Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency 0199207755, 9780199207756

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BECKET T AND BADIOU

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Beckett and Badiou The Pathos of Intermittency ANDREW GIBSON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Andrew Gibson 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–920775–5

978–0–19–920775–6

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Alain and Judith

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship 2002–4. This book would have been much the poorer and slighter without it. It allowed me to do in five years what took fifteen with my last major monograph. Among Badiou commentators and scholars, my most important debt is to Peter Hallward, who shared his expertise with me repeatedly and selflessly and for whose patience, grace, and extraordinary clarity of mind I am very grateful. Judith Balso invited me to speak at the Coll`ege Internationale de Philosophie, explained philosophical distinctions of which I was woefully ignorant, discussed her own work on Dante and Pessoa, and asked me to help with the ongoing labour of translating Stevens, illuminating some obscure points in Badiou’s thought about art in the process. I am also grateful to the following for their differing responses to one aspect or another of my work on Badiou: Jason Barker, Ray Brassier, Simon Critchley, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Nina Power, and Alberto Toscano. There are many Beckett scholars who have more or less directly contributed to this book over the years. Steve Connor has long been a very important source of support and encouragement. John Pilling has been generous and interested almost from the start of my Beckettian career. So has Katharine Worth, with whom I planned a Beckett seminar in which we argued about the relative merits of Beckett’s prose and drama as early as 1982. (It never came off.) James Hansford was an important influence on my early years as a Beckettian: like many of his friends, I remember his gentle gravity and sense of scruple with affection and respect. In the early stages of the book, I owed a great deal to the kindness, intellectual generosity, and ruthlessly interrogative spirit of Derval Tubridy, who never let me off lightly. Dan Katz ´ invited me to speak at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, Ronan McDonald at the Barbican, and Laura Salisbury at the London Beckett seminar at Birkbeck College. Yoshiki Tajiri invited me to Tokyo and gave me the chance to speak there. I have learnt from his modesty, fastidiousness, and scholarly obliquity. Some of these qualities he partly inherited from the late great Japanese scholar Yasunari Takahashi. When I used to meet up with Yasunari in the 1980s and

Acknowledgements

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1990s, he was not only endlessly genial to what Badiou would call a ‘jeune cr´etin’. He also tuned my antennae sufficiently for me to appreciate at least a little of what may be at stake in comparing Beckett’s plays with Noh drama. Other Beckettians to whom I owe a debt include Phil Baker, Mary Bryden, Evelyne Grossman, Brigitte Riera, and James Knowlson. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournes for reading the book in typescript as carefully as she did, and correcting many errors. My thanks yet again to Thomas Docherty who, farsighted as ever, got me reading Badiou as early as 1995. Norman Gowar helped me start off on set theory. Jean Matthee talked to me a lot about Badiou and Lacan, and helped me clarify my thinking about the intellectual relationships between the two. Three heads of department arranged for some of my best virtues to flourish: Kiernan Ryan, Robert Hampson, and (for a short while) Martin Dzelzainis. I am very grateful to them all. This book owes a substantial debt to the commitment and care of Andrew McNeillie at Oxford University Press, a very fine and truly literary editor. I am also very grateful for all their hard work to Val Shelley and Tom Perridge, and to Jackie Pritchard for her meticulous copyediting. As usual, I owe a big debt to librarians; this time, to those in the Rare Books room of the British Library, and the Rez de Jardin of the Biblioth`eque Nationale. By far my biggest debt is to Alain Badiou himself: not just for his philosophy, in all its architectonic grandeur and complexity; nor for his inspiration, continuous though that has been; nor for his obstinate sense of what might really matter, at a historical moment when it is difficult to sustain, and might all too easily seem futile; but also for his great, fierce, warm, energizing, and encouraging presence, from which I have repeatedly taken heart. His unstinting support has been the more inspiring in that I made clear to him, quite early, that I would never be a ‘Badiouiste’. I only hope that what is in some ways a reading of his work that pushes the mood of his thought far closer to, say, Adorno and Benjamin than he would ever find permissible is not altogether alien to him, in spite of its tendency to melancholy.

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Contents Abbreviations Introduction Beginnings Actual Infinity Intermittency Old Extinguisher 1. Badiou (i): Being, Event, Subject, Truth Being Event Subject Truth

xi 1 1 6 16 25 41 41 53 58 67

2. Badiou (ii): Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics State and Doxa Politics Ethics Aesthetics and the ‘Waiting Subject’

76 76 81 90 101

3. Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism Some Critical Positions Ethics (ii): Beckett Differences and Repetitions ´ enementialit´e Ev´

117 117 129 133 138

4. The Break with Doxa: Murphy, Watt Murphy and the Big World Incidents of Note The Logic of Melancholy

143 143 155 162

5. The Event of the Event: The Unnamable Logics of Appearance Objects and Inexistents The Siren and the Rock The Irrepressible Ephemeral

172 172 179 182 186

x

Contents 6. The Thought of the Good: Enough, The Lost Ones, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho Plato and Lacan Love, Enough The Use in Going Up: The Lost Ones Absence Supreme Good and Yet: Ill Seen Ill Said A Grace without Concept: Worstward Ho

198 198 205 211 217 220

7. The Sparkle Hid in Ashes: Beckett’s Plays The Precious Margaret Remains Onstage Nuancing the Event

229 229 233 241

Conclusion: The Pathos of Intermittency The Ends of Jouissance Modernity and the Event Actual Eclipse Another Field of Thought Beckett’s Threshold

254 254 257 268 273 279

Bibliography Index

291 313

Abbreviations SAMUEL BECKETT

AS CA CCE CDW CP CSP DI HII IS MU MV TM TR WA WH

Assez Cap au pire Comment c’est The Complete Dramatic Works Collected Poems 1930–1978 The Complete Shorter Prose 1929–1989 Disjecta How It Is Ill Seen Ill Said Murphy Mal vu mal dit Tˆetes-Mortes Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable Watt Worstward Ho

ON BECKET T

BF BR DF EM IB SI UW

Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature Daniel Katz, Saying ‘I’ No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett Carla Locatelli, Unwording the Word: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize

AL AIN BADIOU

AB BK CD CI

Abr´eg´e de m´etapolitique Beckett: L’Increvable d´esir Casser en deux l’histoire du monde? Circonstances: Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac/Le Pen

xii CM CO CR CS CT DE DL DO DP DZ EE ES ET IT LM LS MP NN NR OB PM PP RT SA SB SP TC TS

Abbreviations Le Concept de mod`ele: Introduction a` une ´epist´emologie mat´erialiste des math´ematiques Circonstances, 3: Port´ees du mot ‘juif ’ Circonstances, 2: Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France Conditions Court trait´e d’ontologie transitoire Deleuze: The Clamor of Being De l’id´eologie D’un d´esastre obscur: Droit, ´etat, politique Monde contemporain et d´esir de philosophie ˆ Gilles Deleuze: ‘La Clameur de l’Etre’ ˆ L’Etre et l’´ev´enement Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil ´ L’Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du mal Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy Logiques des mondes (chapters 1–3, typescript) Le Si`ecle Manifeste pour la philosophie Le Nombre et les nombres Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique On Beckett Petit manuel d’inesth´etique Peut-on penser la politique? Rhapsodie pour le th´eaˆ tre Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism ´ Samuel Beckett: L’Ecriture du g´en´erique et l’amour Saint-Paul et la fondation de l’universalisme Th´eorie de la contradiction Th´eorie du sujet

ON BADIOU

BA

Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth

G I O RG I O AG A M B E N

HS IP PT

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Idea of Prose Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

Abbreviations

xiii

FRANC ¸ OIS E P ROU S T

DR DT HC KA PO

De la r´esistance La Doublure du temps L’Histoire a` contretemps: Le Temps historique chez Walter Benjamin Kant: Le Ton de l’histoire Point de passage J AC QU E S R A N C I E` R E

AU CH CV ME MI NP PA PS

Aux bords du politique La Chair des mots: Politiques de l’´ecriture Courts voyages au pays du peuple La M´esentente: Politique et philosophie Le Maître ignorant: Cinq lec¸ons sur l’emancipation intellectuelle La Nuit des prol´etaires: Archive du rˆeve ouvrier La Parole muette: Essais sur les contradictions de la litt´erature Le Partage sensible: Esth´etique et politique

Except where specified, all translations from French and German are my own.

It will come. Must come. There is no future in this. (Beckett, Play) L’autre vie rayonne sous l’insulte. (Badiou on Krapp’s Last Tape)

Introduction BEGINNINGS The discovery of the square root of two is a capital event. The accumulation of plague-stricken corpses in the streets of Athens is not. According to Alain Badiou, this is the Platonic view. Badiou thinks Plato was right.¹ For a mathematical discovery is testimony to the affirmative capacity of thought and, as such, of interest to the philosophical mind. The same can be conceded of Lucretius’ poetic response to the Athenian pestilence at the end of De Rerum Natura, for the same reason.² But, though brute catastrophe may rightly concern the poet or scientist, or, if it is a political catastrophe, the political activist, it is of no concern to the philosopher. The disasters which punctuate human history cannot serve as a point of departure for philosophy.³ Suffering cannot be its theme. For the Good is always its proper aim and end (‘sa vis´ee propre’, CI, 8). ‘I would agree with Nietzsche without hesitation’, writes Badiou, ‘philosophy must be integrally affirmative’ (ibid.).⁴ Lucretius tells us that the ‘fatal tide’ of the plague ‘laid waste the Athenian fields, turning the highways into deserts and draining the city of citizens’.⁵ When Badiou insists that philosophy should remain indifferent to this, he also makes much modern literature and art seem remote from and unpalatable ¹ See CI, 8–9. ² See VI. 1138–287; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, tr. R. E. Latham, introd. and notes John Godwin (Penguin: London, 1994), 195–9. ³ Badiou makes the point, surely rightly, in repudiation of the contemporary insistence that the conditions of philosophy have been fundamentally changed by the Holocaust. See CI, 7–8. The repudiation is explicit elsewhere: see MP, 7–12, especially at p. 11. Cf. also the critique of the category of ‘the disaster’ (CS, 226–30), and of the political thought of Hannah Arendt (AB, 19–34). The ‘profound compassion’ of the philosopher for the victims and the ‘absolute judgment’ he passes on the perpetrators have no bearing on the issue (CO, 13). ⁴ This is the more striking in that Badiou conceives of Nietzsche as an anti-philosopher, and therefore an antagonist, if a worthy one. Badiou has developed the theme of affirmation more explicitly in ‘Esquisse pour un premier manifeste de l’affirmationisme’ (2001, typescript). ⁵ See De Rerum Natura VI. 1138–40.

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Introduction

to philosophy. For the abysmal landscape evoked by Lucretius is a bleakly commonplace modern topos. This is perhaps supremely exemplified in the work of Samuel Beckett, as in Endgame:    : Nothing stirs. All is—    : Zer—    : [Violently.] Wait till you’re spoken to! [Normal voice.] All is . . . All is . . . All is what? [Violently.] All is what?    : What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. [He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards ]. Corpsed. [Pause.] Well? Content? (CDW, 106)⁶

The Beckettian wasteland is at once familiar. Few if any literary figures have been more often or intimately associated with a mid- and late twentiethcentury Weltschmerz, with modern nihilism or historical revulsion, with a profound, manifold, inner desolation. However this desolation is explained— philosophically, existentially, linguistically, historically, psychologically, even physiologically—at some level, it has usually seemed undeniable. Whilst Badiou is much concerned to distinguish the philosopher from the poet and the philosophical from the poetic task, that Beckett should interest him seems unlikely, to say the least. Yet the truth is very different. Badiou has been an ardent reader of Beckett’s work since the mid-1950s. The attachment led to a book, Beckett: L’Increvable d´esir, published in 1996, a pamphlet, two major essays, and a preface. Badiou describes his first encounter with Beckett’s work as an event of great importance, a true encounter, ‘a sort of subjective blow, the imprint of which is ineffaceable’ (BK, 5). Astonishingly for so robustly positive a philosopher, he claims that the effect of this encounter was such that, forty years later, ‘J’y suis, j’y suis toujours’ (ibid.).⁷ My book began in sheer surprise at that statement. If philosophy is nothing other than affirmation, why should Badiou ⁶ The play on ‘corpsed’—actors’ slang: to put an actor out, or spoil a scene by making a blunder—apparently complicates the point a little. But Beckett seems himself to have used the word to mean ‘utterly exhausted’. See DF, 459 and 792 n. 73. ⁷ The phrase is from one of Rimbaud’s Dernier vers, ‘Qu’est-ce pour nous . . . ’. It is one of Badiou’s repeated literary points of reference. In context, the words might seem to express a ‘bitter resignation to abject reality’, in Martin Sorrell’s phrase. But Badiou appears to read them as a profession of loyalty to a cause or project in dark times. He also applies the phrase to his own relationship to Maoism in 2002. See La R´evolution culturelle: La Derni`ere r´evolution? (Paris: Conf´erences du Rouge-Gorge, 2002), 3. On the poem’s fiercely revolutionary spirit and its references to the Commune, see Sorrell’s notes, Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. with parallel French text, introd., and notes by Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 321.

Introduction

3

have been so preoccupied with Beckett, of all writers? Was his intellectual relationship to Beckett like his relationship to Lacan? That is, did it involve traversing or ‘working through’ an oeuvre he clearly valued very highly, but in order at length to transcend it, not least because of what Peter Hallward calls its insistence on ‘the tragic and horrific dimensions of experience’ (AB, 21)? There were no signs that Badiou approached Beckett like this, in spite of the occasional claim that Beckett’s art ‘dissipates calamities’ (SB, 4). But if Beckett was not the philosopher’s whetstone, then what could Badiou mean when he claimed to have inhabited the Beckettian universe for forty years? Admiring Lucretius’ description of the Athenian waste is one thing. Spending four decades wandering amidst devastation is another. Bringing politics into the equation only aggravated the difficulties: on the one hand, Badiou was a radical political thinker and activist whose Marxism and commitment to dialectical materialism had made him a Maoist in the 1970s. He had gone on to co-found a ‘politics without party’, the Organisation Politique, in the 1980s. The precise character of his Marxism was open ˆ to question, certainly in his later work. In the thirty-first meditation in L’Etre et l’´ev´enement, for example, he stated very clearly that Marxism was a defunct system, that it had died of its own conversion into a theory or ‘science’ of history and society. Yet he was also clear that, all the same, one might remain faithful to what he called the event of Marx.⁸ The radicalism of his politics was starkly obvious in his work, and his practical political commitments had always been firm and undeviating. In Beckett’s case, by contrast, it was hard to forget the weary pessimism of the beginning of Murphy, or the satirical version of the political agitator in The End: He was bellowing so loud that snatches of his discourse reached my ears. Union . . . brothers . . . Marx . . . Capital . . . bread and butter . . . love. It was all so much Greek to me. (CSP, 94)

When Katharine Worth expressed admiration for Edward Bond’s will to change the world, Beckett snorted ‘Let it burn.’⁹ Yet his hostility to conservative orthodoxies and reactionary platitudes had also always been obvious. Knowlson told us that ‘Beckett’s attitudes were basically left-wing and antiestablishment’ (DF, 641). This seemed ‘basically’ right, though the lack of precision and hint of equivocation were revealing, too. When Murphy ironically dismissed the logic of the ‘mercantile gehenna’ and its ‘quid pro quo’, for ⁸ See EE, 361–77, especially at pp. 368–9. ⁹ See Katharine Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 10.

4

Introduction

example (MU, 8, 31), he had to be expressing Beckett’s own fierce antipathy to the aridities of modern economism. Surely the portrait of the bellower in The End was partly ironic? Much of Beckett’s work, then, seemed to be at least obliquely compatible with a radical political demand. But how to tease out the connecting threads? Adorno and, more recently, Simon Critchley seemed to have said most of what could be said for a political Beckett: Beckett’s work was distinguished by a kind of ‘weak messianic power’.¹⁰ If Beckett had chosen a via negativa for his messianism, it was because he scrupulously refused all discredited positivities. In Adorno’s phrase, Beckett had chosen not to conspire ‘with all extant meanness and finally with the destructive principle’.¹¹ The Enlightenment project, wrote Critchley, ‘might have left us with presque rien’. None the less, Adorno does not leave us with nothing. On the contrary, the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be, an otherwise that is persistently but obliquely offered by Beckett. (ibid.)

Beckett became the guardian of the utopian trace. The rigour of Beckettian negation indicated how fervently he assumed this guardianship in what were starkly unpropitious times.¹² This was Beckett’s petit possible. Its self-conscious frailty made it look very remote from Badiou’s ‘pens´ee forte’.¹³ In the first instance, then, I was interested in exploring the relationship between two oeuvres, the one philosophical, the other that of a novelist, poet, and dramatist. I wanted to examine the problematic character of that relationship, rather than just to produce a theoretical critique of Badiou or an interpretation of Beckett’s work. Though it functions as both critique and interpretation, this book is not exactly either. It might perhaps be thought of as an exercise in ‘transcritique’, in Kojin Karatani’s sense.¹⁴ The more thought I gave to Badiou’s writings, the more it seemed to me that his accounts of Beckett both worked and didn’t work. They provided a powerful new framework for understanding Beckett. Put together as Badiou had put it together, ¹⁰ Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 22. ¹¹ Quoted ibid. 24. ¹² In some important ways, my own conclusions are not crucially different to Adorno’s and Critchley’s. But the terms I find for the structure in question, and the minuteness with which I try to elaborate it, are quite different. ¹³ The title of the first French colloquium on Badiou, held 21–3 October 1999 at the Universit´e Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, was Alain Badiou: La Pens´ee Forte. ¹⁴ Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, tr. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). Karatani’s method of reciprocal reading is not unlike the one I seek to practise here.

Introduction

5

however, it was finally less framework than Procrustean bed. Some of Badiou’s explications seemed to me to be compelling, some less so. There were aspects of Beckett’s work which he saw very clearly. There were others that he didn’t explain, or which he seemed not to have registered. It was even the case that Badiou’s thought was more relevant to some of Beckett than Badiou himself seemed to have noticed. Yet Badiou’s neglect of certain aspects of Beckett’s work also raised questions for aspects of his own philosophy. It was not always easy to square Badiou’s Beckett with some of the most crucial emphases in his philosophical system. The connection with Beckett even appeared to introduce a certain tension into that system, an indication of possible exclusions or unresolved ambivalences, of concerns it could not quite accommodate. So my book might be thought of as Janus-faced; that is, it has a revolving structure, turning alternately in one direction and another. At the same time, it proceeds deliberately, methodically, and in stages. Since a great deal of information needs to come first, quite a lot of what I have to say myself won’t emerge until a comparatively late stage. I begin, in the first two chapters, with an account of Badiou’s main philosophical themes, his politics, ethics, and aesthetics. This account is necessarily compressed, selective, and focused towards a specific end: for a superbly comprehensive yet also precise account of Badiou’s thought, particularly in its philosophical contexts and political aspects, I refer the reader to Peter Hallward’s Badiou: A Subject to Truth. My book quite frequently takes its bearings from Hallward’s, and I can’t and don’t intend to rival it; though I shall try to supplement it by giving Badiou’s aesthetics more emphasis than Hallward, and thinking through the implications of that aesthetics as closely as possible. The third chapter then provides an account of Badiou’s work on Beckett in relation both to his larger philosophy and to the most significant developments in recent Beckett criticism. These three chapters make up the first half of the book. In the second half, I work through a set of readings of texts by Beckett. These readings take off from the account of Badiou’s version of Beckett in the third chapter, and variously confirm, challenge, modify, and extend it, sometimes by resorting to Badiou himself, sometimes by resisting him. Certainly, I aim to produce a specific reading of Badiou’s philosophy and one of Beckett’s work. But, as will be clear above all in my last chapter, I shall also be trying to think the two together as a complex nexus and focal point for some important contemporary aesthetic, ethical, and political questions. For, setting aside all the preceding complications and those to follow, this book is powered by two simple convictions or, in Badiou’s terms, decisions: Badiou is a contemporary philosopher of major and lasting

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importance; and, though he has his rivals (Celan, for example), Beckett’s is the most important of the serious post-war literary oeuvres. ACT UAL INFINIT Y¹⁵ The concept most crucial to my attempt to think Badiou and Beckett together will be what I call ‘the pathos of intermittency’. Since the phrase appears in neither oeuvre and Badiou is quite explicit about his distaste for pathos, I clearly have some explaining to do. In ‘Philosophie et math´ematique’, Badiou asserts that, from Plato up to and including Kant, philosophy and mathematics are interinvolved. For Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and many other philosophers, only mathematics can properly instigate the crucial, founding break with ignorance, myth, and superstition. Mathematics is the primary form ‘of an integrally laicised thought’ (CS, 159). But romantic philosophy more or less completely separates philosophy from mathematics, with Hegel playing the decisive role. The anti-philosophical stance of positivism does no more than mirror the anti-mathematical stance of romanticism. For romantics and positivists alike, mathematics is neither a founding condition of philosophy nor a kind of thought. Hegel and the romantics’ rejection of mathematics is inseparable from their ‘historicism, that is to say, the temporalization of the concept’ (CS, 161).¹⁶ The romantics believe that infinity can only be conceived of in terms of time, as a kind of ‘temporal ecstasy’ (ibid.). In comparison with the heady excitement of this conviction, the crystalline, idealized, mathematical conception of infinity seems barrenly abstract. For mathematical infinity is indifferent or impermeable to the passing of time. Hegel is decisive, here: with Hegel and the romantics, mathematics loses its status as a means of thinking infinity.¹⁷ The consequence, however, is a structure whose essence is pathos and from which we have yet to recover. Mathematics thinks infinity strictly in relation to the ‘closed power’ of an order of signs (CS, 162). By contrast, the romantics can conceive of infinity only as a boundless exteriority, an openness without end. The trouble is that, against this horizon, the tragic historicity of ¹⁵ For a more extensive version of the rest of my introduction, particularly the mathematical case, see my ‘Badiou and Beckett: Actual Infinity, Event, Remainder’, in Matthew Wilkens (ed.), The Philosophy of Alain Badiou, Polygraph, 17 (2005), 137–66. ¹⁶ For a critique of Badiou specifically on Hegel and mathematics, see Juliette Simont, ‘Le Pur ˆ et l’´ev´enement)’, Les Temps et l’impur (sur deux questions de l’histoire de la philosophie dans L’Etre modernes, 526 (May 1990), 27–60, especially at pp. 54–5. ¹⁷ See CS, 171–5.

Introduction

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finite beings becomes all the more sharply perceptible. We are separated from infinity by an uncrossable frontier. By the same token, infinity becomes an object of insatiable yearning. It is placed within a structure that opposes it to transience, historical mortality, the birth and death of ideas. In this respect, we are still very much in the shadow of romanticism. But the romantic legacy is profoundly disabling. Certainly, it flatters our narcissism, our need for tragic grandeur, for an auratic conception of the infinite. But it prevents us from setting out on the adventure that has potentially been ours since the modern proclamation of the death of God. The contemporary world precisely demonstrates this. More or less secretly, we believe ourselves to be prisoners of our historicity and materiality. We are immersed in ‘the pathos of finitude’ (CS, 176, italics mine). This insistently drives us back in the direction of religion. Here modernity confronts its most forbidding impasse. The question is all around us, at the current time: how can modernity move decisively beyond its romantic determinations? For Badiou, the only way of doing so—‘l’unique voie royale que je connaisse’ (CS, 163)—is putting mathematics back at the heart of philosophy. This is crucial, above all, insofar as mathematics presents us with a flat, solid, laicized concept of eternity, and therefore offers us the chance of getting away from the pathos of finitude. Set theory in particular spells a ‘radical desacralization’ of eternity (CS, 164).¹⁸ On 25 March 1974, Der Spiegel ran the headline, ‘Macht Mengenlehre krank?’ (‘Does set theory damage your health?’).¹⁹ Badiou might answer that, if so, then so much the better.²⁰ Badiou takes set theory to be massively significant for modernity.²¹ This is because it gives an account of an actually existing, accessible infinity. The concept of actual infinity is central to this study. To explain it clearly, I shall also have to explain certain aspects of ¹⁸ My unannounced shift from ‘mathematics’ to ‘set theory’ at this point is deliberate: the work of the great nineteenth-century mathematicians—Hamilton, Bolzano, Weierstrass, Dedekind, Cantor—suggested that all the concepts of mathematical analysis could be reduced to those of natural number, set, and membership. See Mosh´e Machover, Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 64. According to Cohen, ‘the notion of ‘‘set’’ is the most fundamental concept of mathematics’. See Paul J. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (Reading, Mass.: Benjamin-Cummings, 1966), 50. ¹⁹ Quoted Stephen Pollard, Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 40. ²⁰ Better, at least, this sickening than Heideggerian convalescence as involved in the concept of Verwindung; on which see Jon R. Snyder, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, tr. with introd. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), pp. i–lviii, p. xxvi. ²¹ In Le Si`ecle, Badiou argues that the twentieth century did in fact seek to break with romanticism, but by means that themselves were largely romantic. It failed to learn Cantor’s lesson with regard to actual infinity, and was thus unable to escape its own latent religiosity. LS, 218.

8

Introduction

set theory. For Aristotle in the Physics, infinity is a notion that is inescapably associated with time. Infinity can be conceived of only in relation to a temporal sequence, to time as a process of becoming that we cannot grasp in its totality. This means that, as a whole, infinity has only a potential existence. Infinity in this description—potential infinity—is an indeterminate, variable quantity which increases beyond all finite limits. This is the standard conception of infinity according to what is known as classical finitism. But set theory provides an abstract account, not of a potential but of an actual infinity. Infinity or, better, infinities are actually there, all at once. The assertion of actual infinity is the cornerstone of Badiou’s thought.²² For he takes Being itself to be actually infinite. The account of actual infinity that set theory provides is awesomely sophisticated. It produces ‘a total dissemination, a disunification, of the concept of the infinite’ (EE, 305). Set theory presents us with an infinity of infinities. These infinities are of different sizes. An infinity of one kind of object can differ in number from an infinity of another kind. However, infinities are also determinate. This is true in two ways. First, set theory regards infinite pluralities, not, vaguely, as limitless, but as objects or sets; that is, a given infinity has a determinate membership. Cantor asserts, for example, that, if the totality of all finite, positive integers is infinite, if it surpasses in magnitude every finite quantity, it is also, for all that, ‘a definite quantum, fixed in all its parts’.²³ Given any unending sequence of increasing numbers, there is a smallest actually infinite domain containing them all. This is intrinsic to Cantor’s very definition of a set as ‘any collection of definite elements which can be united by a law into a whole’.²⁴ It will be helpful to remember this phrase. Secondly, an infinity is also determinate in that it can be conceived of as existing all at once. Cantor understood the definition of number as requiring, not ‘the addition of ones’ (in a temporal sequence), but ‘a single act of abstraction’.²⁵ The sheer, peremptory radicality of this ‘act’ is very appealing to Badiou. In Cantor’s wake, the mathematician most responsible for the axiomatization of set theory was Ernst Zermelo. Zermelo, too, sought to avoid ²² Badiou is quite sparing in his use of the term itself, preferring others, like ‘infinite multiplicity’. But he is perfectly aware of its appropriateness to his thought. See for instance ‘Platon et/ou AristoteLeibniz: Th´eorie des ensembles et th´eorie des topos sous l’œil du philosophe’, in Marco Panza and Jean-Michel Salanskis, L’Objectivit´e math´ematique: Platonisme et structures formelles (Paris: Masson, 1995), 61–83, p. 66. ²³ Michael Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 35. ²⁴ Quoted Joseph Warren Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 170, italics mine. ²⁵ Quoted Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 128.

