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Anti-Badiou: The Introduction of Maoism Into Philosophy
This compelling and highly original book represents a confrontation between two of the most radical thinkers at work in France Alain Badiou and the author, François Laruelle.At face value, the two have much in both espouse a position of absolute immanence; both argue that philosophy is conditioned by science; and both command a pluralism of thought. Anti-Badiou relates the parallel stories of Badiou's Maoist 'ontology of the void' and Laruelle's own performative practice of 'non-philosophy' and explains why the two are in fact radically different. Badiou's entire project aims to re-educate philosophy through one mathematics. Laruelle carefully examines Badiou's Being and Event and shows how Badiou has created a new aristocracy that crowns his own philosophy as the master of an entire theoretical universe. In turn, Laruelle explains the contrast with his own non-philosophy as a true democracy of thought that breaks philosophy's continual enthrall with mathematics and instead opens up a myriad of 'non-standard' places where thinking can be found and practised.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
3 people are currently reading
214 people want to read
About the author
François Laruelle
66 books77 followersFrançois Laruelle was a French philosopher, of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle began publishing in the early 1970s and had around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle was notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. Until his death, he directed an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.
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May 17, 2015
François Laruelle published ANTI-BADIOU in 2011, discussing Badiou’s philosophy from the point of view of his own “non-philosophy”. My hypothesis is that this book, published in 2011, can properly be understood as belonging with the initial responses to BEING AND EVENT (1988) published in the immediately succeeding years by Rancière, Desanti, Lyotard, and culminating in Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (1991).
The book functions as a time machine back to that period in that, though it was published over 20 years later, it does not take into account Badiou’s evolution since that time. In the intervening period Badiou undertook an immense work of extension, reformulation, and conceptual invention culminating in LOGICS OF WORLDS. During that period Badiou elaborated a theorisation of “antiphilosophy” in his seminars from 1992 to 1996, treating successively Nietzsche (1992-93), Wittgenstein (1993-94), Lacan (1994-95), and Saint Paul (1995-96).
None of this development is taken into account in Laruelle’s book. Yet, as Badiou’s recent book MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR RÉEL shows, this engagement with “anti-philosophy” has always been central to Badiou’s project and continues to be so today. These considerations are essential to his work in view of a third volume of BEING AND EVENT on subjectivation, whose tentative title is THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS.
The book traces a conceptual portrait of a Badiou that is more an artefact of Laruelle's method than a faithful image. The subtitle ("The Introduction of Maoism Into Philosophy") provides the framing metaphor of the whole book, one whose whose conceptual content and utility is quite low. The analysis is a philo-fiction, replacing Badiou with a character that resembles him more or less, depending on the mood and the affiliation of the reader.
An important contribution of the book is its critique of the principle of mathematical sufficiency, i.e. of the attribution of a foundational role to mathematical formalisation for the conduct of philosophy. Against this, Laruelle opposes a qualitative use of ideas taken from quantum physics. One can imagine that someone will propose a new formalisation for philosophy that takes into account Laruelle's ideas.
My conclusion is that we need both Laruelle and Badiou as two sides of the same coin. This is in accord with my more general conviction that a qualitative approach and a formalised approach are complementary, each serving as heuristic inspiration for the other.
The book functions as a time machine back to that period in that, though it was published over 20 years later, it does not take into account Badiou’s evolution since that time. In the intervening period Badiou undertook an immense work of extension, reformulation, and conceptual invention culminating in LOGICS OF WORLDS. During that period Badiou elaborated a theorisation of “antiphilosophy” in his seminars from 1992 to 1996, treating successively Nietzsche (1992-93), Wittgenstein (1993-94), Lacan (1994-95), and Saint Paul (1995-96).
None of this development is taken into account in Laruelle’s book. Yet, as Badiou’s recent book MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR RÉEL shows, this engagement with “anti-philosophy” has always been central to Badiou’s project and continues to be so today. These considerations are essential to his work in view of a third volume of BEING AND EVENT on subjectivation, whose tentative title is THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS.
