Malebranche: Theological Figure, Being 2

by Alain Badiou, Kenneth Reinhard (Editor), Jason E. Smith (Translator)

Alain Badiou is perhaps the world’s most significant living philosopher. In his annual seminars on major topics and pivotal figures, Badiou developed vital aspects of his thinking on a range of subjects that he would go on to explore in his influential works. In this seminar, Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz.

The seminar is at once a record of Badiou’s thought at a key moment in the years before the publication of his most important work, Being and Event, and a lively interrogation of Malebranche’s key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace. Badiou develops a rigorous yet novel analysis of Malebranche’s theory of grace, retracing his claims regarding the nature of creation and the relation between God and world and between God and Jesus. Through Malebranche, Badiou develops a radical concept of truth and the subject. This book renders a seemingly obscure post-Cartesian philosopher fascinating and alive, restoring him to the philosophical canon. It occupies a pivotal place in Badiou’s reflections on the nature of being that demonstrates the crucial role of theology in his thinking.

Genres: Philosophy

242 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 4, 2013

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strangely compelling reading of Malebranche as a Stalinist. The discussions on metaphor unearth a strikingly modern theory of desire, and the analysis of Malebranche's image for grace (that rain falls on seas and deserts as well as arable soil) develops a dogmatism that absolves God for creating finitude.

***

Take two. I'm giving this seminar an extra star, since it correctly locates the affinity between the mandarin bureaucracy institutionalized by Stalin and Malebranche's Church. Malebranche thinks the Church is better than the Hebrew Temple (of course, how could it be otherwise) since every brick, the metaphor Malebranche uses for the middle of the road Christian, is harmoniously arranged by the invisible hand of Christ. The analogy to Stalin is painfully obvious: you, brave worker, are nothing but a cog; the dear leader will assign you a role, and you will thank him for it. Aside from being a historically insightful comparison, Badiou's point is that if you build the architecture of your community on the basis of occasionalist causation agency degenerates. Only God, or the Party, can have agency you see.

This point holds for religion and politics, and if that were all it would be enough. But wait, there's more! In recent years, occasionalism has returned, this time in paradigms that cluster around the label Object Oriented (Graham Harman is the chief propagandist for this tendency, which has led to a proliferation of truly awful art). Pete Wolfendale has already criticized OOO, but he wisely chooses to ignore its latent theology. It might be time to throw caution to the wind and polemicize against the false stability of Malebranche's Thermidorian Church.

***

One more thing. Badiou is right to emphasize the concept of glory in Malebranche, and he is right that this concept tends to be hopelessly bureaucratic. Notably, God gets more glory when redemption turns around a maximally horrible situation. As Agamben has exhaustively catalogued, modern economic thought depends on a similar concept - for a hardcore free marketer, great acts of excess exist for the sake of their future conversion to profit. Long story short, the Stalinist metaphysics Badiou finds in Malebranche is the same Stalinism in so-called Market Stalinism.

[Kenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very enjoyable book to read. Alain Badiou is an engaging speaker (and writer) although, it must be said, his abilities as a historian of philosophy are laughable. This is not a book to read if you want to understand Malebranche in any capacity. Badiou's focus on desire and the subject is entirely alien to Malebranche's work.

If one can take Badiou's comments as expressing his own viewpoint, and not as any kind of credible exegesis on Malebranche's Treatise on Nature and Grace, there is a lot to applaud here. Badiou deftly analyses the relation between desire and pleasure, a theme popular among philosophers from his era. Despite this, his attempts to shoehorn in Lacan to describe early modern philosophy become tedious rather quickly. For instance, describing supervenient delectation through the contestation between desire as a state of repose and pleasure as an active state is anathema to early modern philosophy, in which acts of intercession should most plausibly be understood as overcoming the distinction between desire and pleasure. As well as this, his description of the relation between God, Christ and the Church using the Lacanian triangle of desire occludes Malebranche's actual system, which is not at all triangular, but much more reminiscent of the system from Plato's Timaeus. For reasons like this, his seminars on Malebranche were frustrating for me to read.