Introduction

9

selecting units in succession, to make possible a simultaneous or ‘timeless’ conception of a set. Not all modern mathematical procedures work like this. The procedures Badiou most distrusts—constructivist procedures—are strictly successive. But for Badiou, sets are not just constructible objects, but objects that already exist. His conception of mathematical entities is in this respect Platonic. Cantor himself took Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Berkeley all to task for dismissing the concept of actual infinity.²⁶ But that the philosophers have been wary is perhaps not surprising: the implications of the concept are far-reaching. Cantor asserted that ‘there is no distinction between the finite and the vast realm of infinity that comes within the orbit of mathematics’.²⁷ In effect, in discovering what he called the transfinite realm, he thus made it possible for man to share what had been solely God’s preserve. This is not true, however, in any grandiose (romantic or humanist) sense. It lays no salve to either our anthropocentrism or our hubris. The classical finitist recoils from Cantor’s universe. He or she obstinately insists on the pragmatic imperative: neither experience nor application suggests any basis or need for the idea of actual infinity. ‘Actual infinity’ has no empirical sense, and can be set aside as a fascinating but idle by-product of mathematical ingenuity. But if classical finitism is pragmatic, it also salvages the religious domain, a point of great importance to Badiou. For the classical finitist argues that, if infinity can be thought at all, it is in other than worldly terms. The theological leap is the only possible resort. If, from a worldly perspective, infinity is always potential infinity, that is, if it must always remain tantalizingly incomplete, the only possible way of conceiving it as a whole is thinking it as God. The theological or mystical and the pragmatic dispositions can thus go placidly hand in hand. So much is clear from the example of Wittgenstein. Not surprisingly, Wittgenstein was fiercely hostile towards set theory.²⁸ If Badiou and Beckett share anything, it is an antipathy to theological leaps and pragmatic imperatives alike.²⁹ This is a matter of intellectual rigour ²⁶ See Dauben, Georg Cantor, 122. ²⁷ Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 15. ²⁸ This is precisely demonstrated in Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), 415–19. Of course, thinking actual infinity can also provoke the theological leap. Cantor himself sought refuge from the implications of his own work in a distinction between the ‘ordinary infinity’ revealed by set theory and the ‘absolute infinity’ beyond reason or number, which was God’s. ²⁹ Beckett does of course pervasively make use of the Christian apparatus. See Mary Bryden’s scrupulous and careful Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). He also makes use of Hebraic and Islamic material. For some traces of Islam in the Three Dialogues, see my ‘Three Dialogues and Beckett’s Tragic Ethics’, in Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, Sjef

10

Introduction

perhaps even more than ethical principle. But there are problems in any case with classical finitism. Mary Tiles makes the objections to potential infinity very clear:³⁰ the classical finitist asserts that infinity is only potential, not actual; that is, any attempt to think it can do so on the basis of complete, finite segments. Potential infinity is never complete and can never be completed. The concept of potential infinity is thus intrinsically linked to a concept of becoming. The potentially infinite is ‘an inescapably temporal notion’.³¹ However, any general concept of becoming is illogical since, if becoming becomes, it must transform itself in becoming, putting itself beyond conceptual reach. There can be no prior, existing, general categories for thinking potential infinity—Aristotelian universals, for example—because they will themselves be transformed in becoming. Cantor understood this: the concept of potential infinity must imply, not just limitlessness, but limitless variability. Thus to think variability on the basis of any given, finite segment is to think variability on the basis of a variable, and to lose ‘any fixed support for the study’.³² The only way of thinking variability at all is to decree its ‘domain’ beforehand, through a definition.³³ This is what mathematics superlatively does. The only precise way of establishing a ‘domain’ is to think it as a ‘set of values’ that is at once ‘definite’ and actually infinite.³⁴ Variability can only be thought intelligibly and free from contradiction within a completed domain. For as long as we remain bound up in a thought of infinity—and it is hard to imagine our not being so, at least in some sense, whilst the culture remains in thrall to religious and post-religious formations—set theory holds out the most complex and subtle system for addressing it. That rather understates the case: the universe of set theory is prodigious, extraordinarily fertile in inventive discoveries. On the one hand, almost as soon as Cantor had achieved his most important breakthroughs, set theory was thrown into brief disarray by what Fraenkel later called ‘the shock of the Houppermans, and Dani`ele de Ruyter-Tognotti (eds.), Three Dialogues Revisited: Samuel Beckett Today/aujourd’hui, 13 (2003), 43–54. ³⁰ See Mary Tiles, The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Introduction to Cantor’s Paradise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 9–31 for the full case. ³¹ Ibid. 25. ³² Cantor, quoted in Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 25. ³³ A domain is the set on which a given function is defined, e.g. the completed, homogeneous number domains, natural, real, and rational numbers. ³⁴ Cantor, quoted in Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 25.

Introduction

11

antinomies’.³⁵ It was assailed by contradictions and paradoxes, like Russell’s paradox and the Burali–Forti paradox, which threatened it with the charge of inconsistency, peculiarly damning for mathematicians.³⁶ Set theory clearly required a more solid foundation than Cantor had been able to give it: the consequence was its rapid axiomatization. This was achieved in the so-called ZF (Zermelo–Fraenkel) axioms. On the other hand, in Badiou’s phrase, set theory as a whole ‘has constantly been enriched with new monsters’, above all, through theory of the ‘large cardinals’.³⁷ Looked at in detail or for any length of time, the book of set theory in fact turns out to be an endlessly fascinating bestiary. To begin very simply: mathematicians distinguish between ordinal and cardinal numbers. Ordinals are the counting numbers. They denote a process of ordering and are sometimes explained in terms of the places in a queue. (Think of the numbered tickets at the delicatessen counters in supermarkets.) Cardinals denote magnitude, answer the question, ‘How many?’, and are arrived at by ‘pairing’ not ‘queueing’.³⁸ The correspondence of the set {knife, fork, spoon} to the set {1, 2, 3} means that its cardinality is 3.³⁹ The obvious objection, here, is that this is merely to number a cardinality by an ordinal. Are cardinals not just ordinals by another name? This is in fact the case so long as we remain within the realm of finite number. But in the realm of infinite number, as I’ve said, there exists an infinity of infinities. Once it has been established that infinities may be different in size, this gives rise to the separation of the notion of cardinality from that of ordinality, because cardinality is linked to the existence of one-to-one correspondences, whilst ordinality is linked to a generalization of the counting process. There can be no one-to-one correspondence, for example, between the infinity of the ³⁵ Abraham A. Fraenkel, ‘Historical Introduction’, Paul Bernays, Axiomatic Set Theory, with a historical introduction by Abraham A. Fraenkel (New York: Dover, 1968), 3–35, p. 3. ³⁶ For Russell’s paradox, see p. 50. The Burali–Forti paradox asserts that the ordinal of the set of all ordinals must necessarily be larger than any of the members of the set, and so would be an ordinal which is not contained in the set of all ordinals. Thus the set of all ordinals is not an allowable set. ³⁷ EE, 344. For Badiou on constructivism as contrasted with Ramsey, Mahlo, and Rowbottom and their work on the ‘large cardinals’, see EE, 342–8. ³⁸ Cantor distinguished between Zahl and Anzahl, number in its cardinal sense and number as an ordering of elements. See Joseph W. Dauben, ‘The Development of Cantorian Set Theory’, in I. Grattan-Guinness (ed.), From the Calculus to Set Theory, 1630–1910: An Introductory History (London: Duckworth, 1980), 181–219, p. 195. ³⁹ I take my example from E. J. Borowski and J. M. Borwein, Collins Dictionary of Mathematics (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2002), 65.

12

Introduction

real numbers and that of the natural numbers, because there are not as many numbers in the second infinity as there are in the first.⁴⁰ Equally, there are numbers like inaccessible cardinals that cannot be ‘reached from below’, that is, by a process of addition. Thus cardinality takes on a life of its own. With the power set axiom, this life takes on staggering proportions. The power set axiom—for every set, there is always its power set⁴¹—generates new orders of cardinality, an infinitely increasing sequence of infinite cardinals. The consequence of this has been ‘the pursuit of the large cardinals programme’ that ‘has formed the core of modern research into pure set theory’.⁴² This programme has spawned the vast, chimerical creatures that lurk beyond the bounds of the ZF axioms: Mahlo, weakly compact, hyper-Mahlo, ineffable, measurable, Ramsey, supercompact, huge, and n-huge cardinals.⁴³ There is a point at which infinite numbers become too large for set theory to deal with, where infinity escapes numerical treatment. There can also be no set of sets, because its power set will always exist and be larger than it. But size isn’t everything. Infinite cardinals are not only very big indeed. In mathematical terms, they ‘are extraordinarily ill behaved’.⁴⁴ Indeed, bad behaviour, or at least illogical behaviour, seems sadly common in the universe of set theory. Most importantly of all, an infinite set can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with a part of itself—the sets of the natural and even numbers, for example, {0, 1, 2, 3 → n}, {4, 6, 8, 10 → n}—even though there are self-evidently many more numbers in the first set than the second. Dedekind took this to define an infinite set. Or take Cantor’s diagonal argument: according to this, no matter how rationally and completely the mathematical description of a line is constructed, the description clearly generates holes in itself, irrational numbers which it could not itself have taken into account.⁴⁵ Thus the work of exhaustive denumeration proves the truth of non-denumerability. Or take Cohen’s concept of ‘forcing’: there is a restriction on the sets that we can find in the universe of set theory according to the ZF axioms. There are some sets and subsets about which it does ⁴⁰ A rational number √ is any number that can be expressed as a ratio. An irrational number is one that cannot (e.g. π, 2 ). A real number is any rational or irrational number. A natural number is one of the counting numbers (usually identified with the positive integers, 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . etc.). ⁴¹ That is, for every set, there is the set of all its possible groupings: from {a, b, c}, for example, we derive ab, ba, bc, cb, ac, ca. ⁴² Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 101. ⁴³ I take my list from Ian Stewart, From Here to Infinity: A Guide to Today’s Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 69. ⁴⁴ Pollard, Philosophical Introduction, 68. ⁴⁵ For a more detailed account of the diagonal proof, see p. 53.

Introduction

13

not allow mathematicians to talk. But Cohen showed that it was possible to add such sets to the universe of set theory by a method of ‘forcing’. As a consequence of forcing, in the words of one mathematical study, ‘marvellous things happen’.⁴⁶ Marvellous, but disconcerting: it becomes possible to prove, as Cantor so devoutly wished to, that the power set of the first, smallest infinite cardinal is equal to the second infinite cardinal. This is known as Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis, and is represented as 2ℵ0 = ℵ1 . The trouble is that it also becomes possible to prove that 2ℵ0 = ℵ2 , 2ℵ0 = ℵ3 and so on. The position of 2ℵ0 in the sequence of infinite cardinals is, in fact, not only undetermined but ‘extravagantly undetermined’.⁴⁷ Furthermore, to the concepts of monstrosity and extravagance, we must also add that of trauma or catastrophe, in the sense in which Hallett writes of the ‘traumatic’ or ‘catastrophic’ stages in the development of numbers.⁴⁸ He is thinking of the limit ordinals, ω, for example, the first limit ordinal or transfinite number.⁴⁹ Cantor produced it according to a Hemmungsprinzip, a principle of limitation which breaks up the sequence of ordinals. Cantor considers three principles according to which numbers can be generated in a sequence. The first is the familiar addition of a unit to another already formed: 0, 1, 2, 3 −→ n. The second principle, however, is the important one: if a definite succession of real integers (like the one just indicated) is defined of which there is no greatest, ‘a new number is created, defined as the next greatest to them all’.⁵⁰ This number is ω, the first limit ordinal; that is, the first number greater than all the finite numbers, a limit which the sequence 0, 1, 2, 3 . . . approaches but never attains. It is precisely with the creation of ω that Cantor opens up the new mathematical dimension of what he called the transfinite. The first transfinite number expresses the natural, regular order of the entire set of finite ordinals as a limit which the natural numbers approach but never reach. Badiou puts the point like this: where Hegel sees only a supposedly unending sequence, Cantor’s actual infinity requires ‘another place’, the limit ordinal, another initial point of being (EE, 184). Of course, once we have ω, the second principle can be applied all over again: ω + 1, ω + 2 −→ ω + ω. This produces a second ⁴⁶ J. N. Crossley, C. N. Ash, A. C. Brickhill, J. C. Stillwell, and N. H. Williams, What is Mathematical Logic? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 77. For helpful accounts of forcing, see pp. 70–7; Tiles, Philosophy, 185–91; and AB, 344–5. For further discussion here, see pp. 65–7. ⁴⁷ Pollard, Philosophical Introduction, 69. ⁴⁸ Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 114. ⁴⁹ For further discussion, see pp. 48–9. ⁵⁰ Tiles, Philosophy, 104–5.

14

Introduction

number class. According to a third principle, Cantor then generates ω1 , the second limit ordinal, in other words, the next number greater than all of the numbers belonging to the second number class; and so on.⁵¹ It is in this sense that a limit ordinal institutes a ‘traumatic’ breach. This particular concept of the limit is also appropriate to Beckett, notably in the Trilogy. The universe of set theory bristles with strange features: infinite cardinals can be doubled and remain the same size.⁵² If a is an infinite cardinal then by definition we have a = a + 1. But therefore a + 0 = a + 1, and we apparently have the contradiction 0 = 1.⁵³ The ‘non-commutativity’ of transfinite ordinals means that the sum of two elements in a given order is not the same as the sum of the same two elements when the order is reversed: a + b = b + a. It would not be hard to continue this list. As Pierre Verstraeten points out, the virtue of set theory, and the advantage it has over ‘other modes of thought’, is that it presents the multiple in terms of strict consistencies, but without cancelling out the inconsistency from which they spring.⁵⁴ Thus the most demanding and rigorously logical procedures unceasingly produce, require, or run up against lacunae, discontinuities, and incongruities. It may seem as though I have resorted to an overly dramatic language to convey the point, that I have converted the universe of set theory into a kind of Disneyland of number. My intention is something like the reverse. I have simply scooped up the daubs of colour in my account from mathematicians’ own non-mathematical accounts of their own work. But much more importantly, I have tried to highlight the strange richness of actual infinity, not just because Badiou does, but because he also repeatedly emphasizes what he calls its ‘neutral banality’ (CS, 164). The paradox is crucial, and we must try to think it through as rigorously as we can with reference to both Badiou and Beckett: number exists as both ‘une foisonnante diversit´e et une sourde monotonie’ (‘an abundant diversity and a dull monotony’, NN, 227). What in one respect are ‘myriad multiplicities’ are, in another, virtually indistinguishable (ibid.). The prolific richness of ⁵¹ According to the third principle, all numbers formed after ω should be such that the aggregate of numbers preceding each one should have the same power (or cardinality) as the first number class, i.e. it should be possible to put them into one-to-one correspondence with that class. This then logically implies ω1 . ⁵² See Ian Stewart, Concepts of Modern Mathematics (New York: Dover, 1995), 135. ⁵³ The examples are from T. S. Blyth, Set Theory and Algebra (London: Longman, 1975), 80, 88. Blyth demonstrates the second point in helpful, pictorial form. ⁵⁴ Pierre Verstraeten, ‘Philosophies de l’´ev´enement: Badiou et quelques autres’, Les Temps modernes, 529–30 (Aug.–Sept. 1990), 241–94, p. 242.

Introduction

15

actual infinity is also a ‘flatness endless’, to quote a Miltonic, Milton-inverting inversion from Beckett’s Lessness (CSP, 199). In set theory as in Beckett, the invention or discovery of a host of precise and exquisite differences is inseparable from the confirmation of a principle of sameness. Badiou associates this ‘ingrate identit´e formelle’, this ‘intractable formal identity’ (EE, 271) with actual infinity. I quote his phrase because it echoes a sentence from Beckett’s Assez that Badiou himself repeatedly quotes: ‘Terre ingrate, mais pas totalement.’⁵⁵ Beckett’s English version of this is ‘Stony ground, but not entirely’ (CSP, 187). When Badiou quotes Beckett’s French, however, he appears to think of ‘terre ingrate’ as principally meaning ‘thankless Earth’. The features of actual infinity may in one respect seem curious, intriguing, even scintillating. But there is another respect in which actual infinity lacks feature and is therefore thankless. If it is ‘not entirely’ intractable, that is because, in principle, it can always be supplemented. To understand the point, we should note Badiou’s logic, as startlingly conveyed by a kind of shrug at the end of Le Nombre et les nombres, 15.1 (NN, 174–5). In 15.1, Badiou confronts the ‘fourmillement [welter]’ of numbers. Numbers are themselves innumerable. They exceed the ordinals beyond all reason: ‘this ‘‘more than’’ vacillates beyond the thresholds of sense’ (‘ce ‘‘plus’’ vacille au-del`a des lisi`eres du sens’). For each ordinal, there will be as many more different numbers as there are parts of the ordinal. The ordinals themselves are ‘an inconsistent multiplicity’. By how incalculably much more so, then, is the number of numbers. Indeed, given any particular ordinal, the exact quantity of the set of its parts is in any case unknowable, ‘undecidably’ in excess of it. The number of numbers is an inconsistency of inconsistencies. It is precisely at this point in his argument that Badiou shrugs: ‘in reality, the easiest thing to say is simply this: Number is co-extensive with Being.’ We should also underline one particular feature of the mathematical account of actual infinity, not least because it is relevant to Beckett. As Badiou puts matters, mathematics thinks the presentation of the multiple independently of questions of time and space.⁵⁶ Cantor argued that ‘spatial as well as temporal intuition and likewise all psychological elements must ⁵⁵ AS, 11; cf. CS, 366. ⁵⁶ See EE, 293. Badiou insists on the point with regard to time, rebuking the eminent mathematician Gilles Chˆatelet for stressing mathematics as a means to liberation from spatial but not from temporal ‘slavery’. See his review of Chˆatelet’s Les Enjeux du mobile: Math´ematique, physique, philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1993) in ‘Les Gestes de la pens´ee’, Les Temps modernes, 586 (Jan.–Feb. 1996), 196–204, p. 203. Chˆatelet’s book is translated as Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, tr. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993).

16

Introduction

be kept out of the concepts and basic propositions of arithmetic’.⁵⁷ To conceive of infinity as a temporal or spatial question is to ignore the fact that neither time nor space ‘comes first’. For both presuppose an independent concept of continuity. Time and space are constructed with the help of a continuum conceptually fashioned and already available. We should rather use a mathematical theory of the continuum to clarify our concepts of time and space. The concept of set alone is finally adequate to the infinitely complex structure of the continuum. Mathematical attention to the structure of the continuum makes an appropriate concept of infinity possible. Alas for the romantically and the theologically inclined, gazing up at the night sky does not. Beckett knows this, too: ‘the stars are undoubtedly superb’, he notes, ‘as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God’ (DI, 141). INTERMIT TENCY The concept of actual infinity is one pole of Badiou’s philosophical universe. The other is a specific theory of the event. In essence, Badiou seeks to replace the Hegelian and romantic dyad of potential infinity and human finitude with the dyad of actual infinity and event. The event is ‘the other side or the reverse of mathematics’.⁵⁸ It is a ‘hazardous supplement’ to ‘the indifferent multiplicity of Being’ (MP, 89; CS, 177). It is an aleatory fragment, the chance occurrence of something that had no existence beforehand, could not be predicted or foreseen, and had no prior name. The event is the means by which the truth of newness enters the world. If the logic of the event puts it at the opposite pole to actual infinity, the two are also intimately bound up with one another. There is always the possibility of an ‘explosive’ movement, an ‘irruption of inconsistency’ into a given situation, and its propagation (EE, 89–90). This movement destroys any illusion that the limits of the situation are the limits of the world. But such movements do not happen often. This is cardinal: in Badiou’s philosophical system, the event has only ‘a rare existence’ (ES, 60; italics mine).⁵⁹ ⁵⁷ Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 121. ⁵⁸ ‘L’Ontologie implicite de Spinoza’, in Myriam Revault d’Allonnes and Hadi Rizk (eds.), Spinoza: Puissance et ontologie (Paris: Kim´e, 1994), 54–70, p. 69. What Badiou takes to be Spinoza’s implicit (as opposed to his professed) ontology involves an apprehension of the event. ⁵⁹ In Ren´e Pesson’s phrase, the event is as rare for Badiou as the psychoanalyst is for Lacan, or authenticity for Heidegger. See review of Manifeste pour la philosophie, in Annuaire philosophique 1988–1990 (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 243–51, p. 250.

Introduction

17

The concept of a universe structured in terms of actual infinity and event has an undeniable descriptive power. Badiou himself becomes progressively more convinced of the persuasiveness of his model. In ‘Philosophie et math´ematique’ (1989), he restricted himself to calling for the spread of modern mathematical concepts beyond mathematics itself. By the time he writes Le Si`ecle (2005), however, he is effectively claiming that certain aspects of twentieth-century culture, particularly its art, are best described in terms of actual infinity and the event.⁶⁰ He suggests that, in much modern art and music—Schoenberg, Malevich, and Duchamp, for example—‘the infinite is nothing other than the finite itself’ (LS, 219). It would not be hard to find literary equivalents of this; indeed, it would not be hard to construct a tradition of literary versions of actual infinity running from Mallarm´e, Kafka, and Finnegans Wake through Roussel, Borges, and the nouveau roman to Perec and Ashbery. Modern art has also turned towards the event, or the possibility of the event. Modern art knows that it has no objective status. It knows that it does not incarnate any prior idea in its supposed wholeness and unity. In its resistance to objectification and its practice of ‘disincarnation’, modern art becomes increasingly concerned with ‘pr´ecarit´es e´v´enementielles’. The most radical examples of this are installations, happenings, and jazz (ibid.). Here, again, it would not be hard to describe a many-sided modern literature of the event, including Mallarm´e, Kafka, Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Imagism, William Carlos Williams and various traditions in post-war American poetry. There is, however, a problem, here. I shall pursue its implications throughout this book. If Badiou decides emphatically in favour of his model, the cost, at least in principle, is a decisive evacuation of history from thought (of a kind that, significantly, has often been associated with Beckett). For Badiou sees the event as founding historicity. It is the very principle of history.⁶¹ History is external to the State. Revolutions, new artistic inventions, and new scientific discoveries plunge us into historicity, but history is solely a trajectory in the wake of an event. Otherwise, philosophy must forget both history and the ⁶⁰ More precisely, this is true of art before what Le Si`ecle refers to as the Restoration, that is, the period of political reaction that begins around 1980. ⁶¹ Interestingly, Badiou’s fellow-philosopher Franc¸oise Proust gets a very similar definition of history from Kant. See Kant: Le Ton de l’histoire (Paris: Payot, 1991), 26–7. The similarity is the ˇ zek’s account of Badiou’s ‘marginalist’ revolutionary purism more striking once set alongside Ziˇ ˇ zek, ‘Le Malaise dans la subjectivation politique’, as Kantian and anti-Hegelian. See Slavov Ziˇ Actuel Marx, 28 (2000), 137–52, pp. 151–2. Badiou is expressly scathing about the contemporary ‘ ‘‘return to Kant’’ ’ (ES, 8).

18

Introduction

supposed ‘forgetting’ of the history of philosophy, and choose autonomous legislation (CS, 59). That is, it must assume responsibility for certain axioms of thought. There is no historical tale to be told; or rather, the narration of the historical tale is always a function of the State. In this respect, Badiou is critical of Marxist historiography: through its narrative and its philosophy of history, Marxism became a form of knowledge, rather than an innovative praxis. But if the event is the rare source of truth, value, even history, what of the commonplace ‘terre ingrate’? In Badiou’s philosophy, the world of events is the sole source of value. From its point of view, the situations to which events are counterposed and into which they break constitute a negligible historical residue. I shall call this residue ‘the remainder’. The term is my translation of ‘le reste’, a word that appears specifically in ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’, a long and difficult essay that Badiou published in two parts in 1985.⁶² Keeping Beckett in mind makes me attach far more significance to the term than Badiou himself would wish to. Ontological discourse must separate itself from temporal or spatial reference, so the remainder cannot strictly be characterized as a ‘dead time’ or space. But we can none the less give it an empirical identity. Indeed, we can do so with reference precisely to the events that are significant for Badiou (artistic, political, scientific, the event of love. These constitute what for Badiou are the four truth-domains). Here the remainder is the psychic deprivation of lovelessness; political oppression or reaction; the triumph of conservatism in the arts and of obscurantism over the sciences. By implication, since events are rare, the remainder comprises and must comprise the larger part of historical experience. Badiou does not theorize the remainder as such. It is antithetical to a purely affirmative philosophy.⁶³ My argument is that, however liberated from ‘the pathos of finitude’, a universe structured in terms of actual infinity and event ⁶² ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’, Ornicar? Revue du camp freudien, 32 (Jan.–Mar. 1985), 39–67, and 33 (Apr.–June 1985), 120–49. The term in the original French has a history and a specific meaning, particularly in Lacanian discourse, in which ‘1e reste’ is the remainder of language (that which falls outside it). Since psychoanalysis is the central theme in ‘Six propri´et´es’, Badiou is clearly aware of the Lacanian derivation of the term. However, as my references to ‘Six propri´et´es’ throughout the book will make clear, he also gives it a different sense. In a recent short piece on Lacan, Badiou actually uses the term ‘remainder’ itself: ‘To act is to tear out anxiety’s certitude. To act is to accomplish a transference of anxiety! And yes! Our anxiety [as political activists between 1968 and 1978] was only the remainder of a massive affect transferred to action.’ See ‘Lacan, Seminar, Book X: Anxiety’, lacanian ink, 26 (Fall 2005), 70–2. ⁶³ Cf. Peter Hallward, ‘Depending on Inconsistency: Badiou’s Answer to the ‘‘Guiding Question of All Contemporary Philosophy’’ ’, in Wilkens (ed.), Philosophy, 11–25, p. 23, p. 25 n. 20. On the ‘precise point’ he specifies, Hallward is exactly right to oppose Badiou to Agamben. His argument is obviously relevant to my own, particularly in my Conclusion.

Introduction

19

cannot be immune to a pathos of its own. I call this the ‘pathos of intermittency’, borrowing my second term from Daniel Bensa¨ıd.⁶⁴ According to Badiou’s Ethics, the ordinary situation ‘of the human animal’ is determined by self-interest on the one hand and opinion on the other (ES, 46). Its behaviour ‘is a matter of what Spinoza calls ‘‘perseverance in being’’, which is nothing other than the pursuit of interest, or the conservation of self. This perseverance is the law that governs some-one insofar as he knows himself. . . . To belong to the situation is everyone’s natural destiny . . . ’ (ibid.). Within the situation, opinion (‘presentations without truth’, ‘the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge’, ES, 50) will prevail. The event is ‘an immanent break [in a situation] in which the human animal finds its principle of survival—its interest [and its attachment to opinion]—disorganized’ (ibid.). But the inertia of any given situation is properly formidable. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of politics, though it is not the only possible example and I no more want to privilege the political instance than Badiou himself does.⁶⁵ Badiou explicitly accepts Rousseau’s argument that ‘politics is rare’ (EE, 379). Politics is born of an allegiance to an event. But such an allegiance is not common. Furthermore, it is precarious. As Rousseau puts matters, ‘there is an inherent and inevitable vice which, from the birth of the body politic, tends unrelentingly to destroy it’ (ibid.).⁶⁶ Politics is also inherently ‘fragile’ (EE, 380). It is not necessary, does not have to be at all, and does not usually happen. We should stress the delicacy and complexity of the event in Badiou’s account of it. The event is characteristically ‘vulnerable’ (EE, 241). It may expire in the very instant of its appearance. Its origins are enigmatic, and it may pass unnoticed or fail to have consequences. Events can be smothered, obliterated, misconstrued, abandoned, and betrayed. ⁶⁴ Bensa¨ıd characterizes Badiou’s (and Ranci`ere’s) concept of truth, politics, and the subject as ‘intermittent’. See ‘Alain Badiou et le miracle de l’´ev´enement’, in R´esistances: Essai de taupologie g´en´erale (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 143–70, pp. 154–5. ⁶⁵ This is a misgiving I would have about Jason Barker’s otherwise helpful Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2002). But it also applies to much current writing on Badiou in the UK and USA, even, in some measure, Hallward’s. Contrast Badiou’s critique of suture as practised by Althusser in ‘Qu’est-ce que Louis Althusser entend par ‘‘philosophie’’?’, in Sylvain Lazarus (ed.), Politique et philosophie dans l’œuvre de Louis Althusser (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 29–45, p. 42. ⁶⁶ See book III, chapter x of the Social Contract. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract, tr. with introd. and notes by Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford ˇ zek’s critique of Badiou and Ranci`ere University Press, 1994), 118–20, especially at p. 118. Cf. Ziˇ as caught ‘in the snare of ‘‘marginalist’’ politics’ in which ‘momentary explosions of an ‘‘impossible’’ radical politicization contain the seeds of their own failure’ and abruptly retreat ‘before the existing ˇ zek, ‘Le Malaise’, 145. Order’. Ziˇ

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Badiou’s conception of events is therefore characteristically austere. He summarily kills off the contemporary prestige of both a post-Heideggerian romance of Ereignis and a post-Deleuzean romance of becoming.⁶⁷ That events are rare and frail, however, does not mean that Being is not inherently unstable. The crucial issue, here, is what Badiou calls the State. Within the structure of the State, a part functions or appears, reductively, as the whole of Being. Thus, for example, as Badiou so brilliantly and scathingly argues in Le Nombre et les nombres, contemporary economism functions according to a pitifully narrow reduction of the infinity of number.⁶⁸ This prevents any manifestation of the principle of the whole, which is inconsistency. It makes for ‘closure and assurance’ (EE, 114), and protects the supposed ‘normality’ of a specific, given situation from the destabilizing force of the event. The State masks or represses or holds at bay the instability of Being. Badiou’s grim realism on this point is refreshing and persuasive: in any ordinary situation, the weight of the State is likely to be overpowering. The event is unlikely and, if it takes place, is unlikely to have effects. Badiou’s emphasis on the rarity of the event, however, dates only from the late 1980s. The Maoist and dialectical materialist of the 1970s and early 1980s held a different view, and here we must give priority to politics since, throughout the 1970s, Badiou did so. For a decade or so after 1968, politics constitutes the very stuff of his thought. Badiou was always inclined to give short shrift to historical materialism and its assumption of the explanatory power of historical contexts. His scepticism went far enough for him to question the theory of historical causality in Marx’s Capital.⁶⁹ Even as early as 1967, he was managing to reconcile what he was calling dialectical with historical materialism only by means of a rather awkward resort to set theory. However, at this point, he merely understood dialectical materialism Althusserianly, as a Marxist ‘science of science’.⁷⁰ ⁶⁷ Badiou takes Deleuze to task precisely for putting the event everywhere. See for instance his review of Deleuze’s Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque in Annuaire philosophique 1988–1989 (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 161–84, p. 171. Cf. Eric Alliez, ‘Que la v´erit´e soit’, in De l’impossibilit´e de la ph´enom´enologie: Sur la philosophie franc¸aise contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 81–7, p. 83. ⁶⁸ See EE, 112–13. ⁶⁹ See for instance TC, 21–2. ⁷⁰ See ‘Le (Re)commencement du mat´erialisme dialectique’, Critique, 240 (1967), 23/240: 438–67. For all the carefulness of the young Badiou’s account of Althusserian thought, he is patently already uncomfortable with the ‘scientificity’ of Althusserian discourse.