The book traces a conceptual portrait of a Badiou that is more an artefact of Laruelle's method than a faithful image. The subtitle ("The Introduction of Maoism Into Philosophy") provides the framing metaphor of the whole book, one whose whose conceptual content and utility is quite low. The analysis is a philo-fiction, replacing Badiou with a character that resembles him more or less, depending on the mood and the affiliation of the reader.
An important contribution of the book is its critique of the principle of mathematical sufficiency, i.e. of the attribution of a foundational role to mathematical formalisation for the conduct of philosophy. Against this, Laruelle opposes a qualitative use of ideas taken from quantum physics. One can imagine that someone will propose a new formalisation for philosophy that takes into account Laruelle's ideas.
My conclusion is that we need both Laruelle and Badiou as two sides of the same coin. This is in accord with my more general conviction that a qualitative approach and a formalised approach are complementary, each serving as heuristic inspiration for the other.
May 20, 2024
François Laruelle hints at more than “a little ad hominem” by his title Anti-Badiou (2011). The prefix “anti-” names “a defensive ultimatum” aimed at the philosophy of Alain Badiou (Laruelle, page xxxi). Accused of making philosophy lazy, Badiou provides new clothes for Maoism “at home in the French context,” and only manifest as “a style” (Laruelle, page xiv). Laruelle interprets Badiou’s Maoism to mean: “The entire system, in its “metaphysical” depths, in its ultimate axioms, can be read as a manifesto of terror or of “cultural revolution” in philosophy.” (xiii)
“For here, the Cultural Revolution is no “circumstantial” topic for intellectual debate, but a theoretical model that can be read transparently even in Badiou’s most theoretical program. Up until Badiou, philosophy was educative and pedagogical; with him, it is re-educated by mathematics. And rather than an invention, re-education is a particular type of repetition” (Anti-Badiou, page x).
Laruelle diagnoses in Badiou “his intention is to “re-educate” philosophy” (page xvii). In the same preface, Laurelle goes as far as to identify “here the cult of personality becomes the cult of master-philosophers” and: “in Badiou we find the old conjunction of three cults: that of personality (a philosopher of stellar rarity), that of the labor of the masses (as intellectual workers), and that of militant struggle (in the name of truth).” (Laruelle, page xiv)
Badiou is specifically determined by the suture “Plato-Mao.” The quilting point or suture consists in the transference. In Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts, the analytic situation is established, yet unraveled, by the transference. Every transference has the effect of “constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other.” (McGowan 2013, page 46) The psychoanalytic transference both constitutes and limits the subject at the point of negative impossibility. As a limit, the suture is always impossible.
The impossible quilting point seems to be threefold in the philosophy of Badiou. Laruelle considers Badouist philosophy in terms of the Plato-Mao transference, with mathematics for “the condition of communism, with the authoritarian Platonist model finding a new lease of life in Maoism.” (viii)
For Laruelle, Badiou is not unique because “the philosopher of mathematics remains a philosopher, and not a mathematician.” By remaining a philosopher, Badiou is not yet a communist. In him, “there is also no chance of exceeding the limits of philosophy. With Badiou, philosophy remains well within the bounds” except “French rather than Anglo-Saxon” (Laruelle, page viii).
According to Laruelle, the philosophy of Badiou hinges on an undetermined appeal to history. If not to save philosophy, at least for the sake of history, Laruelle recommends his own anti-philosophy. For a non- or even anti-philosophical theory of philosophy, there are severe ramifications.
Philosophy “immobilizes” (Anti-Badiou, page ix). Laurelle specifically means:
“immobilization by way of history (as obligatory as ever, if often denied) is consummated, paradoxically, in a philosophy “without history” (Althusser and Badiou). A philosophy that ends up as a lazy queen, who hitches her carriage up to a pack of scientists” (Laruelle, page ix).
