestation thereby establishing a hierarchy of being that would negate univocity. If Deleuze has indeed theorized a truly univocal sense of being, Badiou challenges, by what name should we refer to a One that contains all multiplicity? Much of Badiou's critique of Deleuze, or rather BD, shall hinge on Badiou's claim that one name can never suffice for the One. It requires, Badiou thinks, a name for the One, and another for the multiplicity(ies) that manifest it. Badiou will argue that Deleuze consistently uses pairs of names, although he tries to hide this both from himself and his readers by presenting his terminology as a set of binaries rather than double-names. Badiou goes on to examine such Deleuzean binaries as virtual/actual, time/truth, chance/ eternal return and fold/ outside.

The binary "virtual/ actual" is BD's primary double-name for Being. It is not surprising, then, that Badiou's discussion of it is where he makes his central critique of Deleuze, and where he contrasts Deleuze's work most specifically with his own. BD holds that univocity does away with the need for philosophical grounding in the Platonic sense. The One-All is such exactly because it grounds itself/ is groundless. It simply is, and it is everything.

Badiou holds that it is imperative for philosophy to rethink the meaning of grounding, as it is necessary to revisit and reconsider Plato. "Virtual/ actual", Badiou maintains, is a very ground-based concept, and one that is imperative to BD's univocity. It is only ground that can connect singular beings to the One, as formal manifestations of Being. Whether BD is willing to admit it or not, BD uses the virtual as the ground of the actual.

The virtual is the ground for problems to which actualities serve as solutions. The virtual grounds a double determination- that of a problem (Being) and a multiplicity of problems (beings). Deleuze maintains that the virtual and the actual must be thought as two parts of a whole, as "unequal halves that do not resemble one another." Deleuze also insists that the virtual and the actual are both merely images. But if the virtual is an image, Badiou complains, then it too is merely simulacrum. And, indeed, Deleuze simultaneously asserts that "the virtual is fully actual… one cannot discern the two parts [the virtual and the actual]..." The actual, then, is indiscernible as such. The actual cannot be grounded by the virtual, Badiou concludes, without the actual either becoming a meaningless blur or by the actual tearing itself away from the virtual, which would negate univocity.

To put it simply, Badiou is saying that Deleuze does in fact rely on philosophical grounding in a Platonic sense, but does so clumsily. Badiou makes the radical claim that Deleuze is in fact a neo-Platonist like himself, he just won't admit it. Both philosophers are trying to rethink and reaffirm the univocity of ground. The difference between them is that Deleuze prioritizes the virtual- the Idea as the totality of a virtual multiplicity. Badiou, on the other hand, affirms multiplicity, but negates the virtual. The ground of the multiple for Badiou is the empty set- the mathematical expression of nothingness.

Badiou then moves on to focus on the Deleuzean binary (double-name for the One) "time/truth". Deleuze claimed to have little use for the concept of truth, but Badiou is unconvinced. Badiou senses an alternative concept of truth at work in the philosophy of BD- that of the false. Truth, for BD, is the power of narration to manipulate time. The past, which is available to the present only as narrative, is the product of time, a process by which the actual gives way to the virtual. Time is the becoming virtual of the actual, the process by which the object takes its place in the One, the truth of the false, of narration.

For Badiou, this too reveals the secret Platonic core of BD's thinking. As with Plato, the Real is only such through its relation to the idea, the virtuality, that it manifests. Badiou, of course, has never denied his use for the concept of truth. And he uses BD's concept to illustrate his own. If for BD truth is the narrational power of memory, then for Badiou truth lies in the commencing power of forgetting. Truth, indeed, is commencement- the Event, which establishes a new world that cannot yet be described, and which reveals to the subject new possibilities.

Badiou's discussion of Deleuze's concept of eternal return is, to this reader, his least idiosyncratic and most faithful to a more traditional reading of Deleuze. As was established in the discussion of "time/truth", the true only becomes such through returning as the virtuality of memory. Eternal return is never the return of the same. The object returns as part of the One narrative, and narrative is never identical. It is constantly being reinterpreted and thus rewritten, transformed into something different. What returns is difference and this is the only truth.

Badiou's discussion of "fold/outside" relies primarily on an interpretation of Deleuze's book on Foucault and The Fold, neither of which I have read. Perhaps due to my ignorance of this part of Deleuze's oeuvre, I found this discussion the most interesting in the book. According to Badiou, Deleuze uses Foucault's thought to elaborate his own notion of thinking as a disjunctive synthesis- one in which the synthesized elements never meet up. For BD's Foucault (yes…) truth is always severed in two, divided into visibilities (which correlate fairly closely, it seems to me, to the concept that Deleuze refers to as the actual) and statements (which I read as roughly corresponding to Deleuze's concept of virtuality). Thinking requires, for BD, a plunging into the disjunction while maintaining a fidelity to univocity. The trick is to at once think over the disjunctive crevice and think of the crevice as such. BD takes the geographical metaphor so far as to say that one can, by tracing the fault lines of the crevice, see the trace of the original univocity of truth.

This is where the concept of the fold comes in. BD's fold is the process by which that which is external to being becomes internal. The fold is the act of thought tracing the fault lines between visibilities and statements, actuality and virtuality, and discovering the hidden connection, the univocity of truth. Through the fold that is thought, the disjunction becomes a modality of oneness.

Badiou cannot embrace the concept of the fold because he is committed to a philosophy that allows for radical transformation. The fold implies that thought can only serve as an apprehension of an established world. There is, for BD, only the one world and the one thought to capture univocity. What Badiou can embrace is the notion from Deleuze's book on Foucault that to think is to plunge into the void, the crevice in every truth. But the disjucture does not, for Badiou, reveal a hidden oneness but rather the site least defined by the state-of-things. It is where, Badiou hopes, the empty set that is for him the mathematical foundation of being can reveal itself and the transient nature of all worlds be revealed.

Badiou concludes by characterizing Deleuze as a pre-Socratic thinker- one for whom philosophy is a physics. (This is very strange as he has based most of his critique of Deleuze on the notion that he is an unintentional Platonist.) Plato, Badiou claims, freed philosophy from physics. He transformed philosophy into a meta-thought that does not have to refer to the already-there. Philosophy can therefore think towards a new world, if not a new physics.

My biggest reservation about Badiou's reading of Deleuze is how much stress he puts on the notion that the One-All cannot be named with one term. It seems to me that in Difference & Repetition Deleuze does offer a one-word name for univocity: difference. And difference can be this name precisely because Delezue, as he himself proclaims, is not an idealist. Univocity is, as I read Deleuze, closer to Althusser's materialist concept of the world as a totality of infinite contradiction than to a Platonic notion of a grounding idea. The world is one because there are no ones, no beings, only becomings of becoming. So Badiou's notion that univocity can only be described by referring to both Being and beings seems to me misplaced when discussing Deleuze. Somewhat ironically, I think the anti-communist Deleuze may have been more of an Althusserean materialist than Althusser's commie-hypothesizing heir, Badiou.

In his introduction, Badiou discusses how after putting their political differences aside, the two men corresponded before Deleuze's suicide. Deleuze told Badiou that he found his ideas interesting, but saw no correlation between their two philosophies. Badiou, by his own admission, barraged the older man with letters trying to convince him of the similarities between their projects. Shortly before taking his own life, Deleuze sent Badiou a letter basically saying, "Yeah, I guess you're right," which Badiou takes as a kind of validation. I always enjoy reading Badiou, and this book was no exception. But here I was left with this rather unphilosophical evaluation of Badiou: "What an asshole…"