Badiou's Deleuze

ELE N

E

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston. Ithaca

© Jon Roffe, 2012

ISBN

978-0-7735-4007-1

(cloth)

ISBN

978-0-7735-4008-8

(paper)

Legal deposit first quarter 2012 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published simultaneously outside North America by Acumen Publishing Limited McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Roffe, Jon Badiou's Deleuze I Jon Roffe. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-4007-1 (bound).--ISBN 978-0-7735-4008-8 (pbk.) 1. Badiou, Alain. Deleuze. 2. Deleuze, Gilles. 3. Philosophy, Modern--20th century. 1. Title.

B2430.D454R64 2011

194

Printed and bound in the UK by MPG Books Group.

C2011-906864-8

L'histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes Rene Char d'un meme vocable. Y contredire est un devoir.

Abbreviations

ix

l. The history of a disjunctive synthesis

1

2. Is D eleuze a philosopher of the One?

6

3. Method

24

4. The virtual

43

5. Truth and time

80

6. The event in D eleuze

1 04

7. Thought and the subject

128

8.

1 60

A

singular palimpsest

Notes Bibliography Index

163 1 89 195

vii

B BR

5

The following abbreviations are used throughout. Where two page num­ bers are listed, they refer to the English and French, respectively; any devia­ tion from the published translation will be noted by the appendage of "tm': Where no English translation is referred to, the translations from the French are my own. In addition, references to Spinoza's Ethics will follow the stand­ ard usage of indicating book, proposition followed by any required specifi­ cation. Likewise, reference to Kant's Critique ofPure Reason will be made to the respective pagination of the A and B editions.

TEXTS BY DELEUZE AO

B DR DRF EPS ES F FLB KCP LS ID IVI

MI N NP PS TI

Anti- Oedipus Bergsonism Difference and Repetition Deux Regimes de Fous: Textes et entretiens 1975-95 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza Empiricism and Subjectivity Foucault The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Kant's Critical Philosophy The Logic of Sense L 'lle Deserte et A utres Textes Masochism Cinema 1: The Movement Image Negotiations Nietzsche and Philosophy Proust and Signs Cinema 2: The Time Image

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

TP WP

A Thousand Plateaus What is Philosophy?

TEXTS BY BADIOU

BE CM CT DCB DVO LM NN TS TW

x

Being and Event The Concept ofModel Court Traite d'Ontologie Transitoire Deleuze: The Clamor ofBeing "Of Life as a Name of Being,

Logics of Worlds Number and Numbers Theory of the Subject Theoretical Writings

Of,

Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology"

E

F

Over what were to be the final years of his life, Gilles Deleuze engaged in a long written correspondence with Alain Badiou. Badiou, in the light of his magnum opus Being and Event (L'Etre et l'evenement), published in 1 988, had come to see D eleuze's philosophical project as the closest among those of his contemporaries to his own, and in turn saw Deleuze as his key rival in the attempt to present a philosophy of multiplicity and immanent b eing. This correspondence, unfortunately never published owing to Deleuze's dis­ satisfaction with its abstract tone (DeB 6/ 14), concluded at the end of 1 994, shortly before the latter's death. In 1 997, Badiou published Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Deleuze: Le clameur de l'E tre), which was a final letter to Deleuze, a summary of their epistolary disagreements and a restatement of the critical appraisal of Deleuze's thought first expressed directly to Deleuze himself. The Clamor ofBeing is presented as a work of demystification, an attempt to reinstate a classical image of the latter's philosophy in the face of a per­ vasive attempt to cast him as a thinker of "the heterogeneous multiplicity of desires" (DeB 8 / 1 7 ) : in place of the caricature, "A faithful portrait of the master" (DeB xii) . l The central claim of this work is infamous: that Deleuze, far from being a philosopher dedicated to propounding the fundamental status of multiplicity and difference, is rather concerned with the ultimate status of ontological unity: "Deleuze's fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One" (DeB 10/19). Ranging across a number of Deleuze's works - above all his two key monographs from the late 1 960s, Difference and Repetition and The Logic ofSense - Badiou presents a surprising and, for some, shocking account of a philosopher who was often thought to be already understood. Badiou's portrait of Deleuze was (and remains) particularly confronting for many who considered themselves partisans of his thought. 1he response of Arnauld Villani, who declared that "this is a false book, the falsest book imaginable'; is characteristic: "in the place of the most beautiful movement of 1

BADIOU'S DELEUZ E

life, [Badiou] has only proposed an abstract field, he only manages to strike up a dirge" ( 1 998). And, while Villani himself, along with many others, sided with Deleuze, yet others again manned the barricades on b ehalf of Badiou. The Clamor of Being thus became the epicentre of conflict in thought. The epistolary sequence concluded by The Clamor ofBeing is rooted in an engagement with Deleuze's thought that begins much earlier.2 Its first incar­ nation is entirely polemical in nature, and is manifested in Theorie de la con­ tradiction, published in 1975, and two texts from 1976, all of which directly attack the aspect of Deleuze's philosophy that Badiou will later declare to b e inessential, namely, the account of desire and multiplicity found i n that gri­ moire, Anti-Oedipus ( 1 972) and the text "Rhizomes" ( 1976), which would later take the form of the infamous first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ( 1 980). Theorie de la contradiction, a thoroughly Maoist presentation of con­ tradiction and the dialectic, adds "saint Gilles (Deleuze), saint Felix (Guat­ tari)" and "saint Jean-Fran