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His ‘road-to-Damascus experience’ (TC, 9)—Paris, May 1968—brusquely released him from this dead-end.⁷¹ As a result of it, he turned to a clarification of what he calls ‘the rational kernel [noyau rationel] of the dialectic’ (NR, 17). From Hegel’s ‘reactionary’ and ‘idealist’ system, he sought ‘materialistically’ to excavate a core concept, which is that of a universe whose principle is one of incessant movement, transformation, and development.⁷² Beginning with Mao as opposed to, say, Engels, Badiou produces what might be called an expanded as opposed to a restricted theory of contradiction.⁷³ The world is grasped as an immense and interminable hubbub of contradictions which know neither resolution nor the peace of synthesis. Any given synthesis is merely the localized point at which a ‘new scission is engendered’ (TC, 65). The contradictions latent in ‘concrete forces’ are themselves split and fissured (DL, 34). Ideologies, classes, histories, subjects, consciousnesses, paradigms (like base/superstructure): all are inhabited by ramifying processes of division and splinter incessantly. In effect, for the Badiou of the 1970s, the law of Being is pure fission, ‘affirmative scission’ (NR, 38), dialectics in its ‘Heraclitean affiliation’ (TC, 51). It is a law precisely conveyed by Mao in his assertion that ‘one ineluctably divides into two’ (DL, 117). The law in question is the ‘rational kernel’ itself (TC, 48). Badiou stresses its ‘ineluctability’. In accordance with this law of Being, events appear in ‘untold wealth’.⁷⁴ Alas, from the late 1970s onwards, a range of different factors—Mao’s death, the rise to power of Deng Hsiao-Ping, the increasing hegemony of neo-liberalism, the sordid treacheries of communist and socialist parties, the failure and breakdown of the French left, the emergence of the ‘nouveaux philosophes’—all appeared to sabotage or disprove the dialectical materialist thesis. Badiou’s faith in it accordingly waned and was drastically modified. The younger Badiou thought that inertia or dialectical ‘negativity’ merely served as a stimulus to another phase of dynamic intervention: ‘every halt ⁷¹ He will soon be stigmatizing Althusser’s thought as anti-dialectical. See DI, 34. Just how stark Badiou’s reversion from the Althusserian dead-end was can be gauged from the vituperations against Althusser in De l’id´eologie. ⁷² For Badiou’s specific account of Hegelian idealism as reactionary, see NR, 23. ⁷³ See TC, 36–48 on the two ways of thinking contradiction, with Mao and (to some extent) Lenin on one side, Engels and Stalin on the other. ⁷⁴ The phrase—‘richesses inou¨ıes’—is specifically applied to working-class uprisings in Badiou’s most notorious essay, ‘Deleuze en plein’, in Cahiers Yenan, 4: La Situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie (Paris: Masp´ero, 1977), 40.

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in the building of socialism’, he declared, ‘demands a new ideological regeneration’ (DL, 70). Throughout the 1980s, however, the robust faith implicit in this assertion steadily leaked away. The key moment comes with ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’. This essay clearly marks a very important stage in his thought. In the first instance, it is here that, for the first time since 1968, he explicitly proposes to dispense with ‘a ‘‘dialectical materialist’’ philosophical referent’.⁷⁵ Here, too, he also provides an early, elaborated theory of truth before he has fully developed his mathematical ontology. In ‘Six propri´et´es’, the truth in question is above all that of the analytic cure. Badiou understands the cure in terms of events or ‘coupures’ which break into a given analytic situation and fracture its language (ibid. 42). These ‘coupures’ produce a subject who in turn breaks with established knowledge and embarks on a series of ‘investigations’. A truth divides a situation into two. The division in question separates the truth from its remainder or d´echet. (D´echet means waste matter, though also ‘down and out’ or ‘outcast’, which makes it eminently appropriate to Beckett.) Truths expose ‘negativity’, rather than reactively transmuting it. They reveal what appears to be ‘a prodigious inertia . . . in the bowels of reality’.⁷⁶ The subject of a truth must endure this inertia—and the ennui that it involves—with ‘suppleness’ and tenacity (ibid. 121, 134). We should remember, here, that inertia is a Beckettian word.⁷⁷ But Badiou is probably thinking chiefly of its significance in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Badiou had once taken issue with what he had called the ‘broken dialectic’ of Sartre’s Critique.⁷⁸ In the Sartrean version of it, dialectics is neither pervasive nor caught up in a progressive, forward movement. Sartre asserts that, as existential subjects, we sporadically flare into authenticity, calling ourselves and the world in question. But we are also always bound to lapse back into the ‘massive indifference’ of Being.⁷⁹ The young Badiou found this altogether too gloomy a philosophical construction. By the end of the 1980s, however, he was himself presenting the fissile or explosive process as ‘broken’ or intermittent. Something of the spirit of Sartre’s Critique increasingly hangs over him.⁸⁰ ‘What I call politics’, he asserts, ‘can only be discerned in brief ⁷⁵ ‘ Six propri´et´es’ I, p. 41. ⁷⁶ Ibid., II, p. 121. ⁷⁷ See for instance Beckett to Lawrence Shainberg, 7 Jan. 1983. Quoted Knowlson, DF, 685. ⁷⁸ ‘Le (Re)commencement du mat´erialisme dialectique’, 445. ⁷⁹ See ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, Les Temps modernes, 526 (May 1990), 1–26; and ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, Les Temps modernes, 531–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1990), 1: T´emoins de Sartre, 14–22. ⁸⁰ For Badiou’s own view of his later faithfulness to Sartre, see ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, especially at pp. 19–26.

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sequences, often quickly closed, dissolved in a return to business as usual.’⁸¹ As Hallward aptly suggests, ‘whilst struggling to maintain his strictly political principles’, Badiou increasingly adopts ‘a perspective similar to Sartre’s historical-ephemeral pessimism’ (AB, 43).⁸² Badiou himself evokes this pessimism near the end of Jean-Paul Sartre (1981): ‘Man exists only in flashes, in a savage discontinuity that is always finally reabsorbed into inertia.’⁸³ This judgement on the Critique seems to anticipate much of his own development. Indeed, the very phrasing of the judgement echoes on at least as far as Le Si`ecle (2005), where ‘fraternity’ in particular is announced as a ‘discontinuous passion’ which ‘exists only as ‘‘moments’’ ’, whether within political movements, avant-gardes, or mathematical circles (LS, 155).⁸⁴ After 1985, Badiou mainly formulates the remainder mathematically, in terms of actual infinity, situations, and the State. This neutral formulation reflects his strictly philosophical perspective. However, it does not enter into his accounts of the four truth-domains. Badiou repeatedly asserts the imperative of philosophical modesty in the face of truths.⁸⁵ But his philosophical perspective on the remainder is usually superior and detached. From the perspective of both the ‘terre ingrate’ itself and the events that traverse it, however, the remainder is not neutral. The transforming power of the event casts a bleak light into the shadows that it does not transform. What I call the pathos of intermittency is generated in the gap between events and their remainder. Badiou expressly repudiates any ‘path´etique transcendentale’.⁸⁶ It implies a passivity that is antithetical to his own insistence on ‘active force’.⁸⁷ Yet, as we’ll see, the pathos of intermittency repeatedly shows itself at the edges or just ⁸¹ Quoted Bensa¨ıd, ‘Alain Badiou’, 163. ⁸² Cf. Eustache Kouv´elakis, ‘La Politique dans ses limites, ou les paradoxes d’Alain Badiou’, Actuel Marx, 28 (2000), 39–54, p. 47. ⁸³ Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Potemkine, 1981), 14. This work is part obituary, part critical pamphlet, and part meditation on an early influence to whom, however unconsciously, Badiou himself will increasingly be drawn back. For another use of the same metaphor, see ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, 22. ⁸⁴ The same point is evident, in a different fashion, in the gulf that yawns between Badiou’s early optimism and his later pessimism regarding the political will of the masses. The young Badiou asserts that ‘les masses pensent . . . et les masses pensent juste’ (DL, 100). More recently, however, he has asked, ‘Where is this ‘‘creative’’ capacity of the multitudes?’ The question is followed by a critique of ‘the repertoire of movements belonging to the petit-bourgeois masses’. See ‘Beyond Formalization: An Interview with Alain Badiou’ (typescript), conducted by Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels (Paris, July 2002), tr. Bruno Bosteels and Alberto Toscano. ⁸⁵ See for instance ‘Art et philosophie’, PM, 9–29, pp. 21–9. ⁸⁶ ‘Sur le livre de Franc¸oise Proust, Le Ton de l’histoire’, Les Temps modernes, 565–6 (Aug.–Sept. 1993), 238–48, p. 246. ⁸⁷ ‘Depuis longtemps, depuis si peu de temps’, Rue Descartes, 33 (Oct. 2001), 101–4, p. 103.

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under the surface of his work. He registers it in a political context: adopting a phrase with which Mallarm´e summed up the years after 1880, for example, he writes of counter-revolutionary epochs, like the one that followed the defeat of the Commune, as times in which ‘a present is lacking’. Such epochs are ‘captive to the idea that nothing begins or is going to begin’ (LS, 197).⁸⁸ Intermittency also affects cultural history, as Badiou notes with regard to the vanished (socialist and anarchist) ‘th´eaˆtre de combat’ 1880–1914.⁸⁹ Commenting on Breton’s Arcane 17, he writes very strikingly of a negativity in modern love whereby ‘the weight of suffering endured seems bound to engulf everything’.⁹⁰ In the case of Sartre, as we’ve seen, he recognizes the pathos of intermittency in a philosopher to whom he has been close, but whom he is also concerned to hold at a certain distance. In the case of Lyotard, by contrast, it is precisely a thought of intermittency that he conjures up to leaven what he sees as Lyotard’s later pessimism. Badiou profoundly agrees with Lyotard on the crucial importance of thinking multiplicity, events, and singularities. But Lyotard increasingly despairs of politics. He ends up believing that Capital is ‘the nocturnal name of Being’ itself, that we cannot escape ‘the night’ in which we find ourselves (‘la nuit o`u nous sommes’) and which is the consequence of ‘the obsolescence and deletion [rature] of politics’. Badiou agrees that it is no longer possible to believe in politically transformative action. But politics is not of this order: ‘It is of the order of thought. It aims, not at transformation, but at the creation of possibilities that could not previously be formulated.’⁹¹ However, these will be ‘disparate’ and disjoined.⁹² They occur as interruptions of ‘the melancholy drift [d´erive] of capital itself’.⁹³ ⁸⁸ Cf. Badiou’s presentation of Joan of Arc as an exception to a ‘miserable epoch’, ‘L’Insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit, 238 (Dec. 1997), 26–33, p. 28. ⁸⁹ See ‘Preface: Destin politique du th´eaˆtre, hier, maintenant’, in Johny Ebstein, Philippe Ivernel, Monique Surel-Tupin, and Sylvie Thomas (eds.), Au temps de l’anarchie: Un th´eaˆ tre de combat 1880–1914, 3 vols. (Paris: S´eguier, 2001), i. 7–14. ⁹⁰ Andr´e Breton, Arcane 17 (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1971), 115, translation mine. Cf. LS, 197–207. ⁹¹ That politics is ‘intellectuality’ in the first and determining instance is for Badiou an Althusserian principle. See ‘Qu’est-ce que Louis Althusser entend par ‘‘philosophie’’?’, 29. This is his best and most sympathetic essay on Althusser. ⁹² ‘Le Gardiennage du matin’, in Dolor`es Lyotard, Jean-Claude Milner, and G´erald Sfez, JeanFranc¸ois Lyotard: L’Exercice du diff´erend (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 101–11, pp. 104–5. ⁹³ Ibid. 101. Interestingly, this emphasis is already apparent in Badiou’s 1984 essay on Lyotard. See ‘Custos, quid noctis?’, Critique, 40/450 (Nov. 1984), 851–63, p. 862. However, the point is missing in his contribution to the debate on The Differend at the Coll`ege Internationale de Philosophie in 1989, where he was mainly concerned to accuse Lyotard of reducing the multiple to the unitary principle. See ‘D´ebat g´en´eral’, in Francis Guibal and Jacob Rogozˆınski (eds.), T´emoigner

Introduction

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As this quotation suggests, in fact, Badiou cannot wholly escape a sense of the pathos of intermittency. Science is the only domain that concerns him in which no such pathos seems perceptible, specifically in the case of mathematics. Art stands at the opposite pole. The pathos of intermittency is chiefly evident in art, and notably in literature. Above all, it flickers insistently in Badiou’s accounts of the modern poets who most grip him. Indeed, it is reflected in his very choice of poets: however sedulous the effort to pick a way round their melancholy, it would hardly have been possible to write about Mandelstam, Pessoa, and Celan without also evoking it. But it is not only modern poets in whom, in spite of himself, Badiou detects a particular form of pathos. The great comparison of Corneille with Racine in Rhapsodie pour le th´eaˆtre (RT, 58–61) provides a more out-of-the-way example. The contrast Badiou establishes is between Jansenist fatalism on the one hand and the pathos of intermittency on the other. For Racine, politics does not exist (remembering, here, that what Badiou calls politics always begins with an event). The State is all-powerful in its vigilance and cruelty. Victims are hapless, weak. Love is evanescent and finally inane. Furthermore, and crucially in the context of my argument, Racine does not mourn the loss of politics (‘il n’en porte nul deuil’). A Racine play is an infernal machine, ‘un montage de diamantaire’. By contrast, Corneille ‘knows the torment of the Idea’. He was schooled by the events of Richelieu and the Fronde.⁹⁴ His struggle is to keep politics alive, to believe in its persistence in inauspicious times. When he recognizes, presumably after the defeat of the Frondeurs’ challenge to the supremacy of the monarchy, that, for the foreseeable future, politics is finished—‘that nothing is happening any longer’ (‘que plus rien se passe’, writes Badiou, Beckettianly)—Corneille chooses to sustain an ‘anguished memory’ of it in the creation of great ‘melancholics’ and ‘suicidal figures’. These are his ‘sentimentaux de la politique’. Corneille transcends Racine’s inexorable reality precisely in the desolate magnificence of his later protagonists. OLD EXTINGUISHER Beckett’s preference was the exact reverse of Badiou’s. According to Knowlson, he shared both Thomas Rudmose-Brown’s ‘deep love for Racine’s plays’ and le diff´erend: Quand phraser ne peut: Autour de Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard (Paris: Osiris, 1989), 87–126. For Badiou’s contribution, see pp. 109–13. ⁹⁴ I take it that Badiou is thinking of Richelieu’s inclusion of Corneille among the group of les cinq auteurs, for which Richelieu provided the inspiration himself.

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‘his antipathy to Corneille’s’ (DF, 49).⁹⁵ Badiou rightly asserts that Beckett’s world is not constructed on rigorously deterministic principles.⁹⁶ In this respect, it is unlike Racine’s and a little more like Badiou’s own. But the narrow yet profound difference between the two tastes is none the less indicative. The preference for Corneille on the one hand and for Racine on the other points us quite exactly to two very different shadings of a mutual vision. My thesis is this: Badiou and Beckett both structure their universe in terms of actual infinity, the event, and its remainder. Both shrink the scope of one of the three terms. But the two terms that they respectively diminish are different ones, and are diminished in different ways. On the one hand, whilst Badiou largely banishes the remainder to the margins of philosophy, as beneath thought, though without entirely annulling it, Beckett locates his work squarely within it, as the stuff of art. On the other hand, whilst a concept of the reality and truth of events is everywhere central to Badiou’s thought, one can hardly claim this of Beckett. Beckett’s world is one in which, by an ungainsayable logic, the event is always theoretically possible, to the extent that his characters invoke it and even appear to recall it, that his works conjure it, mimic it, assess the conditions that might make it possible. But it is also none the less a world in which the event can scarcely be said to take place at all (though it has many more or less ironic simulacra). Alongside Badiou’s quotation from Assez, we should place Winnie in Happy Days: ‘Ah earth you old extinguisher’ (CDW, 153). Beckett’s is not only a world of ‘broken dialectic’. It is, emphatically, Lyotard’s nocturnal world, Mallarm´e’s world without a present. As Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot repeatedly state, nothing wholly dooms it to be so. There is no stark and absolute law in Beckett of the kind that so swiftly dooms Ph`edre to ineluctable disaster. This is a crucial point. Badiou is right: there is no Beckettian trap that automatically snaps shut, as there is a Racinian one.⁹⁷ But Beckett’s world is none the less not obviously open to transformation or renewal. For this reason, where Badiou vigorously celebrates ⁹⁵ Cf. also DF, 122, 154, 208, 212, 246 and especially 426, where Knowlson helpfully discusses the influence of ‘Racinian claustrophobia’ on Beckett’s drama. For a suggestive account of the relationship between Racine and Beckett, see Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 73–87. ⁹⁶ To be exact: in Badiou’s version of him, Beckett before 1960 is at least Racinian insofar as he is inclined to ‘a sombre belief in predestination’ (BK, 40). By contrast, the later Beckett is unRacinian insofar as he is concerned to examine the minimal conditions of freedom. ⁹⁷ In lecturing on Racine at Trinity College Dublin, Beckett himself apparently referred to the typical Racinian ‘situation circle’. See C. J. Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, Cuardenos de literatura inglesa y norteamericana, 3/1 (May 1998), 77–102, p. 80.

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the intermittency of truth, for Beckett, it is a source above all of pathos and laughter.⁹⁸ To the idea, crucial to Badiou’s conception of philosophy, that the world should not be as it is, Beckett adds pathos: it is seldom that the world even briefly promises that it might be otherwise. He also adds laughter: our plausible and seemingly irrepressible reasons for revolt against the world can all too easily also seem absurd. From this vantage point, at least, Badiou and Beckett might seem to serve as custodians of the embers of the Enlightenment project for a new century, the one pugnaciously, the other ironically and melancholically. To a far greater extent than he would acknowledge, like Beckett, Badiou is a writer of vestiges. In suggesting as much, however, I don’t mean to diminish the importance of either. Quite the reverse: as we shall increasingly see, the problematic at the heart of Badiou and Beckett’s work is of major contemporary significance. Indeed, by the end of this book, I shall be arguing that both writers make crucial interventions into what Agamben has defined as a new field of thought. But a large difficulty appears at this point. It is not hard to think of Beckett as writing the remainder and the missing event. But it may not be obvious that his work evokes an actually infinite universe; this in spite of the fact that some critics have edged towards the idea.⁹⁹ True, where Badiou writes of the ‘absolute pulverulence’ of Being,¹⁰⁰ Beckett writes of art as ‘a disfaction, a d´esuni, an Ungebund . . . a blizzard of electrons’ (DI, 49). But a shared concern with atomization is not a sufficient link. For Badiou, set theory provides us with an expression of actual infinity. Beckett’s interest in mathematics has long been recognized. Ackerley in particular has shown how pervasive mathematical references are in his work. It is by no means immediately clear, however, that we can jump from scattered if widespread tokens of interest in mathematics in general to the idea that Beckett provides us with a literary equivalent of the set-theoretic universe. The problem is made the more difficult by the fact that, for many mathematicians and philosophers interested in mathematics, there can be no such ‘equivalent’, save as a product of loose thinking. As we’ve seen, for Aristotle and the classical finitists, actual infinity has no empirical meaning. Wittgenstein is even harsher: mathematical statements can simply not be construed as statements about the non-mathematical world, and therefore have no cognitive content. Set theory is a ‘cancerous growth’, and rather than clarifying notions (like infinity) that are common in everyday life, it merely ⁹⁸ On Beckettian laughter, see Simon Critchley on Beckett in On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 47–50, 105–6, 109–11. ⁹⁹ See for instance Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, 15. ¹⁰⁰ ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, 24.

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adds to the confusion.¹⁰¹ Whilst Russell was initially much more enthusiastic for set theory, he defended it, above all, as opening up ‘the Platonic world of unchanging, eternal ‘‘forms’’ ’, not as having any empirical bearing.¹⁰² Furthermore, when it comes to the relation between the mathematical and non-mathematical worlds, modern mathematicians themselves sometimes coincide with classical finitists. If, for Aristotle, we have no need for a concept of infinity in our ordinary dealings with the real, physical world, the same is true for David Hilbert.¹⁰³ In general, many mathematicians would agree with Hermann Weyl that there is a ‘deep chasm’ between everyday experience and mathematical representation.¹⁰⁴ For others, however, notably Dedekind and Cantor, the separation of abstraction from concrete particulars is a false one. Rigorously considered, descriptions of the physical world are always rooted in abstract theories. Ordinary language is in fact capable of expressing mathematical concepts. But it resists the presentation of multiples of multiples, and therefore expresses them unclearly. Set theory provides determinate and coherent concepts for what are vague and possibly incoherent notions in ordinary discourse. Cantor subscribed to the same Platonic theory of mathematics as did the young Russell. But he also believed that number has a ‘transubjective’ or transient reality in the physical world.¹⁰⁵ He insisted that the transfinite numbers of set theory existed in concreto.¹⁰⁶ They are required for any explanation of natural phenomena that aspires to be complete. The problem with the position I have summarized by quoting Weyl is not its assumptions about mathematics but its assumptions about everyday experience. Here the most wildly adventurous mathematicians can sound oddly staid: unlike set theory, it would seem, the nature of everyday experience is a matter of common sense. Pollard wittily demonstrates, for example, what happens to Romeo and Juliet in a set-theoretic universe: commonsense questions start to get weird answers.¹⁰⁷ But this does not prove that the universe of set theory is incompatible with the real-life world, only that there is a poor fit between set theory and one kind of construction of real life, one specific form of aesthetic practice. Pollard seems not to have read Robbe-Grillet or Mark Ford. As Tiles ¹⁰¹ Quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 439. See also pp. 328–9, p. 468. ¹⁰² Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Vintage, 1997), 159. In any case, Monk’s book makes it clear that Russell increasingly felt defeated by Wittgenstein’s arguments. ¹⁰³ See Tiles, Philosophy, 17. ¹⁰⁴ See Hermann Weyl, The Continuum (Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1987), 93. ¹⁰⁵ See Dauben, Georg Cantor, 132. ¹⁰⁶ See ibid. 145. ¹⁰⁷ See Pollard, Philosophical Introduction, 46–51.

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says, the universe is, surely, actually infinite, and, if we cannot experience it as an actually existing infinite totality, we can none the less conceptualize our experience of the physical world in relation to an actual infinity.¹⁰⁸ In practice, at least, Badiou agrees with Cantor and Dedekind. Mathematics presents the infinity of being ‘in its most abstract form’ (EE, 164, my italics). Once he chooses to consider nature and the State—let alone love, subjectivity, and immigrant workers without papers—in mathematical terms, he has effectively decided in Cantor and Dedekind’s favour: actual infinity is concrete. But he is not keen to say so; rather the reverse. For him as for mathematicians themselves, set theory offers formally exact descriptions of actual infinity where ordinary language is chronically inexact. ‘There is no infra-mathematical concept of infinity’, he asserts, austerely, ‘merely vague images of the ‘‘very large’’ ’ (EE, 164). He is therefore deeply distrustful of any smooth move from mathematical thought to empirical world, not least by way of examples. This is partly responsible for the extreme abstraction of his ontology, which Hallward has repeatedly and I think successfully problematized.¹⁰⁹ But, since Badiou is wary, in this respect, of a logic to which he must himself remain attached, the abstraction of his thought also has a curious and specific character, flirting here and there with the very empirical substantiations from which it otherwise maintains a principled aloofness. Interestingly, at least one such ‘flirtation’ runs directly counter to the spirit of Cantor. Cantor dismissed the concept of infinitesimals—infinitely small quantities, smaller than any assignable ones—in the most peremptory fashion. He saw them as one of the ‘ghosts and chimeras’ of mathematics.¹¹⁰ Badiou, however, has no such qualms. Infinitesimals have an important place in his discussion of number in Le Nombre et les nombres.¹¹¹ His favourite passage from Leibniz evokes a world in which ‘ ‘‘each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, or as a pond full of fish’’, and where, moreover, ‘‘each branch of the plant, each limb of the animal, each drop of its humours is in its turn such a garden or pond’’ ’ (EE, 349).¹¹² What Badiou responds to, here, is the metaphor for the infinite recessions of an infinitesimal ¹⁰⁸ See Tiles, Philosophy, 22. ¹⁰⁹ This is particularly clear in their arresting exchange on the subject in ‘Beyond Formalization’, where Badiou’s bluff rejoinder to Hallward’s question—‘Abstraction lies at the basis of all thought’—seems to me to sidestep Hallward’s point. ¹¹⁰ Dauben, Georg Cantor, 234. ¹¹¹ See in particular NN, 221–4. However, Badiou has reason to feel that it is historically possible to take infinitesimals seriously now in a way that Cantor could not. See p. 221. ¹¹² See Nicholas Rescher, G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for Students (London: Routledge, 1991), 26. Beckett’s notes on Henri Poincar´e’s La Valeur de la science in the Whoroscope

30

Introduction

universe. But metaphorical discourse is ‘infra-mathematical’. More pointedly still, so is quite a lot of Badiou’s own discourse in the Ethics, for example. It repeatedly adduces an infra-mathematical concept of actual infinity. Badiou writes for example of representations of the self, whether held together by interest or determined by an event, as ‘the fictional imposition of a unity upon infinite component multiples’ (ES, 54–5). An event such as ‘a loving encounter’ offers a new ‘way of being’ in place of ‘infinite differences’ or ‘the ordinary state of relation to the other’ (ES, 41). Such concrete instances of an actually infinite universe are by no means confined to the Ethics. They can be found, for example, in the chillier world of ˆ et l’´ev´enement. L’Etre ˆ et l’´ev´enement argues that ‘almost all situations are L’Etre infinite’, but are represented by the State as finite (EE, 261). A citizen—say, Antoine Dombasle—does not coincide with any of the State’s particular representations of him. As a voter, for instance, he is represented by a part of himself. In set-theoretical terms, ‘he is considered as a subset . . . or the singleton of himself’; ‘not Antoine Dombasle’, says Badiou, ‘the proper name of an infinite multiplicity’, but {Antoine Dombasle}, an indifferent and unitary figure (EE, 122). The State, writes Badiou, has ‘no concern’ with ‘the life of people’ as such (ibid.). Its concern is with finite forms, as opposed to the actual infinity that is the condition of life in general and lives in particular. As Badiou asserts in ‘Philosophie et math´ematique’, ‘we ourselves’ are (banally) infinite (CS, 165). Not surprisingly, therefore, Badiou’s commentators repeatedly search for their own concrete versions of actual infinity: Jean-Claude Milner, for example, suggests that Cantor intersects with Freud. The unconscious is an actual infinity for the modern, speaking subject.¹¹³ It is worth noting, here, that, however sceptical of concrete versions of the set-theoretic universe, Pollard admits that there may be ‘near cousins of mathematical set talk . . . at the dim periphery of ordinary English’.¹¹⁴ I’d suggest that some of the ‘near cousins’ to which Pollard refers can be found above all in modern literature. Indeed, Badiou is much concerned with Beckett’s work as a ‘near cousin’ of set theory. Critics who have discussed Beckett’s work in a mathematical context have brought this out. There is evidence Notebook appear to show an interest in a similarly atomistic account of infinitesimals. Ackerley relates it to the opening pages of The Unnamable. See Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, 92. ¹¹³ See Alain Badiou, Christian Jambet, Jean-Claude Milner, Franc¸ois Regnault, Antoine Vitez, ˆ et l’´ev´enement, Paris: Potemkine/Seuil, and Franc¸ois Wahl, Une soir´ee philosophique (on L’Etre 1988), 28. ¹¹⁴ Pollard, Philosophical Introduction, 51.