Although immobilized, there is philosophy, and she is a girl boss. Moreover, she is a gatekeeper, “safeguarding the correct image of thought--a project that some would not hesitate to call a bootcamp.” (xi) The image seems to dial in the Badiouist idea that “re-education is a political action carried out upon philosophy itself.” (Laruelle, page x)
There is a resemblance to an earlier concept of theoretical training conceived by a group of students of Louis Althusser (Concept and Form, Verso Books). What is the practice of an Althusserian-Maoist philosophy of science? According to Peter Hallward (2012), the structuralist tendency aimed at “the defence of rationalism and science” (Hallward, page 10). Major theorists like Althusser and his student Michel Foucault each aspired to repudiate
“the view that science proceeds as some sort of gradual, cumulative clarification of ordinary experience or ‘common knowledge,’ coloured as these are by all sorts of prejudice, affective association and unconscious investment.” (Hallward, page 10)
Structuralists risked scientism and overly mathematical rationalism against empiricism. Whether Marxist or psychoanalytic, specific to structuralism was “a refutation of all liberal or humanist politics” for the reason “that such politics are derived from reciprocity, and they search indefinitely for that object that might come to fill in what they conceive as human ‘dissatisfaction’ [...]” (Hallward, page 76)
An ideology of lack was the unflattering name for the effect of universalizing lack to all subjects. The structure of subjectivity forms around an absent point, or essential lacking, which no other, nor commodity, ever fills, except temporarily or by imagination. Hence, the repetition of loss by which subjects move on from one object to the next, to mourn an original absence.
“No relationship between a subject and another subject, or between a subject and an object, fills the lack, except by an imaginary formation that sutures it; the lack persists inside the subject” (Hallward, page 76).
The concept of the weak subject (from Yves Duroux) links the category of Theory (from Althusser) with a sense of analysis (from Lacan). “Analysis was the grasping of this utopian point, the deployment of the structure in order, let’s say, to open a place for action on the structure” (Duroux, page 191).
The weak subject results “once alienation is defined as constitutive of the subjected subject” (Hallward, page 77). For a strong structuralism: “subjectivity will figure not as regent but as subjected [sujette].” (page 74) In French, the feminine connotation is deliberate. The concept of ‘man’ for humanism mainly constituted an obstacle to knowledge. Rather than an empirical certainty, man was mythological. The disappearance of man was an earlier, structuralist theme from Michel Foucault:
“We admire Sartre’s courage, Foucault explained in the spring of 1966, but ‘our present task is to liberate ourselves definitively from humanism’ and to embrace our own passion, ‘the passion of the concept.’ Althusser made the point more vigorously: ‘it is impossible to know anything about men except on the absolute precondition that the philosophical myth of man is reduced to ashes’ [For Marx, 230]” (Hallward, page 6).
The reference to Sartre is not surprising since his phenomenology rivaled the early movement of structuralism. “Claude Lévi-Strauss anticipated the broader shift in priorities when he rejected the ‘continuity between experience and reality’ assumed by phenomenology, concluding that ‘to reach reality we must first repudiate experience.’ His assault on Sartre’s Critique also marked a watershed” (Hallward, page 6). Structuralism appealed to science and repudiated empiricism, the theory of knowledge derived from direct experience.
“Experience is ‘opinionated’ and deluded by definition, and science cannot proceed as the refinement of delusion or non-knowledge as such. Science can only begin with a principled break with experience and ‘sensory knowledge’, a rupture épistémologique that enables a rational, self-rectifying explanation of problems that are not given in or even accessible to lived experience, however ‘intimate’ or ‘authentic’” (Hallward, page 11).