I am eager to explore Simone Weil's relation to early modern philosophy, and based on Badiou's presentation of Malebranche, one could assume that Weil is a bona fide Malebranchean. However, as authors like Rebecca Rozelle-Stone have pointed out, Weil and Badiou are very close to one another theoretically, and given Badiou's approach to the history of philosophy, I conclude that this affinity is not one between Weil and Malebranche, but the already recognised one between Weil and Badiou.

[Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw this book in the background of a YouTube video, oddly enough. The title caught my eye as I had really enjoyed the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche in college. I had never heard of Badiou before, nor had I heard of this series dedicated to publishing his seminars on various philosophers. All that to say, by some great serendipity, I arrived at this present work!

I have some questions about how Badiou interprets Malebranche. At times, it seems that he is too loose with his imposition of 20th century psychological and political categories onto Malebranche and I am unsure of how well he does engage with the religious context of Malebranche's philosophy (though he does respectfully engage with it).

The 17th century was a fascinating time for the thought-world of the West. Descartes had exploded everyone's categories and those who inherited the intellectual landscape after him had to put back the pieces. I do not think we can really grasp the extent to which Descartes philosophy was disorienting to Western thought at the time. Malebranche seems to have revelled in Cartesian epistemology, seeing it as the way to finally prove Christianity mathematically. This was the Enlightenment, after all.

Malebranche sets about his project in the turbulent religious waters of the day, engaging questions that seem abstract to us, but which had significant implications for them. Though Badiou does not explicitly state this, it seems that Malebranche is attempting to re-interpret the Thomistic categories of Nature and Grace within this new system of thought.

I really appreciate the respect and admiration Badiou shows for Malebranche. At times, he comes off as quite the fan boy. Which is justified! Malebranche is meticulous in his argumentation and develops a fairly coherent system that accounts for anticipated objections and problems.

Obviously, I would recommend reading the book to get a more specific picture of what Malebranche is saying. However, I will note that one of Badiou's more striking analyses of Malebranche occurs in the last seminar in a brief section. He takes up Malebranche's understanding of desire. Malebranche argued that all humankind desired God, they could not help but do so. Obviously, he has to explain this position. He went on to argue that when humans metaphorize their desire and direct it to an object, they satiate their desire in pleasure. This pleasure gets in the way of desire by giving rest to our desire as we satiate ourselves with the metaphorized object. If I am following his line of reasoning correctly, the way out of these moments of temptation (for the member of the Church/the believer) is to receive a grace that allows us to savor the desire for desire. In essence, my takeaway is that Malebranche conceived of there being something pleasurable in the enjoyment of our mere desire of God.

In sum, Badiou did an entertaining and rigorous job laying out the framework of Malebranche's thought. He whet my appetite for this dear Frenchman and I hope to read the original treatise upon which Badiou was commenting at some point in the future.

Books I have read that are in conversation with this one: The Search After Truth and Philosophic Classics, Vol 3: Modern Philosophy

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

File under fascinating study of what feels like a very niche subject.

Badiou is obviously enamored of Malebranche's thinking and system of thought, which makes it easy for the reader to become just as enthused. If, in the end, it is a system that is hard to extricate from its theological structure and generalize to a larger project regarding the Subject and Being, it is still an interesting study in how a person might start from a core insight and then architecturally build out a system block by block, much as Malebranche describes Christ's role as the builder and designer of The Church.

In fact, my guess is that this is exactly what Badiou found so fascinating in Malebranche. We know from Badiou's Ethics that Badiou believes Being is created through the eruptive experience of an Event, and that Being is Ethical who day after day then follows and enacts the Truths of that Event.

Malebranche's Event was his experience of Descartes's writings and thought and the consequences for Christianity if those writings were taken as true. He seems to have spent the rest of his life living and enacting the Truths he found there.

To Badiou, there might be nothing as noble as that.