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that Beckett’s interest in mathematics stretched to at least some awareness of developments in contemporary set theory.¹¹⁵ So, too, critics have provided mathematical accounts of certain works by Beckett that have come very close to describing them in set-theoretical terms. James Hansford’s essay on The Lost Ones, for example, effectively suggests that its world is actually infinite. There is no unitary ‘perfect mental image of the entire system’ (CSP, 204) in The Lost Ones.¹¹⁶ The One that will unite the many is precisely ‘the ‘‘lost one’’ ’.¹¹⁷ So, too, various commentators have drawn attention to the relation between limit and inexhaustibility in Beckett. This runs parallel to a similar concern in set theory. Hansford notes, for example, the serial endings in The Lost Ones. These ‘conclusions’ are in fact provisional limits established in a world that is actually ‘without culmination’.¹¹⁸ Ellis suggests that Beckett’s description of the ‘dark zone’ of Murphy’s mind specifically as a ‘matrix of surds’ (MU, 66, my italics) fuses Heisenberg’s concept of the algebraic matrix—a grouping of numbers arranged in a fixed rectangular field to identify and display the mechanics of atomic quanta—and the Pythagorean bugbear of the surd—a number inexpressible as terminating decimals, repeating decimals, or fractions. Ellis thinks that this combination suggests a gridded but ‘numerically irrational, infinitely repeating’ structure.¹¹⁹ The critics have tended to suppose, however, that Beckett subjects mathematical thought to ironical mockery or demonstrates its limitations, particularly when it is cast in non-mathematical terms.¹²⁰ The assumption tends to be that Beckett opposes literature to mathematics, or that he promotes ¹¹⁵ See for instance Hugh Culik, ‘Mathematics as Metaphor: Samuel Beckett and the Esthetics of Incompleteness’, Papers on Language and Literature, 29/2 (Spring 1993), 131–51; Brian Macaskill, ‘The Logic of Coprophilia: Mathematics in Molloy’, Sub-Stance, 57 (1988), 13–21; J. Alane Howard, ‘The Root of Beckett’s Aesthetic: Mathematical Allusions in Watt’, Papers on Language and Literature, 30/4 (Fall 1994), 346–51; Edith Fournier, ‘Samuel Beckett, math´ematicien et po`ete’, Critique, 46 (1990), 660–9; and Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, especially at p. 77. Culik argues that Beckett probably knew of G¨odel’s work, and suggest that G¨odel may very well be ‘the mad (?) mathematician’ in Beckett’s German letter ‘who used a different principle of measurement at each step of his calculation’ (DI, 173). Cf. Macaskill on Beckett and G¨odel, 19. ¹¹⁶ James Hansford, ‘The Lost Ones: The One and the Many’, Studies in Short Fiction, 26/2 (Spring 1989), 125–33, p. 126. ¹¹⁷ Ibid. 127. For a similar emphasis on a Beckettian subtraction of the one from the infinite, see Jeremy Parrott, ‘Infinity Minus One: Mathematics and the Search for Self in Samuel Beckett’, British and American Studies, 4 (1999), 23–33. ¹¹⁸ Hansford, ‘The Lost Ones’, 125. ¹¹⁹ Reuben J. Ellis, ‘ ‘‘Matrix of Surds’’: Heisenberg’s Algebra in Beckett’s Murphy’, Papers on Language and Literature, 25/1 (Winter 1989), 120–3. ¹²⁰ See for instance Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, passim, especially at pp. 99–100; and Howard, ‘The Root of Beckett’s Aesthetic’, passim, especially at p. 346.

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Introduction

literature, affect, and corporeality over mathematics.¹²¹ This seems an odd idea to me: Beckett tends repeatedly to ‘mathematize’ the body. More importantly, his work is much closer to mathematics than it is to most literature. Like mathematics, it is characterized by its powerful will to abstraction; its radical withdrawal from a world of which it none the less retains a residual trace; its frequent concern with extraordinary paradoxes and what seem to be irreducible problems and impossibilities; and its formalization of material that is threatened with drastic inconsistency. Commentators are often reluctant to think of Beckett as abandoning the world of human, flesh-and-blood fullness. But on all the points I’ve just mentioned, he is surely far closer to the bleached world of mathematics. Beckett’s attitudes to different kinds of mathematics, however, were surely themselves different. As Brian Macaskill suggests, insofar as Beckett is attached to a ‘language of number’, it is close to that of a mathematician like G¨odel, at the expense of a classical or Kantian conception of number.¹²² Culik rightly argues that Beckett’s irony actually strikes specifically at Pythagorean mathematics and Euclidean geometry, or intellectual practices that Beckett associates with them. Not only that: it emerges from a grasp of issues like the limits of formal mathematical systems and the nature of continuity and the line that resembles that of set theory.¹²³ Brater has shown how this irony works in The Lost Ones. The narrator’s mathematics is ‘approximate at best, misleading or even erroneous at worst’.¹²⁴ His passion for precision is chiefly rhetorical. But this narrator is neo-Pythagorean, and so are his calculations. As these calculations give way to a ‘chronic instability’, so what Beckett called the ‘irrationality of pi’ assumes ‘its full Pythagorean terror’ (DL, 145). In other words, what breaks down is the world of exact calculation that Badiou satirizes in Le Nombre et les nombres. The seemingly exact calculations in The Lost Ones are opened up to the corrosive effects of an actually infinite world. Beckett does not evoke that world in its ¹²¹ See for instance Vivian Mercier, ‘Poet and Mathematician’, Hermathena, 141 (Winter 1986), 66–71. ¹²² See Macaskill, ‘The Logic of Coprophilia’, passim. In effect, Beckett inverts Kline’s critique of the historical progress of modern mathematics. See Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). ¹²³ See Culik, ‘Mathematics as Metaphor’, 134, 138–40, 144–5. Culik suggests that Beckett’s insistence (particularly in the German letter) on the nothingness behind all linguistic formulations is consistent with G¨odel’s account of the ‘holes’ in the completeness of all mathematical systems. ¹²⁴ Enoch Brater, ‘Mis-Takes, Mathematical and Otherwise, in The Lost Ones’, Modern Fiction Studies, 29 (1983), 93–109, p. 97.

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own terms, those of set theory, but rather in what Brater calls an ‘iconography of imprecision’. In doing so, however consciously, like Badiou, he ‘concretizes’ certain features of the set-theoretical universe. Beckett’s work can occasionally be specifically analysed in set-theoretical terms. Edith Fournier shows for example that the relation between the two parts of Sans can be quite exactly described as a bijection.¹²⁵ But he tends rather to proceed through literary approximations to or analogies with mathematical thought, if in a medium, language, that, for mathematicians, is too inexact, ambiguous, and lacking in well-defined rules to be acceptable. Howard has argued that the mathematical comedy in Watt has a clear point: mathematics is no more adequate than language to a complete description of the self and world.¹²⁶ But the comedy of the use of ‘infinite series’ in Watt —Knott’s servants, the dogs that eat his leftovers, the exchange of looks amongst the Committee members—does not poke fun at mathematics as such.¹²⁷ It is an expression of the irony of supposedly finite forms, sufficient descriptions, and exhaustive enumerations in an actually infinite universe. It is not hard to extend this idea to cover other parts of Beckett’s work. Take the Trilogy, for example. Up to a point, critics like Moorjani are right to see the Beckett of the Trilogy and some of the other early prose as concerned with ‘the task of reconstituting the infinite psychic text’.¹²⁸ The principle of Molloy is that of an indifferent, infinite multiplicity. This is Molloy’s element, as he indicates when he refers to ‘my interminable existence’ and ‘my life without end’ (TR, 15–16), or, more precisely, when he tells us that his life is ‘over’ and yet ‘still goes on’ (TR, 36). Molloy’s sense of his existence as at once bounded and lacking a terminus only properly makes sense in the context of his recurrent uncertainty as to what might constitute a finite series.¹²⁹ This particular form of bafflement is common in the Trilogy.¹³⁰ ‘What do I mean by seeing and seeing again?’ Molloy asks himself (TR, 15). If he cannot keep to ‘the guiding principles of good manners’—‘how to proceed, without going ¹²⁵ As Fournier puts the point, every element (phrase) in the first part has an ‘image’ and only one in the second part, and vice versa. See Fournier, ‘Samuel Beckett’, 668–9. ¹²⁶ Howard, ‘The Root of Beckett’s Aesthetic’, 346. ¹²⁷ Ibid. 349. ¹²⁸ Angela Moorjani, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1982), 150. ¹²⁹ Cf. the discussion of the first limit ordinal at pp. 48–9, especially the section on exhaustion, inexhaustibility, and invariance, p. 48. ¹³⁰ Ackerley describes it, with Malone in mind, as a gulf between the search for ‘the doctrine of a limit’ and the ‘endless counting’ in which it results. See ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, 92.

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wrong’ (TR, 25)—it is precisely because he lacks a definitive sense of the ‘limits’ (his own word) to series. The power of such limits is never quite binding, or never quite binding enough. That is how Molloy can both assert and deny that his crutches impose restrictions on his movements.¹³¹ His uncertainty about limits is reflected in his equally chronic uncertainty about amounts and sum totals. Molloy cannot distinguish ‘enough’ from ‘too much’ (TR, 34). Numbers repeatedly threaten to proliferate indefinitely. He can believe for instance that he has more than ‘a few’ testicles (TR, 35). This is a Beckettian equivalent of set-theoretical ‘non-sense’, like Pollard’s Montague family which comes to an end when Romeo dies.¹³² Any residue of Pollard’s ‘everyday common sense’ in the Trilogy disintegrates at precisely such points. Molloy cannot clearly distinguish what is held within a limit from what exceeds it: the feeling of having had a bellyful, for example, is dependent on the fact of having arrived at one’s destination; ‘an hour more to go and I would only have had my bellyful an hour later’ (TR, 35). Of course, for Badiou as for set theorists, limits must be decided, and, for all his more or less agonized confusions, Molloy acknowledges this principle too: ‘you must choose . . . [f]or if you set out to mention everything you never would be done’ (TR, 41). But he also typically calls it into question, revokes it, or renders it uncertain: ‘Oh I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are, you do not get done either, I know, I know’ (ibid.). He treats the principle ironically, too. Indeed, one might think of Molloy as a great ironist of the finite calculation: hence the fame of the sucking-stones episode. Not surprisingly, ‘calculation’ is a word that usually has an ironical ring in both Badiou’s and Beckett’s work.¹³³ Molloy’s sustained disquiet about himself is a product of the persistent incursion of actual infinity into putatively finite frames. If actual infinity is Molloy’s element, Moran initially acquiesces in a finite, State representation of himself. This will progressively come apart, reducing his condition to Molloy’s; the point has often more or less been made.¹³⁴ Moran starts out as ‘a solid in the midst of other solids’ (TR, 108). But Beckett ‘discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their ¹³¹ See TR, 38. ¹³² See Pollard, Philosophical Introduction, 50. One difference between mathematical sets and what Pollard calls ‘mundane collectivities’ is that the loss of a member transforms a set. ¹³³ See for instance NN, passim. ¹³⁴ See for instance Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1969), 152, 162–3; John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 32, 49; and Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 97.

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explosion’ (DI, 82).¹³⁵ Moran is perhaps the most obvious example of this. His initial relationship to Church, law, and civil administration is deftly defined as one of easy intimacy. His comfortable bourgeois lifestyle goes together with a precisely delimited and compacted sense of identity: ‘a sensible man, cold as crystal and as free from spurious depth’ (TR, 113). The cornerstone of this identity is exact reckoning. Moran not only preens himself on his ‘methodical mind’ (TR, 98). He is a figure for that familiar Beckettian butt, ‘Davus and the morbid dread of sphinxes, solution clapped on problem like a snuffer on a candle’ (DI, 92).¹³⁶ Moran resolves matters by careful calculation. He does sums properly, with precisely specified quantities. His very sense of himself is an effect of his ‘reining back his thoughts within the limits of the calculable’ (TR, 114). He is an example of the citizen who is the object of Badiou’s critique at the beginning of Le Nombre et les nombres, whose soul is ‘informed’ by a certain conception of number, who knows himself in and as calculation (NN, 13–14). Moran’s ‘dehiscence’¹³⁷—which overwrites more or less the whole of his narrative, since he recounts his story having already ‘dehisced’—is the breakup of a ‘fictional imposition of a unity’ upon an actual infinity. What Moran must learn is the paradoxical coexistence of limit and infinity on which set theory insists: . . . when of the innumerable attitudes adopted unthinkingly by the normal man all are precluded but two or three, these are enhanced. . . . Yes, when you can neither stand nor sit with comfort, you take refuge in the horizontal, like a child in its mother’s lap. You explore it as never before and find it possessed of unsuspected delights. In short, it becomes infinite. (TR, 140)

If, at length, Moran experiences ‘a frenzied collapsing of all that had protected me’, it is because he must recognize the banal infinity of the situations in which he finds himself. ‘What are you doing?’ becomes the most difficult question to answer (TR, 173). Thus, where Molloy is associated above all with the comedy of the sucking-stones sequence, Moran is finally associated with ¹³⁵ The remark is made of Sean O’Casey. ¹³⁶ Cf. WA, 252. In Terence’s Andria, Davus is Pamphilus’ cunning slave. In . ii. 36–7, he replies to a rather cryptic utterance by asserting ‘Davus sum, non Oedipus’. The line became a catchphrase. See Terence, The Andria, an early sixteenth-century trans., ed. Meg Twycross (Lancaster: Medieval English Theatre Modern-Spelling Texts 6, 1987), 33. ¹³⁷ ‘Dehiscence’ is a term that Beckett applies to O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. See DI, 82. Its most common meaning is botanical: the breaking open of capsules (seed-pods, anthers) as their parts diverge.

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the poignancy of the dance of the bees, which, for all the formal rigour of its pattern, is also infinite, or (Moran’s word) ‘innumerable’ (TR, 170). In Molloy (read in sequence), the pathos of the remainder finally supplants its comedy. The terms of this account, I think, do much to explain the unique power not only of Molloy but of the Trilogy in general. Its quivery, restless intensity is inseparable from constraint and stasis. As, for Badiou, the ontological conditions for the event are always present, yet the event is always rare, so, for Beckett, worlds of minimal scope are also worlds of maximal instability. This is a distinctive and I think a distinctively modern paradox that haunts both oeuvres. However, there was strictly no need for me to go in search of a concrete version of actual infinity in Beckett, for Badiou himself provides them. As we shall see later, in Badiou’s thought, there is an ineliminable link between actual infinity and the void. Badiou sees Beckett as concerned with ‘the fictive place of being’ (BK, 28). He conceives of this ‘place’ as precisely the point at which language arrests what is otherwise the infinite ‘flight’ (‘fuite’) of being into nothingness (ibid.). It is a fictive place because, as an artist, Beckett thinks figuratively, in fictions, rather than in the pure abstractions of set theory. Hence, I’d add, the importance of Brater’s observation that Beckett replaces what he takes to be bogus precisions, not with a new precision, but with an iconography of imprecision. The figurative and purely abstract worlds, however, are none the less analogous. The fictions in question are numerous: the strange, vague landscapes of Molloy, the labyrinthine streets of The Expelled, the muddy netherworld (‘le souterrain’, CS, 334) of How It Is, which Badiou thinks we grasp as properly infinite (BK, 29). But these fictions take two basic forms, closed (as in Endgame or The Lost Ones) and open (as in Molloy). Behind both these forms, however, there is a single figure into which they blend, the ‘ ‘‘noir-gris [blackgrey]’’ ’ or ‘ ‘‘penumbra’’ ’ of Being. This figure presents Being as on the edge of or indistinguishable from the void. Thus for example in Worstward Ho: Dim light [p´enombre] source unknown. Know minimum. Know nothing no. Too much to hope. At most mere minimum. Meremost minimum. (WH, 9; cf. CP, 10)

This figure of the penumbra spells the ruin of both dialectics and the Cartesian equation of truth with clarity and distinctness.¹³⁸ Here closed and open locations, motion and stasis, stability and instability all become ‘reversible metaphors’ for actual infinity (BK, 31). ¹³⁸ On the penumbra as anti-dialectical, see in particular SB, 7 and CS, 334–5, where Badiou asserts that it is separated from all contradiction with light.

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For Badiou, it is Lessness above all that represents the ‘outcome of Beckett’s poetic effort’ to assign a place to Being. Lessness pointedly and succinctly suppresses ‘all descriptive particularity’ in ‘a uniform image of earth and sky’ (BK, 29): Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light. No sound no stir ash grey sky mirrored earth mirrored sky. Never but this changelessness dream the passing hour. (CSP, 197)

Movement and immobility are equivalent to one another: hence the contradiction of an apparently petrified body—‘legs a single block arms fast to sides’—that the narrator can none the less assure us will make ‘one step more’ (CSP, 198). Here time is a figment: ‘Never but in vanished dream the passing hour long short’ (CSP, 198). As Fournier says, the fundamental situation in Lessness is that of Being thought atemporally.¹³⁹ Space, too, is indeterminate: more precisely, the features of closed and open spaces are indistinguishable. The ‘four walls’ of the ‘issueless’ refuge merge with what is also ‘all sides endlessness earth sky as one’ (CSP, 201). ‘Endlessness’—the endlessness of actual infinity—is the most crucial concept in Lessness. The breach in finitude is irreparable. Banal infinity actually and endlessly intrudes upon the finite: hence the importance, here, of the Beckettian figure of the ruin. To adapt the imagery of Lessness itself: the ruin is half-block, half-sand, a structure defined against the sand into which it is turning and by which it is invaded. Like the penumbra or purgatory, it is a crucial liminal figure in Beckett’s work.¹⁴⁰ It serves as an image of the leakiness or porosity of finite forms, of their friability. Lessness presents this friability as immediate, available at once, not related to the passage of time. The figure of the ruin is precisely appropriate to a world in which—to return to an earlier quotation from Le Si`ecle —‘the infinite is nothing other than the finite itself’ (LS, 219). At the same time, actual infinity in Lessness is constituted specifically as the remainder. When Fournier argues that the world of Lessness is open to interruption, to the idea of a ‘temps a` faire’ in which historical time begins again, she might almost be echoing Badiou’s concept of the relationship between Being and the event. The trouble is that she doesn’t seem to me to be right about Lessness, which emphatically writes off the possibility of the event: ¹³⁹ See Fournier, ‘Samuel Beckett’, 669. Unlike Badiou, however, Fournier also argues that the situation in itself is not limitless, though it can be infinitely explored. ¹⁴⁰ Cf. Le Si`ecle, where Badiou asserts that twentieth-century poetics was above all ‘a poetics of the threshold’ (LS, 39).

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‘Never but imagined the blue in a wild imagining the blue celeste of poesy’ (CSP, 199).¹⁴¹ Badiou tends to skirt round such Beckettian moments in favour of those he finds more affirmative. As I suggested earlier, in ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’, he says that truths expose a negativity or ‘prodigious inertia’ as the very principle of the real. This inertia, which he otherwise largely writes off, is everywhere in Beckett. But what this also implies is the prevalence of the remainder: without the event, writes Badiou, clearly with his favourite quotation from Assez in mind, the penumbra is indifferent, thankless (an ‘indifferente ingratitude’, SB, 17). There is always the possibility of a ‘breaching’ (‘´ebr`echement’) of Being (ibid.). But that does not mean that events are not intermittent and occasional. Badiou comes close to noting what I take to be the intellectual mystery at the heart of the Trilogy. The principal source of Molloy’s, Malone’s, and the Unnamable’s perplexity is the question, not of the event, but of its rarity. Molloy’s and Malone’s speculations are often extraordinary, outlandish. They articulate their inner worlds in weird, obscure, fantastical tropes. They re-imagine their physical existence in monstrous forms. But all this takes place within conditions that seem to be immutable. As Molloy says, ‘what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation’ (TR, 40)? The thought of the event seems to have only a derisory status. It may be little more, for instance, than an ironical or otiose whim. That the classic Beckettian text has long been Waiting for Godot is therefore not surprising. It is a particularly pristine and limpid statement of some of the principal features of Beckett’s universe. ‘Nothing happens’, says Estragon, ‘nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!’ (CDW, 41). In the terms of ‘Six propri´et´es’, this is precisely the world of the d´echet (or, as Estragon puts it, ‘the meantime’, CDW, 38). Its subjects can only stubbornly endure its tedium. It is a world of actual infinity without events. True, its actually infinite character is initially less evident in Godot than in Molloy or The Unnamable. But Godot clarifies what Badiou means when he says—as he does repeatedly—that, strictly, infinity begins with two. Indeed, the play demonstrates Badiou’s ¹⁴¹ It is precisely the equivalent of this sentence in the French text (Sans) that Fournier takes as a sign that history can begin again, that the event remains possible. See TM, 73. There is certainly a little more justification for this reading in Sans than in Lessness. But when Fournier claims that, in Sans, the event and historical time could only emerge to disrupt what is otherwise a ‘paradisal refuge of supreme vacuity’ (p. 668), her notion of paradise seems very odd to me.

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point repeatedly and very plainly and starkly. Once the other intervenes, there is no longer one world. The world proliferates ad infinitum:        : We came here yesterday.        : Ah no, there you’re mistaken.        : What did we do yesterday?        : What did we do yesterday?        : Yes.        : Why . . . [Angrily]. Nothing is certain when you’re about. (CDW, 16)

The uncertainty in question is not hermeneutic. It is produced by a lack of unity, irreconcilable difference, the irreversible dissolution of one into the multiple, the appearance of the principle of infinity within finitude. There is no limit or end point to the process. Moreover, Godot (including the stage directions) might be thought of as a series of discursive sets: clipped, precisely constrained, tightly structured, and repetitive variations that often take place on the basis of a specific and more or less explicit axiom or decision (‘let’s make a little conversation’, CDW, 47, ‘let’s ask each other questions’, 59, ‘let’s abuse each other’, 70). These localized patterns are both exhilarating and banal. They are characterized, precisely, by a curious amalgamation of ‘foisonnante diversit´e’ and ‘sourde monotonie’. Any given sequence quickly runs its course and reaches its limit. Hence the frequency with which Vladimir and Estragon declare that they are ‘tired’, ‘weary’, or ‘exhausted’ (CDW, 54, 61, 71, 78), but hence, equally, the swiftness with which they spring back from exhaustion. There is no determinate or given end to the construction of sequences, and Vladimir can also assert that he and Estragon are ‘inexhaustible’ (CDW, 58).¹⁴² This is not surprising: as Estragon puts matters, ‘There’s no lack of void’ (CDW, 61). Like sets, the exchanges that constitute the play are founded on the void. There is always scope for another ‘little canter’ (CDW, 60). Equally, each such canter will always be haunted by the knowledge that it is nothing more than ‘blather’ (CDW, 61). Godot even has its equivalent of the empty set, a reiterated stage direction: (Silence). Of course, the obvious objection to this reading is that things do happen in Godot: Pozzo and Lucky arrive, for example. But that merely confirms how close Beckett’s thought of the event is to Badiou’s, as opposed to Heidegger’s or Deleuze’s: events are sporadic and extremely infrequent. They are not ¹⁴² Mercier makes a very similar point about Play. See Beckett/Beckett, 15.

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to be confused with diurnal appearances and disappearances, however odd and unpredictable these may be. That, between Acts I and II, the tree unexpectedly puts forth leaves is not an ironic rejoinder to Estragon. The point is precisely that the tree sprouts leaves and yet nothing happens. The world has its processes, shivers, and tremors—that is, there is a kind of play in Being—but such disturbances should not be confused with events. I’ll have much more to say about this play in Being later. For the present, however, it is more important to note that mere surprises or unexpected changes do not constitute events. They might rather be thought of as phantom or delusive events, pseudo-events. Estragon may momentarily wonder whether Pozzo is Godot, but his confusion is short-lived. To put the point very simply: Godot has become a classic because its world is that of the big non-event. We have come to understand this world very well. John Deamer has pointed out that the temporality of the play is precisely that of the non-event:¹⁴³        : He said Saturday. [Pause.] I think.        : You think.        : I must have made a note of it. [ . . . ]        : [Very insidious] But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? [Pause.] Or Monday? [Pause.] Or Friday? [ . . . ] Or Thursday? (CDW, 16)

In the inert world of the non-event, history has not begun. Time is therefore indistinct. The obscure flicker of a play in Being does not of itself produce time. Godot has gripped so many people so intensely because it is an extraordinarily clear and powerful expression of a problematic, vestigial, melancholic modernity. I take Badiou, too, to be a proponent of this modernity, though the melancholy dimension to his philosophy is only thinkable from outside it, since Badiou himself axiomatically proscribes melancholy. In the era of the end of metaphysics and the collapse of the grand narratives, truth and value logically emerge as intermittent or rare. Badiou and Beckett are what I call vestigial or melancholic modernists in that each commits himself to truth and value, in spite of their occasional and unpredictable character. For Badiou, however, what matters is the force of intermittency. By contrast, Beckett cannot ignore its pathos, though in a sense that implies neither sentimentality nor defeatism. To think Badiou and Beckett together is, in this respect and at this particular historical moment, precisely to think ourselves. ¹⁴³ John Deamer, ‘The Event in the Works of Samuel Beckett’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2004), 249–50.

1 Badiou (i): Being, Event, Subject, Truth BEING Badiou aims to reassert the significance of philosophy in an age that has lost a sense of its importance. We no longer know what philosophy is or what its purposes should be. We confuse it with the postmodern sophistries that run from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein to Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, and Vattimo.¹ We conflate it with other concerns: art, science, politics, psychoanalysis. We oscillate between deconstructing its past and anticipating its future forms. Above all, perhaps, we have surrendered philosophy to time, to a history we can no longer believe it transcends. Provoked by a century of disaster, our epoch announces the end of philosophy and claims to be ‘liquidating’ its archaisms (CS, 70). Badiou, however, wants rather to proclaim the end of ‘the end’.² Philosophy should cease to ‘plead guilty’ (MP, 8). The idea that philosophers and not politicians, businessmen, the military, or even historians and sociologists should shoulder the burden of guilt for the past century is patently absurd. Badiou rather argues, in a phrase he associates above all with Beckett, that we should be intent on making ‘another step forwards’: ‘un pas de plus. Un seul pas’ (MP, 12).³ Philosophy must forget the Heideggerian ‘forgetting of being’, the more or less appalled contemplation of its historically mistaken route. The philosophical imperative is interminable (and singularly Beckettian and mathematical): ‘continuation’ (CS, 84). ¹ See ‘Le Retour de la philosophie elle-mˆeme’, CS, 57–78, especially at p. 76. On the apparent oddity of casting Nietzsche as a sophist, see p. 77 n. 6. ² This is in large part what underlies his critique specifically of the philosophical concept of postmodernism. See for instance MP, 22–3; and Alberto Toscano, ‘To Have Done with the End of Philosophy’, Pli, Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 9 (2000), 220–39. Badiou asserts that, for him, as for Lardreau and Jambet, we are still within the modern period of philosophy (MP, 25). ³ Cf ‘R´eponses e´crites d’Alain Badiou’, interview with student group at the Universit´e de Paris VIII (Vincennes/Saint-Denis), Philosophie, philosophie, 4 (1992), 66–71, p. 69; and ‘D’un sujet enfin sans objet’, Apr`es le sujet qui vient: Cahiers confrontation, 20 (Winter 1989), 13–22, p. 13, where Badiou argues the complexity of the ‘step forwards’.

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Badiou’s differences with Heidegger are many and various. But he coincides with Heidegger too, not least in asserting that philosophy starts from the question of ontology.⁴ Heidegger understands Being, however, as Ereignis, aletheia, disclosure, unconcealment, gift. His ontology is suffused with a nostalgia for presence and lost origin. As such, it is the very ‘essence of metaphysics’ (EE, 16). Heidegger’s is a poetic ontology. Poetry affords a unique ‘proximity to Being’ (ibid.), a privileged point of access to it. Badiou grants poetry a very important place relative to his philosophical system. But this is not the place granted it by Heidegger. Badiou remains robustly immune to both the ‘seduction of poetic proximity’ (ibid.) and the delusion of the return of the Gods or the ‘resacralization of the Earth’ (MP, 32).⁵ He puts the romanticism of Heidegger’s ontology into reverse, and emphatically repudiates its ‘reactionary nostalgia’ (MP, 33). For ontology must be austerely mathematical. Mathematics says all that is sayable about Being as Being (‘l’ˆetre-en-tantqu’ˆetre’, EE, 14; the phrase is a translation of Aristotle’s on ¯e on in the Metaphysics).⁶ Mathematicians know that Being is irreducibly multiple, that there is nothing more to be said about it than that, and that any possible indication of the multiplicity of Being will have to be mathematical. Heidegger asserted the opposite: mathematics is the very instance of philosophical blindness, the suppression of thought by techno-science.⁷ From Galileo onwards, we forget the truth of Being, which is the fact of appearance, or ‘blossoming’ (‘´eclosion’, EE, 141), the making-present of presence, the offering of what is veiled. We grow accustomed to a modern, ‘objective’ nature which is, precisely, nature submitted to mathematical ideas. Being is now ‘ ‘‘written in mathematical language’’ ’. Thus where Plato wants to banish the poets, Heidegger wants to exclude the matheme from philosophy.⁸ But the Heideggerian concept of the ‘forgetting’ of Being in objectivity that is characteristic of modernity is itself forgetful. For what Heidegger thinks of as forgetting goes back, not ⁴ We owe Heidegger a debt for bringing us back to an awareness of this. See CT, 25. ⁵ ‘Desacralization’—and the dissolution of the unitary principle that accompanies it—are rather ontological effects of the triumph of advanced Capital. But, like Marx and Benjamin, Badiou argues that these effects ‘are not at all nihilistic’ (MP, 37). ⁶ Aristotle, Metaphysics, book Gamma 1 and ff. See The Metaphysics, tr. with an introd. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 79–88. ⁷ Again, Badiou’s view of the triumph of ‘techno-science’ is opposed to (and surely more original than) Heidegger’s. He not only resists Heidegger’s conflation of science with technology. He asserts that we currently suffer from a certain impoverishment of technology which is precisely a function of the restriction of its infinite possibilities within a given social order. See MP, 34. ⁸ See CS, 163.