Althusser divides new, scientific knowledge from its pre-scientific past or non-knowledge (ideology). Only later does Althusser self-criticize for his theory of the epistemological break between science and pre-scientific origins. The divide becomes increasingly difficult to pin down, and Althusser verges on paradox. Laruelle cuts in with a question. "Is this not a new, Maoist, avatar of universal Aufhebung, a manner of conserving philosophy through its re-education” (Anti-Badiou, page x). To save and conserve philosophy crashes against Laruelle's sense of anti-philosophy.
Laruelle clues us into the “oxymoronic” core of Badiou. “He contents himself once more with a “revolutionary philosophy,” a “cultural” revolution within the limits of philosophy, rather than a scientific and non-philosophical revolution in philosophy” (xii) nearer to the anti-philosophy promised by Laruelle.
“For here, the Cultural Revolution is no “circumstantial” topic for intellectual debate, but a theoretical model that can be read transparently even in Badiou’s most theoretical program. Up until Badiou, philosophy was educative and pedagogical; with him, it is re-educated by mathematics. And rather than an invention, re-education is a particular type of repetition” (Anti-Badiou, page x).
Laruelle diagnoses in Badiou “his intention is to “re-educate” philosophy” (page xvii). In the same preface, Laurelle goes as far as to identify “here the cult of personality becomes the cult of master-philosophers” and: “in Badiou we find the old conjunction of three cults: that of personality (a philosopher of stellar rarity), that of the labor of the masses (as intellectual workers), and that of militant struggle (in the name of truth).” (Laruelle, page xiv)
Badiou is specifically determined by the suture “Plato-Mao.” The quilting point or suture consists in the transference. In Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts, the analytic situation is established, yet unraveled, by the transference. Every transference has the effect of “constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other.” (McGowan 2013, page 46) The psychoanalytic transference both constitutes and limits the subject at the point of negative impossibility. As a limit, the suture is always impossible.
The impossible quilting point seems to be threefold in the philosophy of Badiou. Laruelle considers Badouist philosophy in terms of the Plato-Mao transference, with mathematics for “the condition of communism, with the authoritarian Platonist model finding a new lease of life in Maoism.” (viii)
For Laruelle, Badiou is not unique because “the philosopher of mathematics remains a philosopher, and not a mathematician.” By remaining a philosopher, Badiou is not yet a communist. In him, “there is also no chance of exceeding the limits of philosophy. With Badiou, philosophy remains well within the bounds” except “French rather than Anglo-Saxon” (Laruelle, page viii).
According to Laruelle, the philosophy of Badiou hinges on an undetermined appeal to history. If not to save philosophy, at least for the sake of history, Laruelle recommends his own anti-philosophy. For a non- or even anti-philosophical theory of philosophy, there are severe ramifications.
Philosophy “immobilizes” (Anti-Badiou, page ix). Laurelle specifically means:
“immobilization by way of history (as obligatory as ever, if often denied) is consummated, paradoxically, in a philosophy “without history” (Althusser and Badiou). A philosophy that ends up as a lazy queen, who hitches her carriage up to a pack of scientists” (Laruelle, page ix).
Although immobilized, there is philosophy, and she is a girl boss. Moreover, she is a gatekeeper, “safeguarding the correct image of thought--a project that some would not hesitate to call a bootcamp.” (xi) The image seems to dial in the Badiouist idea that “re-education is a political action carried out upon philosophy itself.” (Laruelle, page x)
There is a resemblance to an earlier concept of theoretical training conceived by a group of students of Louis Althusser (Concept and Form, Verso Books). What is the practice of an Althusserian-Maoist philosophy of science? According to Peter Hallward (2012), the structuralist tendency aimed at “the defence of rationalism and science” (Hallward, page 10). Major theorists like Althusser and his student Michel Foucault each aspired to repudiate
“the view that science proceeds as some sort of gradual, cumulative clarification of ordinary experience or ‘common knowledge,’ coloured as these are by all sorts of prejudice, affective association and unconscious investment.” (Hallward, page 10)
Structuralists risked scientism and overly mathematical rationalism against empiricism. Whether Marxist or psychoanalytic, specific to structuralism was “a refutation of all liberal or humanist politics” for the reason “that such politics are derived from reciprocity, and they search indefinitely for that object that might come to fill in what they conceive as human ‘dissatisfaction’ [...]” (Hallward, page 76)
An ideology of lack was the unflattering name for the effect of universalizing lack to all subjects. The structure of subjectivity forms around an absent point, or essential lacking, which no other, nor commodity, ever fills, except temporarily or by imagination. Hence, the repetition of loss by which subjects move on from one object to the next, to mourn an original absence.