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just to Galileo, but to Plato. The Platonic Idea actually completes the Greek thought of Being. The Idea delimits or frames Being, makes it visible to us. Plato installs the Idea as the unique and determinate interpretation of Being. Crucially, he installs it precisely in mathematical form. For Heidegger, the poetic-natural orientation is linked to a supposedly authentic origin. The mathematical-ideal way leads to metaphysical closure and the forgetting of Being. Badiou proposes, not so much a reversal of this structure, as a different ‘disposition’ of it (EE, 143). He grants Heidegger half of his argument: poetry is certainly an ‘absolutely original’ kind of thought. This is evident in its immemorial character. But philosophy cannot plausibly take its bearings from ancient Greek poetry and its supposed intimacy with the authentic origin. For the history of poetry goes back further than Greece, to India, China, and Egypt. Heidegger ‘forgets’ this, too. Ancient Greece is not the pristine site on which philosophy and poetry first emerge together, in intimate coexistence. What appears for the first time in Greece is a subtractive, axiomatically founded conception of Being. The Greeks did not invent the poem. They ‘interrupted’ it with the matheme (EE, 144). To reassert philosophy, then, is to demand a return, not only to mathematics, but to mathematics in its ancient philosophical function. However, Being is not composed of mathematically objective entities, the Aristotelian mathematika (µαθηµατ ικα), ‘things’ supposedly correlative to mathematical knowledge.⁹ Mathematics not only thinks ontology; it ‘effectuates’ it (EE, 20). Mathematics presents the multiple. But the presentation of the multiple is nothing other than a presentation of presentation itself. Being is a function of presentations. Badiou insists that his thesis is not about the world but ‘about discourse’ (EE, 14), though it is not to be identified with the linguistic turn or present-day constructivism, either.¹⁰ How can an ‘effectuation’ of ontology be possible, though, if not as a discursive construction, whether mathematical or not? When Badiou declares that mathematics is ‘a rigorous aesthetic’ (CT, 43), is he not also declaring himself to be a postmodernist malgr´e lui? Mathematical ideas are not immanent in the sensible world: mathematical thought always and definitively breaks with sensory immediacy. But a mathematical idea does not transcend the world either. It is ‘neither subjective . . . ⁹ See Aristotle, Metaphysics, book Mu, pp. 399–428, especially 393–7, for an account of mathematika. ¹⁰ I use the term, here, in its more commonplace and current sense, and not the specialized mathematical sense that it usually has for Badiou.

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nor objective’ (CT, 97). The subject/object structure is merely empirical in origin, inhibiting the recognition that the knowing mind and its knowledge are identical. Mathematical ideas are ‘gestures’ not objects (‘gestes dans l’ˆetre’, CT, 149), not traces of but ‘tracings in’ Being. They are as close as we can come to the excessiveness of Being in so far as a formal structure can ‘gesture’ towards it. Here the history of mathematics comes into question. As we have seen, the Greeks did not fetishize the punctual and ecstatic figure of the poem. Plato substituted the procedures of mathematics for that figure. These procedures are innovatory but also cumulative. They build upon, rather than disqualifying each other. As such, they ensure that, if mathematical ideas do not have the status of objects, neither are they merely subjective productions. Furthermore, if the mind and its knowledge are identical, discovery and invention are identical, too. Plato knew this, because he is the first great thinker of undecidability.¹¹ So much is evident from the aporetic character of the dialogues.¹² Plato also understands what modern mathematics has massively re-emphasized: one consequence of undecidability is that decisions become imperative. Without decisions, no account of mathematical ideas would even be possible. Mathematics confronts undecidability, not as a limit or barrier, but as a stimulus to the discoveries of inventive thought.¹³ Being is sayable only as a consistent multiplicity, and consistencies are founded on decisions. They are certainly not what they appear to be to the popular mind, empirical or linguistic givens. Modern mathematics represents a formidable advance in mathematical procedure, and therefore in the ontological tradition that stems from the Greeks. But it also breaks with that tradition. In doing so, it leaves philosophy looking belated (‘nous sommes . . . en retard ’, CS, 159). For the Greeks, number is defined in relation to the founding concept of one. It is placed in thrall to the ¹¹ In Badiou’s terms, it is hardly surprising that we should have missed this, given how extraordinarily widespread anti-Platonism has been in the most diverse schools of recent philosophy. See MP, 80. ¹² For Badiou’s unorthodox insistence on undecidability and aporetics in Plato, see for instance ‘Platon et/ou Aristote-Leibniz: Th´eorie des ensembles et th´eorie des topos sous l’œil du philosophe’, in Marco Panza and Jean-Michel Salanskis, L’Objectivit´e math´ematique: Platonisme et structures formelles (Paris: Masson, 1995), 61–83, p. 64. ¹³ Badiou’s conception of mathematics as constantly producing barriers for itself which it must as constantly surmount appears to owe much to Marx’s (dialectical) conception of the barrier or limit. With reference to Capital, see for instance Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), tr. with a foreword Martin Nicolaus, in association with New Left Review (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 542, 606, 649 and especially 749; and passim. With reference to ‘proletarian revolutions’, see The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), 14.

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‘metaphysical idealism’ of that concept (CT, 141).¹⁴ But modern mathematics precisely and repeatedly shows us that there is no such thing as one. There are only multiples, and every multiple is itself ‘a multiple of multiples’ (EE, 37). This pure multiplicity is the condition of an actual infinity and the concern of modern ontology. Philosophy has always assumed that Being and oneness are reciprocally related, as in a phrase of Leibniz’s: ‘That which is not truly a being is not truly a being’ (EE, 31).¹⁵ Leibniz asserted that the ‘internal complexity’ of the monad ‘must enfold a multiplicity in unity or in the one’. The Greek monas itself signified ‘unity, or that which is simple’.¹⁶ By contrast, Badiou follows Lacan, for whom one is merely a feature of the symbolic order: ‘il y a de l’Un’ (EE, 31). One is always the effect of a particular structure, the putting-into-one (‘mise-en-un’, EE, 105). It never transcends presentation. To put matters simply: ‘the one is not’ (EE, 31). But what, then, is the proper mode of presenting Being? To answer that question, by way of preliminary, we need to note two points: first, and very importantly, Badiou asserts that there is no access to Being as such. Secondly, we should heed Cantor’s distinction between consistent and inconsistent multiplicity, which Badiou adopts.¹⁷ In the first instance, Being has no latent structure of its own. It is an inconsistent multiplicity, pure presentation, before the imposition of any structure. The multiplicity of Being is irreducible to any unity or totality. As such, it is not available to us. The ontological situation is ‘the presentation of presentation’ (EE, 36). Ontology is a structured presentation of unstructured multiplicity, paradigmatically, in the case of number. For mathematics works ‘to separate the unseparated’ (CT, 43). It is the Idea—and supremely the mathematical idea, ‘from Plato to Galileo’ and Cantor—that makes Being consistent (EE, 143). Ontology cannot present inconsistency as such. It does not ‘capture’ inconsistency. Being has always already entered the realm of consistency. This means that ontology is always situated. Philosophy has fantasized an experience of Being ‘beyond all structure’ (EE, 34), beyond any particular situation. In fact, there isn’t one. ¹⁴ See in particular Euclid, Elements of Geometry, book vii, definition 2. Ian Mueller puts the point thus: ‘the second [definition] defines a number as a ‘‘multitude composed of units’’ ’. The unit, however, has been defined (in the first definition) ‘in a mathematically useless way’. So an obvious consequence of the two definitions ‘is that a unit is not a number’. See Philosophy of Mathematics and Deductive Structure in Euclid’s ‘Elements’ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 58. ¹⁵ Nicholas Rescher, G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for Students (London: Routledge, 1991), 48. ¹⁶ Ibid. 18, 45. ¹⁷ See Michael Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 74, 165 ff., and passim.

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However, there are more and less adequate forms of presentation. The rudiments of an ontology that breaks with the concept of one are already there in Plato. In the Parmenides, multiplicity is inconsistent. Indeed, the Parmenides in particular offers us ‘a complete theory of the multiple’ (EE, 43). But, though Plato recognizes that Being must be an actual infinity, he has no apparatus for describing it as such. It is Cantor who finally provides us with such an apparatus. Plato must assume that there is no means of describing inconsistent multiplicity as it should be described, as the multiple unshackled by any concept of one. The Parmenides therefore ends with the challenge of nihilism: if one does not exist, then nothing does. No concept of Being seems possible, other than in terms of the unitary principle. For Plato, inconsistent multiplicity can be grasped only as a ‘songe sp´eculatif’, a dream-thought rather than a ‘pens´ee’ (EE, 46). But Cantor gives Plato’s dream the fixity of thought. For Cantor sees as Plato cannot that, whilst only a structured concept of Being is properly possible, that does not prevent us from thinking it as an actual infinity. Indeed, Cantor’s legacy is partly a ‘Platonism of the multiple’ (MP, 85). Set theory lets us think Being without resorting to the concept of one. Sets are multiples of multiples which are themselves multiples, and so on with no stopping point. If we need the number one at all, it will be for practical or ‘operational’ reasons (EE, 45). One is just a number, nothing more: we must take this assertion ‘absolutely seriously’ (EE, 32). Furthermore, if, with Cantor, the unitary principle breaks down, set theory equally dismantles the concept of the object and that of the whole. To empiricists or non-specialists, mathematicians may seem oddly and even frustratingly uncertain about what sets really are. But that in itself is a reflection of how far, and how rapidly, set theory outstripped any conception of sets as objects. So, too, for a postCantorian mind, the multiple does not exist as ‘an organic totality’ (EE, 95). There is no set of all sets. If set theory suppresses the old polarity of the one and the multiple, it equally puts an end to the polarity of the whole and the part. If one does not exist, neither does a single infinity. The ‘infinite-one’ is also dead (EE, 164–5). Actual infinity is not reducible to a unity. It is a vertiginous infinity of infinities. This is because actual infinity is founded on the void. In a sense, it is even another name for the void. The void underlies all things, is omnipresent but a ‘spectre’, a ghostly figure wandering through all presentation (EE, 111). For Badiou, crucially, we do not ‘apprehend’ the void in an experience or through some existential intuition. We know it because it is thinkable, and ‘by the

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purest rational means’, ontologically, that is, mathematically (CO, 92). The most limpid expression of the omnipresence of the void is what is generally called the Von Neumann model of the finite and infinite ordinal numbers.¹⁸ The basic idea is that each ordinal is the set of all prior ordinals. In one sense, the model merely repeats the existence of ∅, the empty set, the multiple of nothing, zero ‘affect´e de la barre du sens’, in Badiou’s witty formulation (EE, 82):¹⁹ ∅ {∅} {∅, {∅} } {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅} } } {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅} }, {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅} } } } ... {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅} }, . . . } {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅} }, . . . , {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅} }, . . . } } ... If we contemplate this champagne-glass tower ontologically rather than mathematically and with Beckett in mind, it shivers with ironical laughter.²⁰ However, Badiou takes its implication very seriously: under the ‘bar’ that designates the empty set, the void is everywhere. It is ‘universally included’ (EE, 100). The Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms include an axiom that simply states the existence of the empty set. For Badiou, this is an existential assertion: ∅ is the proper name of Being. It declares that the absolutely first existence is a negation. The void alone exists: this is even a kind of sacred mathematical truth. It, not one, is where ontology starts. It is what Plato in the Timaeus calls the ‘errant cause’.²¹ With set theory, all the diverse objects and structures of mathematics can be designated as pure multiplicities established on the basis ¹⁸ Taken from Stephen Pollard, Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 118. According to Pollard, though ‘generally attributed’ to von Neumann, the model is Dimitry Mirimanoff ’s (p. 119). ¹⁹ Witty, in that ‘affect´e’ not only means ‘affected by’ with overtones of ‘feigning’, as in English ‘affectation’, but also has a mathematical sense, ‘modified in being marked with a sign’. ²⁰ For a model that inverts this diagram, founding the entire universe on the basis of the empty set, see P. T. Johnstone, Notes on Logic and Set Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 72. ²¹ EE, p. 68. Plato distinguishes accessory from rational causes. But rational causes must also be distinguished from the ‘errant cause’, necessity, which Plato takes to be arbitrary, anomalous, and unpredictable. See Plato, Timaeus and Critias, tr. with an introd. and appendix Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1977), 64–6. What is ‘errant’ for Badiou is ‘indeterminate’ in Lee’s translation.

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of the empty set alone. Ontology must be a theory of the void; ‘in a sense’, that is all it can be (EE, 70). If set theory substitutes putting-into-one for one, what is ‘put into one’ is the name of the void, or its singleton, {∅}. The power set of the singleton is the number with which infinity begins. This is the first split, two: {∅, {∅} }. Two is also woven from the void. Thereafter, the void must be included in every multiple. To the Axiom of the Empty Set, Badiou adds a second existential assertion: there exists a limit ordinal. I discussed the limit ordinal in my Introduction. Cantor’s decision to break with a regular and repetitive sequence and institute a new one is crucial, and I want to consider what Badiou makes of its logic in a little more detail. We may think of the infinite as Aristotle understood it, in terms of its inexhaustibility: given a method for exhausting the infinite, thought discovers that it cannot be exhausted.²² Exhaustion means thinking an entity as prior existence and repetition, as a ‘dialectic’ between what Badiou calls the ‘already’ (d´ejà) and the ‘again’ (encore, EE, 165). For the Aristotelian procedure of exhaustion to begin, a multiple must already be presented. The procedure also requires repetition, a rule which functions repeatedly. Think for example of the set of even numbers, 2, 4, 6, 8 −→ n. The rule must be invariant. Another repetition of the rule must always be possible. At the same time, the rule is ultimately powerless. It can never bring us to an end of the multiple to which it is applied, because no infinite multiple can be properly exhausted. There must therefore be a second limitpoint (the first being the prior existence (d´ejà) of the multiple). This limitpoint designates the very powerlessness of the principle of repetition itself. But the rule governing the procedure cannot present its limit-point. This must be presented ‘from elsewhere’: hence the generation of limit ordinals. This structure—d´ejà, encore, and limit-point—is what constitutes an infinite multiple. The limit ordinals produce a qualitative discontinuity within the ostensibly homogeneous universe of multiples. They are points of alterity. The limit ordinal ω, for example, denotes the other of the series of finite ordinals. Successor ordinals are determined by the unique ordinal to which they succeed: ω + 1, ω + 2 . . . , for instance. By contrast, limit ordinals like ω itself appear beyond a sequence that is ‘ ‘‘complete’’ ’ and ‘uncompletable’ at one and the same time (EE, 174). This is a paradoxical concept only if ²² Aristotle, Metaphysics, book Kappa, 10, pp. 342–5; and Physics, tr. Thomas Taylor (Frome: Prometheus Trust, 2000), 53–60.

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we ignore the clarity and specificity of the mathematical conception of the infinite, as opposed to the vagueness of the post-Hegelian one. Mathematics is a form of ‘hypothetical’ or ‘inventive’ reason (CS, 168; EE, 144). It does not interpret the real world. Thinking is not a question of interpretation, but of particular judgements as to existence, or ‘orientations’.²³ The ‘orientation’ of a thought is what makes it distinctive. Orientations are founded on axioms.²⁴ These declare a world into existence and subsequently appear in protocols, proofs, and demonstrations. An axiomatics decrees ‘ ‘‘that which is’’ ’ into existence (CT, 53). From Euclid onwards, axiomatization is the mathematical approach to systematizing a body of unsystematized procedures. It is crucial to set theory, in which the basic notions (of set and membership) cannot be defined explicitly, since that would lead to infinite regress. Any given thought proceeds on the basis of certain ‘foundational assertions’ that it cannot finally ‘make legitimate’ (CT, 50; CS, 168). Axioms are a precise formalization of this fact in a specific field of enquiry. They situate thought at a distance from the inconsistent multiplicity of Being, bringing consistency to the presentation of multiplicity.²⁵ Ontology must proceed axiomatically: that is, it prescribes the rules for the treatment of undefined terms. It provides a small number of useful and rigorously compatible axioms which are concerned with the variables which denote pure multiples. Axiomatics is not automatically constrained by questions of empirical validity. A Platonically inclined mathematician can accept the controversial Axiom of Choice, for example, on the grounds that accepting it makes the universe larger and richer than rejecting it.²⁶ If we are to think the multiplicity of Being at all, such axioms are an intrinsic necessity. Ordinary language cannot provide an effective description of multiplicity. It is indissolubly linked to the presumption and the concept of one, and therefore cannot separate consistent from inconsistent multiplicity. Set theory treats the concept of one only as a presumption. What set theory calls ‘one’ is merely defined by the symbol ∈, which designates belonging, a relationship between multiples. However, if ordinary language cannot describe infinite multiplicity, in fact, all sign-systems finally falter before it. ²³ Thought is therefore always conflictual. It feeds off dissensus and differends, which are the product of differing orientations: ‘consensus is the enemy of thought’ (CT, 54). ‘Dissensus’ and ‘the differend’ are key concepts in the work of Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard. See in particular The Differend, tr. G. van den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), passim. ²⁴ For Badiou’s conception of the ‘orientation’ of a thought, see CT, 50–1. For a different conception in a contemporary French philosopher, see Guy Lardreau, La V´eracit´e: Essai d’une philosophie n´egative (Paris: Verdier, 1993), especially at pp. 21–34. ²⁵ See EE, 38. ²⁶ For an extended discussion of this axiom, see pp. 62–3.

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Frege supposed that language could actually prove adequate to the multiple, that the master of language could be the master of the multiple. But the paradoxes of set theory show this to be false. In the most famous paradox of all, Russell demonstrated that set theory must have certain limits: in particular, it is impossible to decide whether all sets that are not members of themselves constitute a set, since if they do they don’t, and vice versa. Russell’s paradox shows that a proposition and its negation coincide. Certain formulae will apply to sets only at the price of the ruin of the language of set theory itself. ‘Never glad confident morning again’, said Whitehead, when Russell told him the bad news.²⁷ But from Badiou’s point of view, part of the problem was that Whitehead and Russell shared a grandiose, early twentieth-century, Cantorian absolutism about sets. To a post-Lacanian like himself, thought must pass through the Lacanian interrogation of language as its necessary challenge and filter. Self-evidently, multiple being will always remain in excess of the language used to describe it. Mathematical ontology understands that the inconsistent multiplicity of which it serves as a presentation is also its limit and its obstacle, its ‘point of impossibility’, like the Lacanian Real (EE, 53). Mathematical ontology has major consequences for the concept of God on the one hand and of nature on the other. Badiou is firmly and rightly committed to renewing the necessary conviction of the great modern ‘destroyers’²⁸—Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Russell—that thought only begins on the further side of religion. As we’ve seen, modern mathematics is a sophisticated thought of multiplicity. It provides a clear and precise conception of an uncontained, unlimited infinity of infinities. It understands that there is no whole and that one is just a number. Modern mathematics destroys both the rule of the concept of one and the ‘aura’ of infinity together (CS, 175). It thereby breaks decisively with myth and superstition. It puts paid to God much more efficiently than Nietzsche was able to. In ‘Dieu est mort’, in particular, Badiou considers God in three main aspects.²⁹ First, there is the ‘living God’, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God it was possible to meet and with whom it was possible to share ²⁷ See Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Vintage, 1997), 143. Whitehead was quoting from Browning’s ‘The Lost Leader’. ²⁸ The term is Derrida’s. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, tr. with an introd. and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 351–70, pp. 354–6, especially at p. 356. But Derrida specifies only Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, and does not exactly mean what I mean, here. ²⁹ ‘Dieu est mort’, CT, 9–24.

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a world. This God is, definitively, dead. That, every now and again, someone claims to have encountered him ‘under a tree, or in a provincial chapel’ (CT, 13), or while strumming a guitar in the happy-bunny glow of an evangelical meeting, changes nothing.³⁰ Thought no longer attaches any more value to such a situation than it does to that of someone who claims to have seen a ghost. In both cases, writes Badiou, we are concerned with symptoms, psychosocial manifestations, a pathological condition. At the popular level, contemporary religion is otherwise just simulation, ‘theatre’, doxa, a pitiful State formation (ibid.). Indeed, the simulations of religion that make up contemporary Christianity are the very ‘subjective forms’ in which the real death of God is precisely declared or confirmed (CT, 17).³¹ God in his second aspect is the God of speculative metaphysics, an indifferent, immobile deus ex machina; perhaps above all, Spinoza’s God. This God has turned out to be more robust and tenacious than the living God. Rightly seen, however, from Aristotle to Descartes, ‘post-Cartesian humanism’, and beyond (CT, 18), this God was never really alive in the first place. He was a source of meaning and truth and, as such, not only precisely distinguished from the living God, but an instrument in the rationalist war on him. Badiou firmly rejects the postmodern conviction that we are unable to finish with the God of metaphysics.³² If we find it difficult to break with God, that is because we remain deaf to mathematics and in thrall to post-Hegelian, romantic historicism. The pathos of finitude is still ‘the referential site of our thought’ (CS, 162). Thus we (and philosophy itself) repeatedly lapse back into trivial complicities with ‘religions of every stamp’ (CS, 163). In its flight from rigour, postmodernity has not begun to shake itself free of the pathos of finitude; hence the appeal of sub-Wittgensteinian mysticism, dumbed-down Levinas, dilute versions of negative theology, the ‘spiritualization’ of deconstruction, and so forth. As long as finitude remains the ultimate determination of Dasein, God remains as its unnamable or unattainable horizon, and we ourselves remain prey to nostalgia. This is evident enough in the third aspect ³⁰ Interestingly, Badiou has an audacious, specific term for the contemporary religious subject: he or she is the ‘obscure subject’, in whom the workings of a truth, that of the death of God, are buried or unconscious, misconstrued (CT, 17, italics mine). ³¹ Though the triviality has also been a strand in Christianity since the Gospels. See Badiou’s account of their use of ‘the trusted staples of religious thaumaturgy and charlatanism’ and their stock association of Jesus with the ‘itinerant magician’s paraphernalia’, SA, 32–3. ³² Badiou calls this the Lacanian view. Many readers will be more likely to think of it as Derridean, and it is perhaps what is most central to Badiou’s fierce differences with Derrida. Cf. Peter Hallward, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, ES, pp. vii–lxvii, pp. xxiii–xxvii.

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of God, the Heideggerian God (or gods). Whether its practitioners see it or not (and some of them haven’t, notably Cantor), modern mathematics cleanses us of God. Above all, it spells the end of the God of the poets. Modern mathematics is an ‘integrally laicised’ form of thought (CS, 159). It offers us a secular ‘eternity’ and an anti-romantic Platonism of banally multiple Being (CS, 165). In this respect, David Hilbert’s famous declaration was right: ‘Cantor has created a paradise for us from which no-one will drive us.’³³ Badiou’s dismissal of God is unproblematic. His account of nature is more shocking. Here if anywhere his anti-romanticism seems clear, and close to Beckett’s. For he takes the essence of nature to be purely structural. The theme of nature is crucial to ontologies of presence and poetic ontologies, like Heidegger’s. For Heidegger, nature as physis is the appearance or ‘blossoming’ of Being itself. By contrast, Badiou argues that nature in itself is simply not sayable, in that nature is neither one nor a whole. There are only natural beings. It is the complex structure of their interrelations (‘leur intrication’, EE, 160) that is universal. To this extent, nature and number can actually be substituted for one another (‘ ‘‘nature’’ et ‘‘nombre’’ sont substituables’, EE, 159). Substitutions of this kind are repeatedly evident in Beckett. Modern, ‘objective’ nature is a nature under the sway of mathematical ideas and ‘ ‘‘written in mathematical language’’ ’ (EE, 141). Once again, modern knowledge completes a Platonic thesis, for it was Plato who first proposed an interpretation of physis as Idea. Nature is a stabilizing presentation of the multiple. It is normality. In normal conditions, the multiple is secured by or as a state of things (‘r´e-assur´e par un e´tat’, EE, 146). Natural multiples are homogeneous: nature ‘never contradicts itself internally’ (EE, 147). At the same time, however, because there is no one, because a multiple is a multiple of multiples, because the multiple of multiples that is nature is founded only on the void, nature is also always unstable. This paradoxical mixture—nature is both constitutively normal and endemically volatile—is crucial to Badiou’s conception of the event, its rarity, and what I have called its remainder. The apparent stability of a given multiple can always be internally contradicted, particularly by singularities. Singularities are abnormal or unnatural. Nature is the stable and homogeneous form of existence. Here and there, sporadically, singularities break with it. Before they appear, they find no representation at all. Thus ³³ David Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’, in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings (2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 183–201, p. 191.

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Badiou radically rethinks the question of the ontico-ontological difference: nature is precarious because it is founded on the void. But it is so ontologically and not historically. Only ontically, that is, historically, does a stable and normative conception of it prevail, as a consistent presentation of what is otherwise a sheerly inconsistent multiplicity.³⁴ Inconsistent multiplicity underlies all presentation and is the condition of freedom. Here, in principle, a break with nature and normality is always possible. Here it is possible to overcome the inertia of history, to effect a release from the massiveness of the remainder. Here Being makes room for singularities; in other words, it makes room for the event. EVE NT The void is ‘the being as such’ of every multiple presentation (‘son eˆtre en tant que tel’, EE, 109). Because multiple presentations harbour the void within them, they are always ‘imperilled’ by it (ibid.). There is always the possibility of a catastrophe in presentation and an actual manifestation of inconsistency. Russell’s paradox would be one example of this. A supposedly exhaustive system reveals an ‘excess’ which designates its limits. Cantor’s ‘diagonal reasoning’ provides another example. It conveys both Badiou’s point and the particular mathematical brilliance at stake with exquisite clarity. As described by Stewart, the principle behind the diagonal argument is the assumption that the real numbers are countable (that is, they can be numbered off by the natural numbers). One proceeds to argue for a contradiction by listing the reals out as decimal expansions. One then forms a new decimal whose first digit after the decimal point is different from that of the first on the list; whose second digit differs from that of the second on the list, and in general whose nth digit differs from that of the nth on the list. This new number cannot then appear anywhere on the list, ‘which is absurd since the list was assumed to be complete’. Thus the diagonal argument ‘proves an infinity bigger than that of the natural numbers’.³⁵ The infinite collection of real numbers must be larger than the infinite collection of naturals. It is as though we were watching a second infinity grow within the first, with whose order it cannot be made compatible.³⁶ ³⁴ See EE, 210. ³⁵ See Ian Stewart, From Here to Infinity: A Guide to Today’s Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 66. ³⁶ This is particularly clear in Pollard’s account of the diagonal argument. See Philosophical Introduction, 50. Readers baffled by the explanation above may wish to turn to Pollard’s or Hallward’s. See also BA, 331–2.

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As we’ve seen, set theory is fertile in paradoxes of this kind, and both Badiou and Beckett are keenly responsive to mathematical paradox. Badiou tells us why this might be: the paradoxes of set theory are evidence of the irreducible inconsistency of Being. Being does not simply submit to ‘the sovereignty of language’. Nor can it be formulated as a totality (MP, 60). That is the very condition of an actually infinite universe. There is a wobble in Being, as it were, which may always give rise to the catastrophic sequence, the ‘explosive’ arrival of the event (‘av`enement e´v´enementiel’, EE, 90). Actual infinity is founded on the void. But the void is definitively in excess of any given infinite situation. The possibility of an ‘irruption’ of inconsistency into the situation always exists. Once it occurs, the irruption can always ‘propagate itself’ (ibid.). An event arises as the inconsistency of Being fractures the consistencies of presentation (MP, 89). As it does so, it breaks up any illusion that infinity has a limit. What evades consistency is the quelconque (‘whatever’), or what Agamben calls the quodlibet.³⁷ It is the possibility of the quelconque that underpins Badiou’s key article of faith: ‘there is newness in Being, a thesis antagonistic to the maxim from Ecclesiastes: ‘‘Nihil novi sub sole’’ ’ (EE, 231). I shall come back to the famous sentence from Ecclesiastes later, not least via Beckett’s Murphy. Badiou says the event comes as close as is possible to repeating ‘the initial state of things’ (MP, 17). It is not however a fragment of a paradise we might be supposed to have lost. The event releases what were previously ‘frozen’ or virtual potentials (EE, 274), but it does not ‘come from elsewhere’ and has no ‘depth’ (CT, 23). It is an expression of the void within the particular situation to hand. The ‘initial state’ of this situation is precisely its conjuncture with the void. Seen from within, the situation seems caught in an impasse. But ‘every theoretical impasse’ constitutes a possible site for an event. This is evident in the case of the mathematician Evariste Galois.³⁸ At a certain point in his career, Galois reaches an impasse. For Badiou, however, there is an exact correlation between the arrival at the point of impasse, the novelty of the event or discovery which followed it, and Galois’s decision to ‘wager’ on the event. The event has ‘forced’ a given situation—as it might be, mathematical knowledge prior to Galois—to declare its void (EE, 204). The event functions, then, as a radical supplement to ‘the indifferent multiplicity of Being’ (CS, 177). It is supernumerary to everything we are used to ³⁷ For Agamben and the quodlibet, see Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 123. Wall points out that the quodlibet in Agamben’s account of it is very close to Badiou’s conception of singularity. ³⁸ For which see EE, 226.

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counting, ‘to everything of which it is said, ‘‘that counts’’ ’.³⁹ It is a ‘chance exempt from nomination’ (MP, 87). In its present form, it is pure happenstance. But it also anticipates and produces the logic according to which it will be placed and understood, gaining its logical coherence and necessity only in retrospection. For Badiou as opposed to other contemporary philosophers of the event, the event takes place only in certain specific domains, according to certain conditions. There are four such domains: art, love, science, and politics.⁴⁰ In each domain, the event—emancipation, invention, creation, the lovers’ encounter—breaks into an established order of things. It makes possible what had formerly seemed to be impossible. It urges us to decide on a new way of being, in defiance of the conservatism or scepticism that tell us this is out of the question. Badiou gives as examples the encounter of Eloisa and Abelard; the French Revolution; the creation of Galilean physics; and Schoenberg’s invention of the twelve-tone system. The dominant events of our time include Cohen’s mathematical work; the political sequence 1965–80 (May 1968, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Iranian revolution, the workers’ movement in Poland); the poetry of Paul Celan; and Lacanian psychoanalysis.⁴¹ Philosophy must try to think the compossibilit´e of such events (by which Badiou means ‘the organization of their synthetic reception’, the space in which they coexist, rather than the historical circumstances determining their appearance, SA, 108; MP, 66). ‘Compossibility’ is not homogeneity: truths are always heterogeneous to one another, and cannot be rendered in each other’s terms (MP, 69).⁴² There are of course mathematical events. But ‘there exists no mathematical concept of the event’ (EE, 267). Mathematics even ‘eliminates’ the event (EE, 376). For mathematics is the science of Being, and the event is outside Being, ‘an aleatory figure of non-Being’ (‘une figure al´eatoire du non-ˆetre’, EE, 231). ³⁹ ‘Les Lieux de la v´erit´e’, interview with Jacques Henric, Art Press sp´ecial: ‘20 ans: L’Histoire continue’, hors s´erie 13 (1992), 113–18, p. 113. ⁴⁰ See for instance ET, 39. It is important to note that Badiou accepts that there may be more than four, that ‘there may even be an infinity’ of truth-domains. This is an open question. See ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, Les Temps modernes, 526 (May 1990), 1–26, p. 11. ´ enements’, MP, 59–69. The inclusion, here and elsewhere, of psychoanalysis as an ⁴¹ See ‘Ev´ event in the domain of love is not satisfactory. Whatever their importance, Freud and Lacan are not Eloisa and Abelard. Badiou repeatedly confuses the event of love with the event of discourses about it. He is on much firmer ground when he asserts that psychoanalysis may itself be a fifth truth-domain. See ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, 11. ⁴² None the less, Badiou’s concept of ‘compossibility’ forms part of a sustained contemporary effort to try to hold what postmodernism has increasingly presented as the separate elements of an exploding galaxy in some sort of relation. Cf. for example Lardreau’s conception of ‘symphony’, La V´eracit´e, 16–18, 32–3, and passim.

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Indeed, there is no abstract or general ‘situation of the event’ at all. Though an event takes place outside and detached from the ‘rules’ of a given situation, it is always particular to that situation (ET, 61). It is thus that Badiou can insist that his is a materialist philosophy. For Badiou as contrasted with Heidegger, this ‘localization’ of the event is the very principle of its emergence. It also founds what he calls history. Events are particular to particular situations. Histories are always particular. Historicity is ‘a local criterion’ (EE, 197). Two more points need emphasis: first, the event always involves a subtraction from the situation. Something is ‘taken away’ from the situation in hand. The concept of subtraction will (quite rightly) be key to Badiou’s account of Beckett. Secondly, though it happens by chance, the event is not a consequence of some indeterminate or messy flow of things: in Badiou’s terms, it is inseparable from the construction of a concept.⁴³ Mathematics shows us that infinity is not an illimitable excess over finitude. It is simple and ordinary, and the finite is ‘deduced’ from it (CS, 176). The event produces a series in the ‘banal tissue’ of infinity (CS, 164). It produces identities out of infinite multiplicity. In doing so, it founds a discipline. We will miss much of the point to Badiou’s politics, ethics, and aesthetics if we do not stress the connection between event and discipline. Simon Critchley amongst others has argued that Badiou’s philosophy, and in particular his ethics, can seem too close to a virile heroics.⁴⁴ Such tendencies are no doubt perceptible here and there in his work, though Lacan’s version of the unheroic Philoctetes in the twenty-fourth section of Seminar VII—a seminar that has been very influential on Badiou—would more nearly capture what he is getting at. In Lacan’s witty reading of Sophocles’ great play, the eponymous hero ‘isn’t much of a man’ (gullible, obsessive, malodorous, etc.), but is a hero ‘in that he remains fiercely committed to his hate right to the very end, when the deus ex machina appears like the curtain falling’.⁴⁵ For Badiou, discipline is the token of a commitment like Philoctetes’. According to Kouv´elakis, it is precisely the emphasis on discipline that distinguishes Badiou’s from a heroic ethics: ‘the event engenders a discipline, not heroism’.⁴⁶ The discipline in question is partly ‘a discipline of time’ (EE, 233). It is intrinsic to history or histories. ⁴³ See EE, 199. ⁴⁴ See Simon Critchley, ‘Comment ne pas c´eder sur son d´esir’, in Charles Ramond (ed.), Alain Badiou: Penser le multiple (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 207–33, p. 232 and passim. ⁴⁵ See Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. with notes Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), 320. ⁴⁶ Eustache Kouv´elakis, ‘La Politique dans ses limites, ou les paradoxes d’Alain Badiou’, Actuel Marx, 28 (2000), 39–54, p. 40.

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From the early 1980s onwards, Badiou has been critical of certain aspects of his Marxist heritage. Yet his concept of the event owes a debt to it, as Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s do not. The event in Badiou is a version of the Hegelian and, above all, Marxist dialektisches Umschlag. The Umschlag is a sudden reversal or overthrow of a given situation whereby a contradiction is set at naught. The situation yields to an antithesis which it has in any case been harbouring within itself. Marx asserts, for example, that the highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with the depreciation of capital, degradation of the labourer, and the most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises . . . ⁴⁷

Such ‘awful visitations’ may be just the vis medicatrix of ‘an overgrown and bloated opulence’.⁴⁸ But ‘these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale’, and finally to the ‘violent overthrow’ of capital, the decisive suspension of its ‘self-realization’.⁴⁹ Badiou retains Marx’s emphasis on the latent power of the antithesis: the situation that produces the event of Evariste Galois’s mathematical discovery does so insofar as it indicates an element that it cannot present and that is unknown to Galois’s predecessors. He also keeps Marx’s valuation of tremors, upheavals, and, above all, crisis. He radically departs from Marxist tradition, however, in distributing the Umschlag amongst the political, aesthetic, scientific, and psychosexual domains.⁵⁰ Above all, he strips the Marxist conception of crisis of its historical logic and supposed inevitability. Nothing ensures the arrival of an event. There is no inexorability to it. Its very principle, again, is intermittency. Badiou’s Th´eorie du sujet is notable for its anti-historical animus. The later Badiou does not exactly sustain this. But he insists that the event is not the consequence of ‘historical development’, as it is for Marx.⁵¹ In a universe that counterposes actual infinity and event and is no longer in thrall to the pathos of finitude, the event founds historicity. Again, it is the very principle of what counts as history. History begins with events themselves.⁵² But it does so rarely, sporadically, and locally. In this respect, for all Badiou’s insistence on affirmation, it is hard not to see his philosophy as a rigorous scaling-down of Marxist confidence and a ⁴⁷ Marx, Grundrisse, 750. ⁴⁸ In John Fullarton’s phrase as quoted by Marx, Grundrisse, 849. The Fullarton text is On the Regulation of Currencies (London: John Murray, 1844). ⁴⁹ Grundrisse, 749–50. ⁵⁰ For a very immediate example of this, see MP, 19. ⁵¹ See TS, passim; and Grundrisse, 749. ⁵² See in particular EE, 193–8.

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radical diffusion of the Marxist concept of struggle. ‘Terre ingrate, mais pas totalement’ has rarely been a Marxist sentiment.⁵³ Badiou arguably makes it one. He also dumps Marx’s insistence on the priority of existing, actual, empirical, material relations as everywhere apparent in The German Ideology, for example.⁵⁴ As we shall see, however, a different inspiration is born in the wake of this move. It is a contemporary inspiration, for which Agamben and Benjamin will finally supply a more relevant context than Hegel or Marx. SUBJECT It is hard to talk about the event in Badiou without also talking about the subject and truth. For the three concepts cannot really be separated. Badiou asserts that the modern period is defined by the central importance it grants to the category of the subject. It does so, however, chiefly in raising the question of whether that category can be sustained in any form, or whether ‘it must be deconstructed’ (MP, 24). This issue divides the philosophers: Lacan, Lardreau, Jambet, and Badiou himself think it possible to keep the subject, if only as a rare occurrence. Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Nancy, and LacoueLabarthe do not. For Badiou in particular, the subject is not a universal or a given category. His is neither the transcendental nor the empirical subject, neither a knowing nor a signifying subject. This is not the constructed subject made vulnerable by its very constructedness to deconstruction. Subjectification only takes place in the wake of an event. It is unthinkable apart from an encounter, of which the most vivid example is falling in love. Thus the subject is always ‘qualified’; that is, he or she is always the subject of a particular art, a particular love, science, or political movement. Crucially, ontology cannot think the subject in itself. It can only think ‘the type of being’ to which the regime of the subject corresponds. A subject emerges by chance, as a ‘local configuration’ of an aleatory procedure, a specified, localized, finite moment in the trajectory of any truth that is born of an event, like Galilean physics or atonal music. No law requires that there be a subject. Subjects do not have to exist at all. Most of the time, there are no subjects. The subject is ‘rigorously singular’, a sporadic phenomenon: again, ‘the subject is rare’ (EE, 429). ⁵³ The Frankfurt school is a remarkable and obvious exception, as we shall see further later, particularly in the case of Benjamin. ⁵⁴ See for instance Marx (with Friedrich Engels), The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 349–50.

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If no law requires that there be a subject, the subject calls established law into question. At the very least, he or she will see flaws in it. So, too, subjectification does not mean possessing a particular kind of knowledge. The subject might rather be thought of as constituted in a break with knowledge, even as ‘purified’ of knowledge (EE, 472). In Badiou’s jargon,⁵⁵ a generic procedure (of which a subject is an instance) is subtracted from all prior determination by the existing encyclopedia. In this respect, Badiou identifies his own position with a tradition he sees as running from Descartes to Lacan and Beckett. All of them recognize the importance of holding the subject in the ‘pure void’ of radical subtraction from existing knowledge (ibid.). From Schoenberg composing at the end of tonal music to Chris and Susan falling in love, subjectification is an occurrence of the void (EE, 431). Subjects do not apprehend their truths as objects of knowledge. They rather profess or declare them. Truths are subjective acts. Equally, whilst subjects can ‘hypothesize themselves’, they do not properly know themselves as subjects (EE, 437). A subject is therefore both a real ‘instantiation’ of a truth-procedure, and the hypothesis or ‘new idea’ which that procedure introduces into presentation (ibid.). The subject also resists capture by an ‘established language’ (MP, 78). He or she is no more determined by an existing language than by the current state of knowledge. Subjects invent new names. They are self-hypothesizing insofar as they seek new names, both for themselves, and for the process of which they are a part. The question of nomination will be significant in Badiou’s account of Beckett. Subjectification involves what Badiou calls scission. This might seem to be hardly a new idea. Both the Cartesian division of the subject and the Freudian insistence on its non-coincidence introduce a principle of self-alienation into subjectivity. But Badiou’s emphasis is different, partly, again, as a result of the influence of ‘my master, Jacques Lacan’ (CS, 85).⁵⁶ For Lacan, the concept of the unconscious designates the fact that ‘it thinks’ (‘c¸a pense’) at a place where I am not, but where I may yet come to be (EE, 471). It keeps me at a saving distance from the site where I am familiar with myself, where I declare or trust myself to be transparent. This site belongs to the world of opinion, Spinozan ‘perseverance in being’. But ‘perseverance in being’ is the rule only insofar as one knows oneself. Lacan understands that there can be no immanent selfcertainty. The possibility of becoming a subject therefore always exists. On ⁵⁵ Badiou himself is happy to refer to his terminology as ‘jargon’. See for instance AB, 131. ⁵⁶ On the depth of a debt that goes back to 1960, see LS, 76 n 1.

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the one hand, then, the condition of the subject-to-be, prior to subjectification, is that of a banal, actual infinity. On the other hand, the event precisely divides that condition. Subjectification ‘takes the form of the Two’, the originary scission, turned towards both the situation from which the subject emerges and the event that came to interrupt that situation (EE, 431). This scission founds the political subject in Rousseau, for example, where the will is divided by the event, split between submission to the laws of the State and ‘the sovereignty of the general will’ (EE, 381).⁵⁷ Subjectification also has a second aspect. Subjects are ‘seized by’ or caught up in events (or ‘suspended from’ them). Badiou repeatedly resorts to the phrase, EE, 444; CS, 68. In that sense, they cannot will and have no control over the process of subjectification. But subjectification also involves a decision. The event radically subtracts the subject from the world of opinion or established knowledge. In doing so, it burdens him or her with the ‘anguish’ of the void (EE, 110). This in turn makes it necessary for the subject to wager on the event itself. Nothing guides or directs this decision. It has no prior foundation: it is made ‘without a concept’ (EE, 469). Nothing underwrites the wager. Nothing justifies it, proves it right, or guarantees its consequences. Hence what Badiou calls ‘the hazardous historicity of truth’ (EE, 445): the progress of the truths to which subjects commit themselves is chancy and at the mercy of historical circumstance. The tense of the wager must therefore necessarily be future anterior: ‘this will have been true’. The concept of the future anterior is crucial to Badiou. The subject anticipates a final presentation of what remains indiscernible to him or her. He or she always pronounces sense in the future anterior. For the meanings in question will only exist retroactively, when the indiscernible has come to exist. Thus, at a time when her country itself and its future are subject to great uncertainty, Joan of Arc axiomatically prescribes that ‘The English must be booted out of France’.⁵⁸ In doing so, she ‘prescribes’ a historical condition to France that ‘will have come to pass’. H¨olderlin provides a poetic version of this kind of prescription. The essential tense of his poetry is the future anterior. H¨olderlin is neither a conservative poet of the German national spirit, nor a romantic nostalgic for ancient Greece and the ‘return of the Gods’. Certainly, he is the poet of an emergent Germany, ⁵⁷ See book II, chapter iv of the Social Contract. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract, tr. with introd. and notes Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 67–70. ⁵⁸ See ‘L’Insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit, 238 (Dec. 1997), 26–33, p. 30.

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‘the Germanic event’ (EE, p. 287). As such, however, he is actually preoccupied with the thought of escaping Germany. Paradoxically, for H¨olderlin, fleeing one’s country is a way of being loyal to it. Badiou suggests that H¨olderlin is interested, above all, in the idea of an eastward flight. This rings true: after its opening lyrical evocation of ‘Gl¨uckselig Svevien’ (‘most happy Swabia’), for example, ‘Die Wanderung’ abruptly proclaims: ‘Ich aber will dem Kaukasos zu!’ (‘But I will make for the Caucasus!’).⁵⁹ If the poet parts company with Germany, however, so, too, he imagines Germany parting company with itself, above all, again, in a movement towards Asia. In ‘Der Rhein’, the Rhine itself ‘wandern wollt’, und ungeduldig ihn | Nach Asia trieb die k¨onigliche Seele’ (it ‘longed to wander, its kingly soul drove it impatiently towards Asia’).⁶⁰ In Badiou’s version of it, H¨olderlin’s preoccupation with Greece centres on the event of Greece as asymmetrical with the German one. Greece is born of an irruption of Asia into Europe, the intrusion of Asiatic ‘holy pathos’ (‘ ‘‘path´etisme sacr´e’’ ’, EE, 285). Greece subsequently tames this irruption through an ‘excess of form’. But the Germany H¨olderlin so often reviles is already tame. This Germany must put the structure of the Greek event into reverse in order to be able to repeat it. Germany must go outwards towards Asia in order to return to itself (as is actually specified in ‘Der Rhein’).⁶¹ Here H¨olderlin recognizes what Badiou himself sees, in the case of St Paul: ‘When a step forward is the order of the day, one may . . . find assistance in the greatest step back’ (SA, 2). The backward look to ancient Greece is not to a precedent, but to a mirror-image of a putative future. It is a way of anticipating an identity for Germany that is not a historical given but rather lies in prospect. Certainly, H¨olderlin sets out without knowing where he is going. He declares himself as a subject, not in any feeble will to conserve a past identity, but in the wager involved in ‘uprooting’ and ‘departure’ (EE, 289). He works in the future anterior, anticipating a final presentation of what remains in fact indiscernible to him. Subjectification is closely related to indiscernibility, in Badiou’s sense of the word. That which ‘will have been the case’ is at present indiscernible. H¨olderlin ‘always pronounces meaning in the future anterior’ (EE, 438). The ⁵⁹ Friedrich H¨olderlin, S¨amtliche Gedichte, ed. with commentary Detlev L¨uders, 2 vols. (Bad Homburg: Athen¨aum Verlag, 1970), i. 308–9. ⁶⁰ Ibid. i. 312. ⁶¹ ‘Stillwandelnd sich im deutschen Lande | Begn¨uget und das Sehnen stillt | Im guten Gesch¨affte’ (‘Quietly advancing [it] is content with German lands, and stills the yearning with prosperous labour’). Ibid. i. 314.

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significance of the names he uses will only exist retroactively, when what is at present indiscernible has come into existence. It is then that those names will prove to have been true. So, too, paradigmatically, in the psychoanalytic procedure, new names create referents on the hypothesis of a final, complete description of what is at present indiscernible. On this basis, Badiou provides a definition of the subject. A subject ‘decides on the undecidable from the point of view of the indiscernible’ or ‘forces a veridicity where the truth is suspended’ (‘force une v´eridicit´e selon le suspens d’une v´erit´e’, EE, 445). The subject arrives at a decision of whose truth or falsity nothing will immediately assure him or her, on the assumption that, though indiscernible now, its truth will finally be discerned.⁶² Here Badiou clearly owes a debt to Sartre. But Sartre’s insistence on the importance of the wager that nothing will justify before it is made is also borne out by mathematics. Mathematicians recognize that, at the moment of the difficult encounter with ‘paradox, inconsistency, the diagonal and excess’, they can only proceed on the basis of a decision (CT, 49). When G¨odel argues that, at a certain level, Cantor’s continuum hypothesis needs only to be axiomatically demonstrable, the decision is precisely what is at stake.⁶³ That the continuum hypothesis is finally neither provable nor disprovable points to the necessity of a decision for which no prior legislation exists. This kind of wager is formalized in the Axiom of Choice. Many mathematicians are wary of this axiom and explicitly, even guiltily confess to any use of it. But others like Fraenkel see it as ‘probably the most interesting and most discussed axiom in mathematics after Euclid’s axiom of parallels’.⁶⁴ The Axiom of Choice guides the selection of a consistent set of elements from a given set of multiples to form another multiple whose existence is then guaranteed. It says only that such a multiple exists. It does not guarantee that it can necessarily be constructed, and indicates neither the rules nor the material for the selection in question. It merely asserts that that selection is possible. Once again, nothing secures the decision. The mathematician is concerned with a domain where he or she must ⁶² See in particular ‘Conf´erence sur la soustraction’, CS, 179–95, for definitions and specific accounts of the key concepts of the undecidable, the indiscernible, the unnamable, and the generic. Undecidables are statements that are neither demonstrable nor refutable. Indiscernibles are statements in which exact differences are not ascertainable: it is not possible to say whether a is larger than b, or the reverse. For a fuller account of indiscernibility with reference to a specific subject, see Badiou on Cohen, EE, 449. ⁶³ See Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory, 101. ⁶⁴ Abraham A. Fraenkel, ‘Historical Introduction’, Paul Bernays, Axiomatic Set Theory, with a historical introduction by Abraham A. Fraenkel (New York: Dover, 1968), 3–35, p. 16.

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intervene, and where no prior assumption or practice will serve as a guide. It is only subsequently and in terms of the ‘effects’ of the intervention that the mathematician knows the meaning or value of the choice made (EE, 252). Badiou’s conception of subjecthood is inseparable from an assertion of the importance of intervention. Subjects declare themselves as such, without ground or foundation, on the edge of the void, because an event has ‘seized’ them.⁶⁵ They intervene on behalf of the event. The commitment at stake is exemplified in apagogic reason (reasoning by the absurd). In apagogic reason, I suppose the truth of A, not because it is self-evidently right or I can prove it, but because supposing the truth of non-A leads to a palpable absurdity. Apagogic reasoning has often been ‘categorically rejected’ as counter-intuitive (EE, 275). But it is so only ‘from the vantage point of [established] law’ (PP, 113). The objection holds only if we assume that events are absurd. But we know very well that, to the contrary, events happen that turn our notions of absurdity inside out. The point is that, as Mallarm´e says, in Igitur, the event contains the absurd, ‘ ‘‘implies it—but in a latent state’’ ’ (PP, 114).⁶⁶ Apagogic reason is actually a peculiarly daring form of thought. It is a form of pseudo-deduction in an incoherent universe, installing itself in a situation it supposes to be incoherent until this incoherence manifests itself. It is remarkable for its freedom. It begins in nullity and is extremely uncertain of the criteria for the connections it forges. It does not know where it is going. It imposes a responsibility that can only be assumed voluntarily. It is, at one and the same time, an assured and prudent experiment in order, and an ‘adventurous pilgrimage in disorder’ (‘[une] aventureuse p´er´egrination dans le d´esordre’, EE, 279). Assurance, prudence, and order are all features of the delicate balancing act that is subjectivity. For subjects are not merely born of events. Subjectification is a process. It involves discipline and difficult, sometimes ‘almost impossible’ labour (EE, 257). With Mallarm´e and Beckett in mind, Badiou adopts a Mallarm´ean term for this labour: it is a ‘restricted action’ (an ‘action ⁶⁵ To some extent, Badiou’s conception of subjectification as a ‘seizure’ by the event resembles Agamben’s concern with inspiration, though the two philosophers think the subject in obviously different ways. Part of what is gripping in both accounts is that inspiration is the reverse of a privileged condition: for Agamben, inspiration is an impoverishment of human being, ‘subjectification as desubjectification’, possession as dispossession. See IP, 44, 59, 108–9. What, Agamben asks, could an inspired philosophy be? He answers his own question: an expression that ‘would shatter to pieces in the very moment it unveiled its truth’ (IP, 109). ⁶⁶ See the beginning of the fourth section, ‘Le Coup de d´es’, St´ephane Mallarm´e, Œuvres, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Bordas. 1992), 388.

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restreinte’). Subjects construct trajectories in the wake of and from the effects of events. They isolate the criteria that distinguish the effects of an event from the conditions of ordinary life. They make ‘investigations’ (‘enquˆetes’, EE, 364) into the connections between the event and the contexts it affects, and the lack of such connections. This process of ‘discernment’ is not a question of knowledge: as we’ve already seen, subjectivity definitively involves a radical subtraction from knowledge. But the progress of the subject none the less ‘resembles’ the acquisition of knowledge (EE, 365). Indeed, what the ‘restricted action’ of the subject at length produces is something like a coherent work. This, of course, is amply the case with Beckett. It is also the case with love. Badiou’s conception of the development of the loving subject is particularly well illustrated with reference to Marivaux, of ˆ et l’´ev´enement. That Badiou should whom he gives a short account in L’Etre admire the elegance and lightness of marivaudage seems considerably more implausible than that he should be enthusiastic for the Beckettian wasteland.⁶⁷ If Marivaux is the Fragonard of French drama, Badiou is hardly the Watteau of French philosophy. For Badiou, however, what D’Alembert called the eternal ‘surprise d’amour’ in Marivaux’s plays⁶⁸ is born of an encounter on the borders of the void (‘aux parages d’un vide’, EE, 257). Giving a name to the encounter is very important.⁶⁹ But so too is Marivaux’s treatment of the issues that remain after love has been declared or ‘named’. Marivaux’s lovers then seek to ascertain who exactly this other subject might be. They embark on a process of ‘investigation’ and discovery. Theatre does not treat love as a theme, as novels do. It treats it as an axiom whose declaration is followed by an exploration of its consequences.⁷⁰ This is particularly significant in that, as we’ll see later, Badiou thinks of love as a very important theme in the later Beckett. The investigation of the other loving subject is not as banal a matter as it might sound. For if, on the one hand, the subject in love has been transformed by an encounter, on the other, he or she previously occupied a particular place in the world which was not determined by the event of love, and cannot simply be shrugged off or left behind. Though Badiou does not refer to it, Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard is an excellent example of this: the ‘unique event’ of Silvia and Dorante’s love—Marivaux stresses the word ‘unique’—runs up against ⁶⁷ Of course, the two enthusiasms are hardly comparable in Badiou. So far as I know, he has devoted no more than a single page to Marivaux’s work (EE, 257). ´ ⁶⁸ D’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux, in Marivaux, Th´eaˆ tre complet, ed. F. Deloffre, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1968), ii. 984. ⁶⁹ See ‘Les Lieux de la v´erit´e’, 118. ⁷⁰ See RT, 55–6.

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the fact that each believes the other to be a mere servant. What follows is an elaborate attempt on both sides to negotiate the implications and gauge the exact significance of their encounter as lovers for their situation apart from the encounter.⁷¹ The lovers manifest a sustained if shifting concern with the intricate relation between a subjectivity emerging from the encounter, and the regulated mundanity of ordinary life. Marivaux’s lovers must work to get the measure of this relation. They must try to agree on the criteria that distinguish ‘the effects of love from the ordinary train of things’. But the task is formidable: such agreement, again, is ‘almost impossible’ (EE, 257).⁷² Some of the specific features of the process of subjectification will also become clearer if we consider the concept of ‘forcing’.⁷³ Badiou gets this from Cohen. Within the universe of the ZF axioms, only a limited range of sets is available. These are the so-called ‘constructible sets’. They are definable within the ZF universe according to certain established operations. Mathematical constructivists (as they are known) dispute the validity of any sets that are not thus definable. The appropriate analogy, here, would be Wittgenstein’s rejection of nonsensical statements: indeed, for Badiou, Wittgenstein is a philosophical constructivist. Constructivism is a pragmatic mathematics put forward by ‘the real descendants of Aristotle, the modern, Anglo-Saxon empiricists’ (CT, 40). It is normative. It pins Being down to a prescribed language, to ‘finite and controllable linguistic protocols’ (CT, 52). Badiou is unrelentingly hostile to constructivism, mathematical and philosophical. His reasons are clear. It is a cardinal principle that there exists a zone of Being that is radically subtracted from the jurisdiction of language. ‘Language’, writes Badiou, ‘is not the absolute horizon of thought’ (DP, 23). For the constructivist, by contrast, what language cannot designate—indiscernibles, unnamables—does not exist. Above all, there ⁷¹ The remarkable ninth scene in Act II, for example, seems to me to be a miniature image of the truth of love in Badiou’s conception of it. Silvia insistently reveals her love in spite of her own conviction that she should ‘know better’. In a sense, the event of the encounter is ‘speaking’ the subject in spite of herself. To anticipate a point in Chapter 2: Silvia has deep misgivings about and even struggles against but does not give up on her desire. ⁷² In the English theatre, certain Restoration comedies, particularly The Way of the World, might be thought of as very much concerned with the kind of subtle juggling of conflicting claims that Badiou describes. ⁷³ I have refrained from paying very much attention here to the account of ‘forcing’ in EE, 429–71. The ground has already been well covered by others. See in particular Hallward, BA, 341–8. For detailed mathematical descriptions, see Mary Tiles, The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Introduction to Cantor’s Paradise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 185–91; and J. N. Crossley, C. N. Ash, A. C. Brickhill, J. C. Stillwell, and N. H. Williams, What is Mathematical Logic? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 70–7.

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can be no event, since the event is not indicated beforehand by language. Newness can only be thought of as an effect of language, or in relation to an already established language. Change and diversity always appear in relation to a prior language, as in Wittgenstein’s language games.⁷⁴ Constructivism denies any dimension to Being that would leave language in an impasse or at a loss. Politically, too, it is pragmatic. It is concerned only with what is possible within existing rules or realizable within existing constraints. In the flat, correct world of the constructivists, excess is strictly measured. Situations persist indefinitely in their regulated or well-managed being. Constructivism might be thought of as the contemporary cultural dominant (‘a strong position, which no-one can escape’, EE, 325). But it is none the less characterized by its ‘stupefying poverty’ (EE, 347). This is exemplified in the fact that mathematical constructivism cannot accommodate the large cardinals. ‘Forcing’ is of great significance for Badiou because it means refusing to accept that the constructible universe is the whole universe. It adds extra sets to the constructible universe. Cohen showed that it is possible to talk about N , a new model of the universe of sets, even when its existence is a virtual one; that is, before its new sets have been properly or completely specified. We can find names for the new sets in N before we know exactly what those sets are going to be. In the precise terms that Badiou derives from Cohen, ‘forcing’ makes the new model N exist as a ‘generic extension’ containing the old one. An existing situation is forced to accept a truth that it did not previously discern and that has yet to be wholly and formally stated. ‘Forcing’ changes the ontological status of truth and situation together. Of course, a truth that is ‘forced’ will itself eventually be normalized. But it will remain subtracted from knowledge until the language of the existing situation is radically transformed. Badiou finds equivalents of ‘forcing’ in non-mathematical domains: when Mallarm´e defines the poetic act, for example, he makes what is effectively a polemical or proleptic declaration. It is not a description of what the poetic act has been before the declaration. It is rather a definition of what the poetic act will reveal itself to have been, after it. As Badiou notes in Le Si`ecle, in this sense, modern artistic manifestos have repeatedly sought to ‘force’ truths. If Mallarm´e’s assertion does indeed turn out to have been true of French poetry, that is because it will have been borne out by certain poems, as a given form ⁷⁴ The substance of Badiou’s reading of Wittgenstein seems to me to be that the latter finally writes off the trivial pluralities of the world in the interests of an unspeakable, mystical truth.