“No relationship between a subject and another subject, or between a subject and an object, fills the lack, except by an imaginary formation that sutures it; the lack persists inside the subject” (Hallward, page 76).
The concept of the weak subject (from Yves Duroux) links the category of Theory (from Althusser) with a sense of analysis (from Lacan). “Analysis was the grasping of this utopian point, the deployment of the structure in order, let’s say, to open a place for action on the structure” (Duroux, page 191).
The weak subject results “once alienation is defined as constitutive of the subjected subject” (Hallward, page 77). For a strong structuralism: “subjectivity will figure not as regent but as subjected [sujette].” (page 74) In French, the feminine connotation is deliberate. The concept of ‘man’ for humanism mainly constituted an obstacle to knowledge. Rather than an empirical certainty, man was mythological. The disappearance of man was an earlier, structuralist theme from Michel Foucault:
“We admire Sartre’s courage, Foucault explained in the spring of 1966, but ‘our present task is to liberate ourselves definitively from humanism’ and to embrace our own passion, ‘the passion of the concept.’ Althusser made the point more vigorously: ‘it is impossible to know anything about men except on the absolute precondition that the philosophical myth of man is reduced to ashes’ [For Marx, 230]” (Hallward, page 6).
The reference to Sartre is not surprising since his phenomenology rivaled the early movement of structuralism. “Claude Lévi-Strauss anticipated the broader shift in priorities when he rejected the ‘continuity between experience and reality’ assumed by phenomenology, concluding that ‘to reach reality we must first repudiate experience.’ His assault on Sartre’s Critique also marked a watershed” (Hallward, page 6). Structuralism appealed to science and repudiated empiricism, the theory of knowledge derived from direct experience.
“Experience is ‘opinionated’ and deluded by definition, and science cannot proceed as the refinement of delusion or non-knowledge as such. Science can only begin with a principled break with experience and ‘sensory knowledge’, a rupture épistémologique that enables a rational, self-rectifying explanation of problems that are not given in or even accessible to lived experience, however ‘intimate’ or ‘authentic’” (Hallward, page 11).
Althusser divides new, scientific knowledge from its pre-scientific past or non-knowledge (ideology). Only later does Althusser self-criticize for his theory of the epistemological break between science and pre-scientific origins. The divide becomes increasingly difficult to pin down, and Althusser verges on paradox. Laruelle cuts in with a question. "Is this not a new, Maoist, avatar of universal Aufhebung, a manner of conserving philosophy through its re-education” (Anti-Badiou, page x). To save and conserve philosophy crashes against Laruelle's sense of anti-philosophy.
Laruelle clues us into the “oxymoronic” core of Badiou. “He contents himself once more with a “revolutionary philosophy,” a “cultural” revolution within the limits of philosophy, rather than a scientific and non-philosophical revolution in philosophy” (xii) nearer to the anti-philosophy promised by Laruelle.
November 12, 2023
Not "bad", of course, Laruelle is a very good and special and sometimes useful thinker... But this book is quite mean and stupid. Something like a little revenge with old pieces of work, notes of reading... I'm very disappointed.
August 1, 2024
Laruelle et Badiou sont l'un et l'autre des auteurs importants pour moi, ce livre me semblait donc prometteur. Il est pitoyable.
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