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of knowledge (literary criticism) will be able to show. Those poems will have changed the situation of poetry—will have ‘forced’ a change—in conformity with the truth that Mallarm´e declared. ‘Forcing’ will have enlarged and transformed an existing situation, that of French poetry before modern symbolism. Equally, there can be no ‘forcing’ a return to a status quo: after Schoenberg, the declaration ‘ ‘‘music is essentially tonal’’ ’ cannot be ‘forced’ (EE, 443). Here again, the subject ‘forces’ language in anticipation of a truth that he or she can only know in the future anterior. ‘Forcing’ implies a subjective discipline, as in the case of the ethics of Lacanian analysis. Badiou associates Lacan and Lacanian analysis with an extraordinary philosophical ‘calmness’ (CS, 305). This calmness is born of the analyst’s acquaintance with the void, which will necessarily be intimate. It has two aspects. First, there is the principle of impassivity (‘impassibilit´e’, CS, 318). The analyst must remain impassive, not merely because, in certain respects, he or she must remain unresponsive to the analysand, but because analysis proceeds in the recognition that what the analysand says about him- or herself is founded, in one sense, on the void. Secondly, there is the principle of attentiveness: because it is founded on the void, the analysand’s existing situation can always be ‘forced’, reformulated, named anew. Lacan says this explicitly: it is the very principle of analysis that ‘other words, unprecedented meanings are possible’ (CS, 323). But this is the case only if the analyst is capable of an ‘astringent fidelity’ to ‘that which arrives’ (‘`a ce qui advint’, ibid.). This is the analytic discipline. Nothing could be further removed from analysis than the hermeneutic move (CS, 280): where the interpreter claims to have discovered a truth, the analyst hearkens out for a truth that is in the process of discovering itself, whose tense is the future anterior. The analyst recognizes the truth of the analysand, not as the present reality of neurotic suffering, but as model N , an ‘id´ealit´e a`-venir’. Analysis produces a protracted series of ‘finite approximations’ to this ideality (EE, 472–3). ‘Forcing’ takes place in the long, impassive, resolutely calm encounter through which the analyst supports and sustains the development of the truth of the analysand. TRU TH The subject of analysis, like the political, scientific, or artistic subject, is the subject of a truth. Consructivists repeatedly deny the existence of truth. For Badiou, on the other hand, ‘the category of truth is the central category of all

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possible philosophy, whether under another name or not’ (CS, 62). Truth is not reducible to the flaccid statement—itself a truth-claim—that there are ‘only interpretations’ (EE, 469). Nor, contrary to the whole thrust of postNietzschean thought, are truths fictions, though the difference is admittedly subtle.⁷⁵ Badiou’s concept of truth cannot be understood apart from the event and the subject. Truths are not objects of knowledge. Knowledge discerns objects and then classifies them. It divides objects from one another, names them, and then groups them. It consists of judgements and connections between judgements. Knowledge ‘ignores the event’ (EE, 363). For the event is supernumerary to the existing situation, and knowledge can only function with reference to that situation. By contrast, truths are produced on the basis of events. We can distinguish them by the degree to which they break with existing situations. The categories of truth and knowledge are quite separate from one another. Heidegger insisted on this ‘capital distinction’ (MP, 54). But he also equated truth with Being, an equation which ‘must be abandoned’ (EE, 391). Truths don’t have being. They come into being. Once again, Badiou owes a debt to Marx, as exemplified in the Theses on Feuerbach. Marx writes: The chief defect of all previous materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. . . . The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice.⁷⁶

Badiou shares with the Marx of the Theses an insistence on the subjective as opposed to the objective dimension of truth; on truth as effected in practice, by labour; on truth as a goal, towards which the subject works. Marx famously declares, in the Theses, that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’.⁷⁷ In doing so, he also declares his opposition to a hermeneutic conception of truth and his commitment to a conception of it as produced by active subjects. Indeed, one might ⁷⁵ See CS, 67 for some account of this. ⁷⁶ Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in The German Ideology, 572. ⁷⁷ Ibid. 574. I am grateful to Jason Barker for reminding me of the relevance of this assertion to Badiou.

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think of Badiou’s conception of the subject and truth as to some extent a radicalization of the first two of the Theses, but one achieved only at the wholesale destitution, first, of Marx’s historical materialism, and secondly, of the category of the object. As regards the first: at the beginning of the second chapter of Manifeste pour la philosophie, Badiou explicitly contrasts truth and history in a manner that underlines the question of intermittency: ‘temporal discontinuity’ is the ‘mode of being’ of truths (MP, 13; italics mine). As regards the second: truth is not a question of exactitude or ‘an adequation between a subject and an object’ (MP, 74). It is a question of a subject ‘sans vis-`a-vis’ (ibid.). Ours is the first epoch in which a generalized desacralization (‘la destitution des liens sacr´es’, MP, 38) has offered us this understanding of truth. Strictly speaking, of course, it is truths in the plural that are always at issue. Truth is not one or whole. To assume that it is either is to court disaster. Truths are necessarily multiple and not to be unified. They are also always subtractive: that is, they are withdrawn from the authority of language and knowledge, holes ‘in the field of the namable’ (MP, 87), Beckettianly minimal consistencies that testify to the inconsistency intrinsic to any given situation (MP, 90). They are not to be measured in quantitative terms. Quantitative measurement is merely a fetish of an objectifying culture like our own. There is no guarantee of the durability of truths. They have no allotted or predetermined lifespan. Their trajectories are always aleatory. Here Badiou and Wittgenstein fleetingly coincide, for this is one of Wittgenstein’s great themes: what tells me whether a proposition is true or not is simply the pure hazard of the world.⁷⁸ Truths depend for their persistence on the commitment of the subjects who are faithful to them and agree to sustain them. This is obvious in the case of the history of modern mathematics, which has developed in a process of transmission and constant modification. The truth of modern mathematics is a kind of ideal recollection of all the evaluations produced by Cantor and the mathematicians who have followed in his wake. A truth of this kind is a regulated procedure. It is non-natural, unstable, and typically artificial. Truths are fragile, precarious things, and can start to die very quickly. Yet, startlingly, Badiou also claims that truths are infinite, even immortal. We can grasp precisely what he means, here, if we look at his account of the death of Marxism. Certainly, ‘Marxism died, in the end’ (EE, 368). It fell victim to ⁷⁸ See ‘Silence, solipsisme, saintet´e: L’Anti-philosophie de Wittgenstein’, BARCA! Po´esie, politique, psychanalyse, 3 (Nov. 1994), 13–53, p. 38.

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the ‘encyclopedization’ of its truth (ibid.); that is, its truth became indistinguishable from a historical and sociological knowledge. The truth of Marxism ceased to be a form of subjective fidelity to the event of Marx, a truth that was constantly produced (or ‘proved’, to recall the Theses on Feuerbach). Indeed, in interview, Badiou has declared that, in its political aspect, his thought is an effort to think Marxism anew, through a rigorous separation of political subjectivity from the objectivity of State and economics.⁷⁹ Marxists forgot that the proletariat was ‘an infinite class’ and began to think of it as a merely ‘empirical’ one (ibid.). Once they did so, defeat was always imminent.⁸⁰ As Badiou asserts and as is ever more obvious, the truth Marx offered to the world was not the ‘science’ he made available. It was the hole he made in knowledge. It is in this sense that the truth of Marx is infinite; that is, it knows no end and is endlessly renewable. It is not tied to any historically finite forms. It cannot be thwarted, gainsaid, or cancelled out by any specific set of historical circumstances. By the same token, like all truths, it is radically egalitarian, available to all. Marxism died because it became a prisoner of what Badiou calls ‘veridicity’.⁸¹ Veridicity is established truth; it is truth as contained in the encyclopedia (by which Badiou means the system of knowledge extant at any given time). The veridical is a finite semblance of truth. It is what counts for truth in a situation prior to the event. If no event arrives ‘to supplement [such a situation], there is no truth. There is only what I call veridicity’ (MP, 17). Truth distinguishes itself from veridicity precisely in so far as it is infinite.⁸² The ontological difference between truth and veridicity consists in this: where truths are subtracted from knowledge, veridicity is the condition of knowledge. But here, as so often in Badiou, the apparent simplicity of an antithesis turns out to have been deceptive: if ‘truth is subtracted from knowledge, it does not contradict it’ (EE, 445). There is in fact a ‘subtle dialectic’ between truth and knowledge (EE, 365). Veridicity is not irrelevant to a truth-process. If a truth cannot be named by the language of the existing situation, it will none the less become ⁷⁹ See ‘R´eponses e´crites d’Alain Badiou’, 68. ⁸⁰ In England, the empirical proletariat definitively corrected this error in 1979. Cf. Jacques Ranci`ere’s compelling attempt to rethink the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’, beginning with its Roman origins, in ‘L’Inadmissible’, AU, 128–47; and my own development of that essay in ‘Oublier Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000’, in Remembering the 1990s: New Formations, 50 (Autumn 2003), 123–41. ⁸¹ For a simple note on the distinction between truth and veridicity, see MP, 17. For a more extended account, see EE, 365–9. ⁸² See EE, 367.

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part of a situation in which it can be so named. Retroactively, at least, truths are named and become veridical.⁸³ The very ‘investigations’ that subjects make into the connections between events and situations result in knowledge. Hence the strange paradox of a truth that is subtracted from knowledge, still in process and at the mercy of chance, and yet, at the same time, also already lodged in the encylopedia. The crucial point, in the end, is that every multiple in a truthprocedure must contain at least one investigation that avoids determination by the encyclopedia; but only one such investigation is in principle required. Truth is not reducible to the terms of the encyclopedia. But truths involve naming. They therefore produce a disturbance in language. Truths make language quake. Events demand new names. The subject of an event employs names which have no referent in the existing situation and which ‘do not duplicate an established language’ (EE, 436). Names mediate: they are the trace left on a situation of what cannot be discerned from within it. The elements of a truth-procedure are only accessible through their names. Names are its anchor, guarantee, and ‘sole certitude’, writes Badiou, echoing Beckett’s Mal vu mal dit in the midst of a predominantly mathematical discussion (EE, 418).⁸⁴ However, the names of a truth usually seem empty to someone who is not its subject. He or she recognizes them, because, formally at least, they belong to the situation, but they seem empty and without content. The sceptic declares that they are meaningless, obscure, incomprehensible, as cryptic and hermetic as ‘poetic language’ (EE, 438). In a sense, the sceptic is right: the power and scope of the new names, their very point and clarity, depends on the future of the truth in question. Names displace established significations. They leave the referent void. The void in question will be filled if the truth produces a new situation. Names are thus hypotheses; or rather, subjects use them to make hypotheses about truths. But no new name will be absolutely new. Whilst the name of the event is drawn from the void and is therefore surplus to the existing situation, it will also be taken from that situation (EE, 363). In any case, no one would want to be permanently caught up in the process of subjectification. Badiou is cleareyed about this: most of the time, the world will prevail. We ‘cannot function otherwise’ (ES, 50). It is not possible indefinitely to sustain the adventure of a process of subjectification in which ‘improbable names appear from the void’ (EE, 325). So, too, the rare exception that is a truth will ultimately be convertible into knowledge. Indeed, as Badiou shrewdly observes, the very rarity of ⁸³ See ibid. 439.

⁸⁴ IS, 48; cf. ‘seule certitude’, MV, 61.

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the exception itself is conceivable only in relation to knowledge. The structure of event, subject, and truth-procedure implies a necessary declension from truth. This is what I call the logic of the remainder. Badiou’s most detailed, practical account of event, subject, and truth together appears in his version of St Paul. Like Beckett, Paul is a key figure in Badiou’s select pantheon and a key element in the structure of his thought (though we should always remember that, for Badiou, Paul is not a philosopher nor even, as might seem likely, a political subject, but an antiphilosopher).⁸⁵ If Paul is an exemplary figure, it is because he is the subject of a truth in its rarity. As an extension of the event in and by its subjects, a truth is in principle unlimited; that is, it is universalizable. That is the case with Paul. However, the truth in question is not that of the Damascene conversion. It is crucial that we grasp this. Paul’s truth is not the truth of a coup de foudre, a revelation or a moment of ‘illumination’ (SP, 16). It is not numinous and certainly not mystical in character. On the contrary: Paul is the one apostle who is not committed to an obscurantist ethics, who does not claim that his discourse is authorized by a non-discursive or ineffable dimension to experience.⁸⁶ The Pauline event rather has an intellectual structure, the structure of a fable. The fable in question is the resurrection, understood in Badiou’s intransigently atheist terms as ‘a mythological assertion’ (SP, 115). The narrative of the resurrection has no historical validity. It cannot be assigned an objective location according to the established laws of a given society. It is indifferent to a given State or state of things. It determines Paul’s truth in being radically heterogeneous to established laws. In its radical singularity, the event of the resurrection cannot be formulated in the terms of any available, preexistent generality. Nor can it be placed within the dominant (Greek and Judaic) philosophical and theological spaces of antiquity. Of course, the latter leave their traces on the ‘truth-effects’ that proceed from the resurrection. But Paul’s truth also marks the obsolescence of those spaces and manifests its independence of them: the event dramatically redraws the dividing line between the possible and impossible. For its subject, it is the sole source of authority. Conversely, the only validation of a truth is that a subject or subjects continue to declare or bear witness to it. Paul’s truth demands subjective commitment and must be sustained with a militant persistence, not least, for others: the subject or subjects of a truth become a vector for universal ⁸⁵ See SA, 108.

⁸⁶ See SP, 55.

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humanity (‘l’humanit´e tout enti`ere’, SP, 21). Paul’s truth also determines its own specific modes of communication: it imposes ‘the invention of a new discourse’, of new names, a new language (SP, 49). Indeed, as it progresses in the wake of the event of the resurrection, the radicalism of Pauline truth requires the construction of a Pauline style. Interestingly, there are moments at which Badiou seems to come close to conflating Paul and Beckett. He articulates the Pauline imperative, for example, as ‘il faut continuer’ (SP, 99). The young Paul shares the young Beckett’s (and the young Badiou’s) will to destruction (‘le saint vouloir de la destruction’, SP, 39). Like the Unnamable, supremely in the Beckett canon, Badiou’s Paul hears the logics of identity promoted by established knowledge as persecutory and oppressive. He is ferociously determined to subtract a truth from all extant forms of knowledge and law. This specifically involves him in a work of radical dehistoricization and inevitably calls Beckett to mind. Paul adamantly resists any dissolution of truth into opinion, into the perspectival world of historicity and ‘culturalism’ (SP, 7). He rejects the idea that historical or cultural memory can be the repository or guardian of meaning. Historical consciousness cannot be a substitute for truth. Like Beckett’s, Paul’s prose itself is strikingly lacking in historical clutter, the traces of historical circumstance. Like Beckett again, Paul is remarkable partly for the determination and vigour with which he expunges or holds at bay the density of specific, historical time. Given the rarity of the event from which it stems, the emergent Pauline truth can only be radically heterogeneous to historical reality. Paul develops the necessary subjective discipline. He ‘subtracts’ his truth from established knowledge through the austere concentration involved in ‘investigations’. He identifies the laws that ‘will have structured’ a subject of Pauline truth. Paul operates his own version of ‘restricted action’: as with Beckett, everything must be organized around the few themes that matter. For Paul, of course, the foremost of these themes is the resurrection. The discourse in which Paul addresses his themes must itself be ‘delimited’, stripped of all veils and ornament, learned allusions and obscurities. It must be immediately focused on the thought it conveys to the point (as in Beckett’s Trilogy) of violence and ‘tirades’ (SP, 35). This practice is born of an impasse. Like Galois’s—and like Beckett’s, as we’ll see—for Badiou, Paul’s course is determined by a crucial point of impasse. At a certain point, he arrives at the recognition that both Greek and Judaic logics equate power with mastery. He responds by inventing an astounding logic that radically separates these two features. In the transvaluation of all values that is the consequence

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of the event, folly becomes wisdom. Other Beckett-like paradoxes also follow. Power becomes powerless, powerlessness (faiblesse) is power: For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent . . . God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are. (1 Corinthians, 1: 19, 27–8)

This conviction is a crisis in and for language itself. No established discourse grounds or is receptive to it. Here, at the point of impasse, the subject’s weakness manifests itself as the most acute vulnerability. Like the Beckettian subject, the Pauline subject must consent to the condition of the d´echet, a condition of drastic loss. The radical novelty of Pauline discourse springs precisely from the ready assumption of this position. Paul’s discourse becomes ‘the militant discourse of weakness’ (SP, 56). The tenacity with which he perseveres in it is precisely an index of his fidelity to the event that has come to change him. The logic of Paul’s trajectory is a logic of the ‘non . . . mais’, the ‘no . . . but’ (SP, 67–8). The break with or negation of established knowledge gives rise to the exceptional, faithful, patient labour of the subject of a truth in process. Thus Paul is an example of what Badiou calls the charismatics of subjectivity. Paul continues in his persuasion with an extraordinary power and vigour. There is a strange, paradoxical, intense, charismatic relation between that power and vigour and the fact that the persuasion is groundless and the commitment gratuitous. This might seem to be the case with Beckett: the patient labour is certainly the same. Yet here it is the gulf between Paul and Beckett—in Badiou’s accounts of them—that needs emphasis. For Beckett surely calls any such charismatics of subjectivity into question. It is simply not possible to produce a narrative of Beckett or his career that refers back to the determining power of an inaugural event. Paul is exemplary for Badiou’s philosophy in a way that Beckett cannot be. In Paul’s case, the event has an extraordinary and decisive singularity. It has sufficient power and scope to compel us ‘to decide a new way of being’ (ES, 41). As I will show at some length, the event in Beckett is of a different order. Beckett’s principal concern is with the liminal condition of the event, the possibility of the opening or breach in Being, rather than the actuality of a singular breach that inaugurates the progress of a truth.

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However, this conception of the event is necessarily also latent, at least, in Badiou’s account of Paul. For the Pauline event becomes possible only if there is a play in Being to start with, as Badiou himself implies when he talks of ‘the real as pure event’ (SP, 61, 68, 72). This play in Being is the very condition of the event. The subject would not be possible without it. Beckett lodges his work precisely here. Badiou cites Romans 6: 14: ‘ye are not under the law, but under grace’. As Simon Critchley points out, ‘grace’ is precisely the Greek charis.⁸⁷ Though Badiou does not say so, the logic of the charismatics of subjectivity is paradoxical. If this is so, then the case of Beckett represents a remarkable aggravation of the paradox. In Beckett’s case, the charismatics of subjectivity becomes an irrationality or surd. Beckett persists in a truth corresponding to no founding event, and in a labour which leads, tortuously and at length, only towards an elaboration of a possibility that may always have been there in the first place. His work thus offers a kind of anti-charismatic charismatics. It manifests a peculiarly scrupulous and rigorous problematization of the very logic of the charism or gift. This problematization of the charism is inseparable from a conception of an intermittent world which, as Beckett well knows, has its own specific, inextricable, and irreducible pathos. ⁸⁷ Simon Critchley, ‘Demanding Approval: On the Ethics of Alain Badiou’, Radical Philosophy, 100 (2001), 16–27, p. 19.

2 Badiou (ii): Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics STAT E AND DOXA The account of Badiou’s philosophy that I have given so far raises an obvious question. Being is irreducibly inconsistent. In an actually infinite universe, there is always what I have called a wobble or a play in Being. This is what makes the event possible. But why, then, is Badiou’s world not more like Deleuze’s? Why are events rare? Why is the world not as full of events in Badiou’s later as in his early work? The answer lies in the concept of the State. This has both an ontological and a political significance. Badiou does not define it solely in political terms: Spinoza’s God is an example of it. As we have seen, nature is another. But, not surprisingly, the concept of the State becomes starkly clear in relation to the political sphere. I shan’t be offering an exhaustive account of Badiou’s politics. Hallward has already done so. But the pathos of intermittency cannot be separated from politics. Here, I shall follow through a particular—and particularly relevant—strand in Badiou’s political thought. This will lead on to brief accounts of his ethics and aesthetics. These, too, are compressed and precisely focused. They are focused, above all, towards the discussion of Badiou’s reading of Beckett, in Chapter 3. We cannot go any further, however, without first referring to what Hallward calls the ‘simple foundation’ of Badiou’s whole ontology (BA, 85), the distinction between belonging and inclusion. Hallward provides an admirably clear account of this.¹ On the one hand, a set is a collection of elements. The elements belong to the set, the relationship of belonging being written ∈. Hallward provides the example of ‘a national population’ (let’s say, French). This is the set defined by of all those elements that are ‘counted for one in a particular census’ (ibid.). On the other hand, the elements in a set can be grouped as parts or subsets of it. They ¹ See BA, 82–6.

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can form ‘distinct groups of belongings’ (ibid.). The relation between set and part or subset is one of inclusion, written ⊂. Thus the subsets of the set of the national population will include elements combined ‘according to civil status, tax rates, criminality, levels of education or salary, or indeed according to any arbitrary criterion (‘‘everyone with black hair,’’ ‘‘everyone living east of the Seine,’’ etc.)’(BA, 88). Self-evidently, the number of subsets that can be produced out of a set is always much larger than the number of elements comprised in it. For Badiou, the significant point is that there is always what he calls a ‘point of excess’, a massive gulf between belonging and inclusion (‘une b´eance sans mesure’, EE, 468). Inclusion is always ‘irremediably’ in excess of belonging (EE, 100). The resources of a given multiple are always greater than those that mere counting suggests. This is crucial for Badiou: it shows there are always other potential orders hidden within the one given. The scope of a given order is not determined by the elements that comprise it, but is a question of how they combine. Nor is it ever possible to know or calculate the exact excess of inclusion over belonging (MP, 60–1). The ‘point of excess’ is indeterminate or ‘errant’, to return to the Timaeus (AB, 158). It wanders lawlessly through all things, producing effects that are strictly unpredictable, incalculable, and intermittent.² The ‘point of excess’ is the principle of a fundamental ontological instability. We might also think of it as Badiou’s principle of freedom. We only know it as situated. A situation is a particular presentation (configuration, disposition) of the multiple. The State is a representation of that presentation. Whatever its claims to the contrary, it really has no interest in the life of people as such. It knows the citizen, not as the ‘concrete infinity’ he or she is, but as an element that is counted as one, ‘as a subset’ or singleton of him- or herself (DO, 46; EE, 124). It counts its already structured elements by imposing a ‘metastructure’ (EE, 126). Every structure ‘calls for a metastructure’ (EE, 99), and no situation is thinkable apart from this concept. Any given structure presents an infinite and inconsistent multiplicity as units (‘ones’). But one is always a ‘fictive’ effect (EE, 105). Structure is always haunted by the void on which it is founded. Remember the laughter tinkling in von Neumann’s champagneglass tower. Structure is threatened by an eruption of the very inconsistency of the multiple that it seeks to hold at bay. There is always the possibility of ‘a catastrophe in presentation’ and the manifestation of inconsistency as such (EE, 109). Structure of itself cannot guarantee consistency. For the count ² On the ‘point of excess’, see EE, 98–100. On excess as ‘errant’, see MP, 60–1.

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itself escapes the count; the structuring operation escapes structuring and is the point at which the void is given. This is why metastructure is so crucial: it defends structure against catastrophe. It counts what has already been counted a second time. It gives form and shape to indifferent consistency. Most of the time, this ‘doubling’ of structure (EE, 109) holds the event at bay and provides an effective defence against its consequences. This is the logic of rarity and intermittency. By definition, the State never merely reflects or contains the whole of a given situation. It rather always masters or dominates it, imposing on it the ‘fictional being’ of a metastructure (EE, 115). This is a system of inclusion, a structure of separate but interlinked parts or parties (a ‘connexion du s´epar´e et du li´e’, ibid.). But inclusion will always exceed belonging. The combinations that can be derived from a given multiple are always more numerous than any specific or situated count suggests. No count will exhaust them. Multiples of multiples cannot be reduced to a unity: ‘no multiple is capable of making-one [faire-un] of all that it includes’ (EE, 99). Translated into practical, concrete, political reality, this is part of the logic of Badiou’s commitment to the cause of the ‘sans-papiers’, French immigrant workers without papers. They have precisely been left out of the count.³ The system of the prevailing count means that, in a sense, they cannot even be noticed. They are therefore both philosophically and politically significant. The Organisation Politique has worked to get them counted, thereby also changing the principle of the count itself (French nationality). This abruptly returns us to the ‘most radical statement’ in the first Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘ ‘‘God has chosen the things that are not [ta m¯e onta] in order to bring to nought those that are [ta onta]’’ ’ (1 Corinthians 1: 28; SP, 50; SA, 47). The work of the Organisation Politique is an exact demonstration of why Badiou gives such emphasis to the passage. For it is a succinct and altogether unsentimental expression of the ontological basis for social transformation. The dominance of the State may be effected through a ‘paradigmatic’ subset, as in the case of the Party under Eastern-bloc communism (CS, 242). In the modern State whether socialist or democratic, State power is above all a question of management (‘gestion’). This is above all the case in the current ³ Cf. Badiou’s argument with reference to Israeli nationality and the proper incorporation of Israeli Palestinians, and his identification of his position with Jewish ‘creative universalism’ (St Paul, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Trotsky, CO, 93–4). Cf. also the Chinese workers and peasants before 1949. La R´evolution culturelle: La Derni`ere r´evolution? (Paris: Conf´erences du Rouge-Gorge, 2002), 27.

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phase of what Badiou rather awkwardly calls capitalo-parliamentarianism. No metastructure, however, can exhaust the ‘immanent resources’ of ‘a presented multiple’ (EE, 100). For this reason, as Hobbes knew, the State is ultimately founded less on consistencies than ‘on the peril [and the fear] of inconsistency’ (EE, 126).⁴ Furthermore, the systems of structure and metastructure are incommensurable. The ‘point of excess’ means, not only that inclusion exceeds belonging, but that it does so to an ‘errant’ or indeterminate degree. The excess of the State over the situation can never be precisely judged. The protection afforded by the State against the void (its ‘fonctions ‘‘anti-vide’’ ’, EE, 117) is never assured. It is unstable at its foundation. It is precisely because of this founding instability that politics in Badiou’s sense is possible. Those who belong to but are not included in the State, whom it disregards, who are literally nothing to it, may transform its terms of reference. Badiou is fond of quoting the Internationale: ‘Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout’ (‘We are nothing, let us be everything’, AB, 130). To recapitulate: every multiple presentation is threatened by the void, which is ‘its being as such’ (EE, 109). There is even a situational ‘anguish of the void’ (EE, 110). Metastructure protects us from it, offering ‘closure and assurance’ (EE, 114), a bulwark ‘to keep the void from pouring in’, to quote from Beckett’s That Time (CDW, 390). But there is a price to pay: metastructure will always mean that a part functions or appears as the whole. This in turn means that we necessarily live in a world of representations that have only a ‘fictional being’ (EE, 115). This is the world of doxa. The Republic associates doxa with the habit of ‘taking things for granted’.⁵ Badiou usually refers to it as opinion. ‘What corresponds to the State in people’s consciousness’, writes Badiou, is ‘the apparatus of opinion’ (SA, 15; SP, 16). Opinions ‘are representations without truth, the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge’ (ES, 50). They are context-derived, immediately known, and indifferently communicated. ‘What arises from a truth-process, by contrast, cannot be communicated’ (ES, 51). Truths are not information. They are not contained in messages or conveyed in broadcasts or emissions. They are produced subjectively, in encounters. Subjectification involves breaking with the world of opinion, or, in Badiou’s ⁴ For a relevant account of Hobbes, see Jacques Ranci`ere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, tr. Hassan Melehy, foreword Hayden White (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 19–23. ⁵ See for instance Republic 509d–513e. Plato, The Republic, tr. with an introd. and notes Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 237–40.

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meaningful phrase, with ‘business as usual’.⁶ In making this break, subjects also break with themselves insofar as they are tied to that world, as for Badiou, they must be. Badiou repeatedly insists that twentieth-century thought was almost universally anti-Platonic. This anti-Platonism was undiscriminating. He himself calls for what is, in effect, a discriminating return to Plato, and particularly to the Platonic insistence on the break with doxa. This is an unfashionable insistence, but it is hard to overestimate its importance to Badiou. ‘Since Plato’, Badiou writes, ‘philosophy has been a break with opinion’ (AB, 89).⁷ Thought is thought only insofar as it repudiates or holds at a distance that which is immediately given us to think. If philosophy is unremittingly affirmative, it is constituted as affirmation precisely in its break with doxa, which must itself be recognized as a form of negativity. To put the point differently: all thought refuses immersion in the ‘massiveness’ (‘massivit´e’, CS, 83) of the social order. It seeks to have done with the excess of the State over Being, of representation over presentation. It seeks to make the two coincide, to get the measure of the mirage of representation, or have done with it. In its overpowering fear of a historical relapse into terror, our culture has grown stubbornly hostile to thought. One might add that the fate of ‘theory’ shows this precisely. In its inception, theory was an extraordinary break with opinion, the sheer force of which is still evident, for example, in the structuralist and post-structuralist work of Roland Barthes. But this is a momentum that it subsequently lost and which has now disappeared. Badiou effectively tells us to renew it. The break with opinion should not be loosely defined. For Badiou as for Plato, it is exemplified above all in mathematics. Mathematics is ‘irremediably discontinuous’ with ‘the immediacy of doxa’ (CS, 167). There are no mathematical opinions. The difficulty of mathematics exactly reflects the severe demand inherent in the break. Indeed, mathematics is the very paradigm of the possibility of the break. Everything else remains in some degree ‘captive to opinion’ (ibid.). It is mathematics above all—though Badiou does not say exactly this—that resists the deconstructive double-bind. ‘On peut toujours recourir aux math´ematiques’ (ibid.): other forms of the struggle to break with doxa can always look to the example of mathematics, as Beckett ⁶ Quoted in Daniel Bensa¨ıd, ‘Alain Badiou et le miracle de l’´ev´enement’, in R´esistances: Essai de taupologie g´en´erale (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 143–70, 163. ⁷ Cf. the remarks on Plato’s ‘long d´etour’, CI, 10.

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does. Whilst Badiou actually makes comparatively little of Beckett’s interest in mathematics, he rightly reads the Beckettian affirmation as founded on an almost uniquely astringent repudiation of contemporary doxa. This move is comparable to mathematics both in its difficulty and in its radical abstraction from the world. As we’ll see later, however, for Beckett, the break with doxa has considerably more problematic consequences than Badiou ever quite seems to recognize.

POLITICS In an interview with Jacques Henric, Badiou grouped Beckett along with Genet and Natacha Michel as an instance of what, in Abr´eg´e de m´etapolitique, he calls ‘resistant subjectivity’ (AB, 9).⁸ He was thinking of Beckett’s membership of the French Resistance. For Badiou, whose own father was also a member, understanding Beckett’s courage is important to understanding his work. In Badiou’s terms, however, that courage was neither heroic nor sentimental. Beckett made a clear-eyed declaration of allegiance and then submitted to ‘its jurisdiction’.⁹ Like Cavaill`es and Canguilhem, who were also members of the Resistance, Beckett was ‘ ‘‘resistant through logic’’ ’.¹⁰ In a phrase of Rimbaud’s that Badiou is fond of quoting,¹¹ Beckett’s wartime politics was a form of ‘logical revolt’. For Beckett as for Cavaill`es and Canguilhem, the choice of resistance is a choice made against the grain of ‘subjugated opinion’ (AB, 13). It is not a humanistic but an intellectual necessity. The first thing to recognize about what Badiou calls politics is that politics is always thought. Modern politics is by definition emancipatory. It involves a subtraction of thought and action from the dominant (state-sponsored) forms of what passes for subjectivity. It breaks with the existent (‘avec ce qu’il y a’, AB, 34). It declares the intrinsic possibility of what seems to be impossible. It must therefore stop its ears to ‘the voice of the time’ (PP, 96). Politics begins with an event and consists of truth-procedures. It is also always singular, which means that, strictly speaking, there is ‘no definition of politics’ (AB, 56). Political events are by definition collective. But collective action does not imply the need for a Party. Parties spell the death of politics. Politics involves discipline, ⁸ Natacha Michel is a friend of Badiou’s and a fellow founder of the Organisation Politique. ⁹ ‘Les Lieux de la v´erit´e’, interview with Jacques Henric, Art Press sp´ecial: ‘20 ans: L’Histoire continue’, hors s´erie 13 (1992), 113–18. ¹⁰ AB, 12. Badiou is quoting Canguilhem (unsourced). ¹¹ See for instance IT, 39.

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but that discipline is singular to the truth-procedure in question. It does not take the form of Party discipline, which is always correlated to the State and doxa. We should also distinguish the political event from the ‘public affect’, what the eighteenth century called an ‘ ‘‘´emotion’’ ’ (CI, 14). Badiou’s most pointed example of a modern ‘ ‘‘´emotion’’ ’ is the spontaneous mass demonstration against Le Pen at the time of the French presidential election crisis in April and May 2002. Badiou’s ferocious enmity towards Le Pen spans several decades. He none the less argues that the demonstration was precisely the reverse of an event. For its aims were fundamentally conservative. The real reason why Le Pen destabilized the electoral system was that he inserted himself between the two democratic options. He threatened the usual democratic routine of substitution, ‘le train-train de l’alternance usuelle’ (CI, 25). What the demonstrators were really demanding was a return to that routine, the reassertion of a principle of continuity. They wanted ‘a guarantee that everything would continue as before’ (CI, 20). To have really opposed Le Pen would have meant choosing a militant, emancipatory politics. It would have meant deciding to break with those aspects of French government policy which actually resembled (and still resemble) Le Pen’s. Modern politics emerges above all as presentation not representation, that is, in the form of ‘manifestations’, in demonstrations not deputations (CI, 39). The twentieth century was even ‘the century of the demonstration’ (LS, 152). But the mass demonstration of 2002 was not political, for it proceeded ‘without an Idea’ (CI, 23). As a form of thought, politics is quite distinct from philosophy. There is no political philosophy as such. Indeed, rather than philosophy explaining politics, and thus mastering it, politics is one of the ‘conditions’ of philosophy (CS, 30). Politics is an immanent thought: it is experienced from within, not observed or known from outside. It cannot be accounted for in philosophical definitions or abstract terms. It rather resembles love, in that it is born of an encounter (‘elle se rencontre’, CS, 236), and the encounter is accompanied by a decision or declaration. Politics is therefore inseparable from an act or actions. The person who does not act politically is not a political being (‘Quiconque n’en fait pas n’en est pas’, PP, 83). At the same time, what is at stake in a political decision is political subjectivity, the subject’s norms for political acts. Politics has no relation to any objective world. It cannot be conceived of in terms of an objective logic of cause and effect (here, again, Badiou departs from Marxist orthodoxy). In the absence of any objective categories, politics thinks its own reality (‘son r´eel’, AB, 37), a reality that is purely

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internal to it. Politics breaks with established representation, brings about a scission, and asserts an existence it can neither justify nor prove. Political subjects wager on this assertion, thus instituting a singular political process. Since the break with ‘business as usual’ is the foundation of politics, its central subjective figure is necessarily the militant. Like art, politics is an ‘occurrence of a hypothesis’ which then has certain consequences for its subjects (PP, 18). Marx’s great invention, for example, was communism as a ‘strategic hypothesis’, a hypothesis which its subjects then took as a normative principle (PP, 105). If Marxism finally betrayed the event of Marx, it was partly by failing to sustain Marx’s own power of political invention. This needs to be stressed: for Badiou, politics always means inventiveness. It is perhaps the death of political invention that he is most inclined to deplore in the contemporary world. If philosophy seeks to describe politics, politics prescribes. The concept of prescription is central to Badiou’s understanding of politics. Prescription means the imposition of a rule, a remedy, perhaps, and, crucially, pre-scription, ‘writing forwards’. A prescription takes place in the wake of an event, and declares the binding force, not of an imperative, but of a ‘postulation’. By this, Badiou means an axiom that is valid ‘here and now’ (AB, 112, 126) but is also universal in that it is made available to all. Thus Saint-Just ‘prescribes’ virtue to the French Revolution; he enjoins virtue. Prescription is localized, that is, it is singular to a situation. Yet, at the same time, it aspires in principle to ‘universal domination’ (AB, 126), though it does not seek to impose itself as such. If, in the wake of a revolutionary upheaval, the political subject prescribes equality, then this is not an abstraction. It is immediately true, whilst also anticipating a realization whose precise form cannot be known in advance. To introduce a pair of terms which will appear again in the book, and which I will develop in my conclusion: prescription establishes a balance between actuality and potentiality. It establishes a balance between the known and the unknown. By the same token, it cannot be a programme. It is not a project or an object of desire. It does not even aim at victory, since victory has itself by now become suspect. Victory has invariably meant replacing one State with another, as in the case of Vietnam.¹² A prescription is not embodied in a State. The State cannot prescribe justice or equality. They are ‘subjective and axiomatic’ figures (AB, 113). Prescription rather ‘gets the measure’ of what is otherwise the indeterminate excess of the State (AB, 159). It ‘decides at the point of ¹² For both the argument and the illustration, see PP, 42–3.

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the undecidable’ (PP, 19). It ‘fixes’ a power that is otherwise unfixed, and holds it at a certain distance. In 1917, for example, the Bolsheviks abruptly demonstrated the limits, the actual weakness of a tsarist state that had seemed endowed with a quasi-divine supremacy. When, at the time of the Iraq War, the Organisation Politique announced that we have entered the era of a new kind of war, the war of ‘pure power’, it sought to specify or ‘fix’ the errant power of the State. Like any truth-procedure, politics invents new names. Breaking with the State and doxa is, crucially, a question of language. Here Badiou has been much influenced by friend and co-founder of the Organisation Politique Sylvain Lazarus, and Lazarus’s L’Anthropologie du nom.¹³ Naming has nothing to do with retrospective or historiographic description. To ascribe ‘revolutionary politics’ to French society in 1792, for example, tells us nothing about the political singularity of Saint-Just’s thought (AB, 40). Equally, it tells us nothing about the new names Saint-Just himself invents, like virtue. In the first instance, the name functions prescriptively. It simply says, ‘there is . . . ’ (‘il y a’, AB, 46). But in saying this, it does not designate an empirical given or a state of affairs. It enshrines certain possibilities to which the event has given rise. A political truth is cast in the future anterior. Truth is what will have been known to be the case. Political names, then, are not descriptive, but declarations of what is possible, anticipations of a possible future that remain valid even if not fulfilled. They also sustain the political processes that work towards that future. They even ensure that ‘what happens does not annul what might have happened ’ (AB, 47). This was another aspect of the problem with the development of Marxism. As we’ve seen, in insisting on treating ‘the proletariat’ as a merely empirical category, later Marxists failed to recognize the virtual dimension of the term, that part of it that was (and is always) ‘still to be filled’. For my purposes, however, the most important aspect of Badiou’s conception of politics is the emphasis he places on the political sequence. Like Ranci`ere, he has occasionally scoffed at Lyotard’s concept of the decline of the grand narratives. In fact, the political thought of both Badiou and Ranci`ere is definitively shaped by that very concept. Badiou states the point quite categorically, if in his own terms: ‘there is no Reason in history’ (DO, 33). Politics is always local and singular: that is, it happens irregularly, from time to time, in different ways, in different situations. That it does so precisely exemplifies ¹³ See in particular ‘La Politique comme pens´ee: L’Œuvre de Sylvain Lazarus’, AB, 35–66.

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what I mean when I say that Badiou’s is, above all, a world of intermittencies. Politics happens, and has always happened, as and in sequences. The political sequence in Badiou bears a close resemblance to the Lyotardian micronarrative. A sequence encompasses no whole, and does not form part of one. It both begins and ends. The fact that it ends, however, does not affect its status as a truth, since its ‘effects’ are properly ‘infinite’, and ‘persist’ (PP, 69). There are no trans-historical political categories. Equally, political sequences do not oppose grand abstractions, but seek to name and address specific contexts. Thus, again, at the time of the Iraq War, the Organisation Politique seeks to name both a singular political situation (the era of ‘pure power’) and a new politics commensurate with it. Political sequences, however, are rare and fragile. Badiou has given different accounts of the major modern political sequences. The most precise one appears in ‘Philosophie et politique’ (CS, 234–5): the Montagnard convention from 1792 to 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794); 1848 to 1871 (from the Communist Manifesto to the defeat of the Commune); 1902–17 (Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? to the October revolution); 1928–49 (Mao’s earliest writings to the communist takeover in China); and 1965–7 (the Cultural Revolution in China).¹⁴ Badiou may adapt and even expand this account elsewhere. There may be, as he claims, a certain ‘solidarity’ between some of the sequences (DO, 34). Marx learns from the French Revolution and the Commune serves as an example to the Bolsheviks.¹⁵ But the essential point remains unchanged: no overarching narrative or logic binds political sequences together. Politics is irreducibly sporadic. It takes place here and there. Like Beckett’s and Mallarm´e’s art, it is always a ‘restricted action’, bearing no relation to any ‘massive history’ (AB, 118). There is no reason to suppose that we have finished with modern politics. But the price of that affirmation is a melancholy one. Politics does not form part of a coherent historical process, and is not informed by one. Politics is rare; democracy is rare. Badiou’s theory of the political sequence, then, is based on a principle of historical intermittency. The sequences he actually lists seem all the rarer, given their geo-cultural specificity. But, once again, it will not quite do to think truths in merely temporal or spatial terms. Intermittencies appear in the context of actual infinity itself, and it is that context alone that gives us their measure. This explains why it is futile to think in terms of political victory, and why, ¹⁴ It’s worth noting the importance of a founding text or texts, in three of these instances. ¹⁵ As Badiou tells us, for example, in ‘La Commune de Paris: Une d´eclaration politique sur la politique’ (typescript, 2003), 6.

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for Badiou, politics is so strictly an intellectual necessity. But it also begs the question of what I have called the remainder. If, in Badiou’s terms, the world apart from political sequences knows neither history (properly speaking) nor truth, can we write that world off as summarily as he wishes to? Is Badiou not in danger of himself replicating the very indifference of which he accuses the modern State? This is not a matter of social-democratic or liberal-humanist queasiness. As we shall increasingly see, Beckett’s work insists on thinking the event or the possibility of the event in relation to its remainder, rather than apart from it. This insistence, too, is a question of thought. It has its own rigorous logic, one with large political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences. Insofar as Badiou deals in detail with any instance of the historical remainder, it is actually what, in Le Si`ecle, he repeatedly refers to as ‘the Restoration’. This is the period from 1980 to the present that has witnessed the increasing dominance of ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’ in politics and neo-liberalism in economics.¹⁶ A full account of Badiou’s powerful critique of the contemporary democracies is beyond the scope of this book, but one or two of the key points need stressing. First, the concept of democracy has meaning only insofar as it is egalitarian and therefore prescriptively determined as emancipation from the State.¹⁷ But democracy as we commonly and certainly as we currently understand it ‘is a form of the State’ (AB, 91, italics mine). Secondly, ‘The State does not think’ (AB, 99). The democratic State grants an absolute authority to doxa. This will seem outrageous: surely we live in an era of an unparalleled freedom of the expression of opinion? But this freedom is founded on a basic consensus. The ‘objective logic of Capital’ asserts that the economy is an absolute good and has absolute priority (AB, 113). In the advanced economies, at least, there is virtually total agreement on this priority. It means that democratic politics becomes ‘electoral nihilism’ (AB, 110), ‘le train-train de l’alternance usuelle’. This spells the death of democracy, rather than indicating its vigour. The world of opinion under the democracies may seem boundlessly open in its relativism. In fact, it has a firmly agreed basis, as contrasted with truths, which have no basis save the void. Indeed, for Badiou, the gulf between thought and doxa has seldom if ever been wider than in the contemporary world. This gulf is particularly evident in the fact that the real transformations currently being visited on the world are not questions of democratic choice at ¹⁶ In English terms, this period is more accurately thought of as starting in 1979. ¹⁷ Political prescriptions are themselves democratic, since they are universal. See AB, 97, 103, 105, 107.

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all and ‘have never been submitted to the vote’ (CI, 34). They are produced by vast, impersonal, economic processes. These processes require that democracy be slighted or swiftly overridden as and when necessary (as in the case of Blair’s war). In any case, those most dramatically affected by the processes in question tend to be outside the advanced democracies. Like Ranci`ere, Badiou is concerned with the partial character of the democracies, their wilful oblivion to the larger world they assume they represent. Ranci`ere thinks this through very immediately, in terms of frontiers, borders, refugees, camps, the vast new proletariat debarred from sharing the spoils of imperial Rome.¹⁸ Badiou thinks it through more abstractly, in terms of a process of inclusion whereby the part becomes the whole. The point, however, is similar in both cases: as Badiou says, if the good new world order ‘is so good’, why does it find such difficulty in sharing its goods with those beyond its margins (DO, 40)? Contemporary democracy is an irreducibly ‘melancholy’ phenomenon, above all, perhaps, in the continuing ‘absence of real politics’ (AB, 129).¹⁹ Surprising as it may seem, a crucial aspect of Badiou’s political thought— from my point of view, as well as his own—can be crystallized around a single quotation from Beckett’s Comment c’est: ‘en tout cas on est dans la justice je n’ai jamais entendu dire le contraire’ (CC, 193).²⁰ Badiou makes much of this sentence. It crops up, not only in his work on Beckett, but in his political writings, as an example of prescription, the axiomatic declaration or ‘the latent axiom of the political subject’.²¹ Here justice is a name for man’s inhuman ends, ‘crawling with his bag in the darkness of truth’ (‘le noir de la v´erit´e’).²² Justice, says Badiou, is the name for an ‘extreme moment’ of breakdown in the social bond (AB, 118). It is therefore a rare word, as, indeed, it is in Comment c’est. Empirical politics has little to do with truth. It is merely ‘a mixture of power and opinions’ (AB, 110). Politics in Badiou’s sense declares the possibility of the impossible. It ‘leaves aside the facts’ (PP, 78). As such, it seems to me that politics for Badiou is what Beckett calls justice in How It Is, ‘the safeguard of our essential activities’ (HII, 155). According to the law, it is ¹⁸ See in particular ‘L’Inadmissible’, AU, 128–47. ¹⁹ Cf. the reference to ‘nos tristes pays’, DO, 20. ²⁰ In How It Is, ‘in any case we have our being in justice I have never heard anything to the contrary’ (HII, 135). I have stuck to the French text because Beckett’s use of the word ‘being’ is rather confusing in the context of Badiou’s philosophy. ²¹ See for instance AB, 113; ‘Philosophy and Politics’, IT, 69–78, p. 72; and ‘V´erit´es et justice’, in Jacques Poulain (ed.), Qu’est-ce-que la justice? Devant l’autel de l’histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1996), 273–81, p. 276. ²² See ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, Les Temps modernes, 531–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1990), 1: 14–22, p. 22.

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absurd. But it reasons precisely ‘by the absurd’, apagogically: it pursues what it will be absurd not to have believed (PP, 112–13). In the context of the bleak, dark, violent domain of Comment c’est as a whole, Badiou’s favourite quotation is an absurd declaration. It flies directly in the face of the world at stake in the text. Nor is it an entirely isolated instance of apagogic reason, in Beckett: in this respect, Badiou has noticed an important if intermittent feature of Beckett’s work. ‘Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free’, says the Animator, for example, at the end of Rough for Radio II, a play that rigorously excludes all reasonable grounds for thinking so (CDW, 284). Like justice in Comment c’est, freedom in Rough for Radio II is a concept that finds no objective realization in the given world. It is, precisely, ‘an intrinsic dimension of the subject’ (PP, 107), an immediate, subjective declaration or decision. Both works exemplify a remarkable observation of Badiou’s, that injustice is always clear, but justice obscure, for, unlike injustice, justice has no obvious witnesses. ‘Mais qui t´emoignera pour la justice?’ (AB, 109).²³ What evidence could one adduce? However, Badiou has doctored his Beckett quotation, omitting the phrase with which it begins: ‘on n’y peut rien’, ‘nothing to be done’. The phrase, of course, is famously Beckettian, as in Waiting for Godot. Badiou’s omission is the more notable in that, as Laura Salisbury has pointed out, in Waiting for Godot, at least, Beckett seems obviously to be responding to Lenin’s question of 1902.²⁴ I stress this, not to invalidate Badiou’s point, but to show how promptly he obliterates the very context that made the point possible. The phrase he excises actually reinforces the effect of apagogic reason. Badiou ignores this, I think, because of one obvious danger: here as in general, apagogic reason is very close to irony and can very easily be ironized. Beckett everywhere grasps this. By contrast, Badiou everywhere refuses to acknowledge it. At this point, if anywhere, art and philosophy diverge. ‘Nothing to be done’ is never, under any circumstances, an axiom of Badiou’s. Yet there are occasional passages in his work in which he seems to close the gap between the will to subjectification that he shares with Beckett and the Beckettian irony from which he distances himself. This is evident, in ˆ et l’´ev´enement of which Badiou’s particular, in a remarkable passage in L’Etre French commentators have made much, his English ones little.²⁵ Towards ²³ Cf. IT, 69. ²⁴ Laura Salisbury, ‘Beckett’s Laughing Matters: Comedy, Time and Form in the Prose and Drama’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2003), 43. ˆ et l’´ev´enement’, Annuaire philosophique ²⁵ See for instance Christian Jambet, ‘Alain Badiou: L’Etre 1987–88 (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 141–83, p.168; Ren´e Pesson, review of Manifeste pour la philosophie,

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the end of the ninth meditation, Badiou defines politics as an assault on the intolerable excess of the State in the name of singularity. But alas, though the State apparatus may be overturned, torn down, even destroyed, the State itself survives unscathed. Indeed, writes Badiou, it is not clear that, strictly speaking, the State in itself could have ever been assailed in the first place: Scarcely five years after the October insurrection, a Lenin ready for his own death despaired of the obscene permanence of the State. Mao, who was both more of an adventurer and more phlegmatic, observed that, after twenty-five years of power and ten years of the fierce tumults of the Cultural Revolution, after all, not much had changed. (EE, 127)

As Jambet suggests, it would appear that, for Badiou, the State can never be comprehensively defeated, for ontological reasons.²⁶ Indeed, Jambet sees ˆ et l’´ev´enement as providing an ontological rationale for the insuperabilL’Etre ity of the State. At root, the problem is whether and in what circumstances it might ever be possible to break down the reassuring power of unity (or one) over the multiple or, more precisely in this instance, over ‘the excess of parts’ (ibid.). The State tends always to reassert itself, according to an ‘enigmatic will’ to inertia which puzzled Saint-Just (AB, 140). There is no ‘ontological state’ as such. The State’s function of keeping the void at bay is never assured.²⁷ But equally, whilst radical justice can address the State, it cannot be reconciled with or flow from it, for the character of the State does not and cannot change. This is a permanent problem for thought. The predicament articulated in Comment c’est is very similar. ˆ et l’´ev´enement alongside It is worth setting the ninth meditation in L’Etre the great critique of Marxist tradition in the first part of Peut-on penser la politique?, particularly the critique of the Marxist recreation of the State.²⁸ Marxism became indefensible, and must begin again, as rawly as it did in the Communist Manifesto.²⁹ But however serious and significant his critique of Marxism, Badiou also crucially and rightly asserts that the death of Marxism was the death of the sole modern politics that has been worthy of thought. in Annuaire philosophique 1988–1989 (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 243–5; and Emmanuel Terray, ‘La ˆ et l’´ev´enement’, Les Temps modernes, 526 (May 1990), 72–8. Politique dans L’Etre ²⁶ See Jambet, ‘Alain Badiou’, 168. ²⁷ See EE, 116–17. Cf. p. 137, where Badiou argues that Spinoza seeks the ontological eradication of the void through an absolute union of situation and state, presentation and representation. But the void lurks on under the ‘nominal artifice’ from which, in theory, Spinoza deduces its radical absence. ²⁸ See PP, 25–31, 45–8. ²⁹ See DO, 56–7.

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In its wake, it left only incoherence. It is precisely for that reason that what currently passes for subjectivity—the subjectivity ‘immanent’ to the historical ‘crisis’ of Marxism—is so incoherent (PP, 52). For Badiou, I think, the Marxist subject today must also be a Beckettian subject. He or she must learn how to live amidst ruins, to ‘inhabit the uninhabitable place’ (PP, 55). Politics will now begin again amidst ruin, ‘the ruin of every State presentation [pr´esentation e´tatique] of truth’ (DO, 56). In Beckettian terms, politics must declare its ‘fidelity to [a] failure’ (DI, 145). It must work ‘with impotence, ignorance’.³⁰ We should recall here that, however dire the world of Comment c’est, its title implies, not only the description of a condition, but also an imperative—Commencez!—that we might compare to those in Badiou’s Ethics. ETHICS The point in the ninth meditation that has attracted most attention, however, is Badiou’s declaration that the political subject is not ‘a warrior [guerrier] under the battlements of the State, but a patient observer [guetteur] of the void that instructs the event’ (EE, 127, strictly speaking, a ‘guetteur’ does not so much observe as ‘watch out for’ something). This implies a concept of a different kind of subjectivity from the one we have met with so far, what Badiou refers to in Le Si`ecle as a ‘subjectivit´e de l’attente’, a ‘subjectivity of waiting’ (LS, 39). Furthermore, the discipline and tenacity of purpose implied in the figure of the ‘guetteur’ would not seem to be exactly the same as in the case of the militant subject, for whom thought and action are inseparable. Nor are they characteristic of the ethical subject, at least, according to the account of that subject that Badiou gives in his Ethics. I will consider Badiou’s ethics in a largely contemporary context, because he himself does so. I will also tie his ethics quite closely to his politics. The first and most important point about the Ethics is that it is powered by an anti-ethics. This anti-ethics is sufficiently shocking to current orthodoxies to need some careful explanation and contextualization. Badiou takes fierce issue with the ethics of alterity and difference currently prominent in much of the academy. ³⁰ Israel Shenker, interview with Beckett, New York Times, 5 May 1956; see Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 148.

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He takes even fiercer issue with the ‘ethics’ being promoted in a larger world that extends from so-called ‘centrist’ or ‘centre left’ social-democratic political parties to corporate business. Only a very short while ago, in an academic context, at least, the first of these two ethics seemed radical; or, if not exactly radical in itself, a historically specific form of a radical spirit. Ethics was the turn that the radical strains of theory that had developed or flourished or at least survived from the late 1960s to the late 1980s—feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, deconstruction—were increasingly forced to take, in the 1990s, in what had for some time looked like worsening circumstances. Ethics was a radical politics with a large dose of sceptical caution. It even seemed to be the guardian of a kind of thought that the death of Marxism had itself imperilled. This ethics, however, has progressively shown itself to be incapable of preventing its own betrayal (in other words, its identification with ‘ethics’). On the one hand, postmodern ethics can hardly be blamed for its simulacra. On the other hand, it has not been able to defend itself against contamination by them. Indeed, almost by definition, it would scarcely be able to defend itself (for fear of lapsing into ‘binarism’). Ethics cannot necessarily even show us how it distances itself from spin. That it has assumed such prestige in the social-democratic phase of neo-liberalism is hardly surprising. We might think of this as the contemporary abjection of ethics. Badiou is particularly concerned to disparage what currently passes for ethics as a new doxa, one which precisely obscures the most significant ethical questions. Contemporary ethics is ‘a dog’s dinner [de la bouillie pour les chats]’ (ES, 23). Its underlying impetus is in fact pragmatic compromise. Badiou is surely right: what was initially a sophisticated and theoretically demanding conception of ethics swiftly became a mixture of a bland ethics of the other and a doctrine of human rights whose essence is a reconstituted and basically sentimental brand of liberal humanism. By a strange, ironical twist whose determinations are ultimately political, the theoretical tradition threatens to leave us more or less where we started before structuralism. Badiou produces a powerful critique of an ethics of difference and the other. The mild-mannered, elegantly diffident ethics of difference will always have been trounced in advance by the Donald Rumsfelds of the world. More importantly still: what commands us to respect the other? What requires our self-abnegation in the encounter with the other? If it is not a principle or an imperative that exists prior to the encounter itself—and it cannot be that, in postmodern ethics—the command can only stem from the presence

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of the Great Other within the other, from God. This is evident enough in Levinas. Postmodern ethics cannot separate itself out from theology without falling into inconsistency. More than that: ethics itself is the pretext for a return to the theological and, more vaguely, the ‘spiritual’ in contemporary theoretical discourse. In Badiou’s terms, this return is inevitable in a culture that has not learnt to escape from the romantic pathos of finitude. Badiou is intransigent on this point: those, like Simon Critchley—and myself, in the past—who have argued for a Levinasian ethics in the mode of ‘atheist transcendence’, to adopt Critchley’s phrase,³¹ have failed to recognize that, without the theological sanction, Levinas’s ethics simply falls apart. But if Badiou is dismissive of efforts to secularize Levinas, he is excoriating about contemporary ‘humanitarianism’. He has returned to the basic point repeatedly in his recent writings on contemporary political events. ‘Humanitarianism’ is the means by which free market capitalism, understood as what it cannot but be, a monstrous, unprincipled undertaking, sustains its own good conscience. Our obsession with ‘human rights’ provides the necessary ‘spiritual supplement’ to our ‘economic obsession’ (CI, 62). The doctrine of rights is a means by which Capital seeks to ‘give itself meaning’ and dignity (CS, 238), to take on a serious and responsible air. Human rights are, if you like, an affectation of Capital. In a term Badiou derives from Lazarus, the concept of ‘human rights’ is a ‘circulating category’ in between ‘ideality and the reality of power’ (DO, 43).³² Ethically, it is a disingenuous concept, since its circulation is wholly dependent on a prior assurance that the circulation of capital is securely established and will continue. This prior base, the assurance already given from the start, means that no ethics of rights ‘has any intrinsic relation to truth’ (DO, 50). It is an ethics without risk, one that cannot be cast in the future anterior, not least because it knows what its terms of reference are from the outset. St Paul would be the precisely relevant point of contrast. The doctrine of rights presents itself as the necessary ethical adjustment to a society massively in thrall to larger forces to which it has granted an objective and regulatory status. But even as it appears to counterbalance such forces, the doctrine in fact consolidates them. The insistence on rights means that, in principle, no one part of society or humanity has any absolutely privileged ³¹ See Simon Critchley, ‘Il y a—Holding Levinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire’, in Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (London: Routledge, 1996), 108–22. ³² Badiou cites Lazarus’s L´enine et le temps. See DO, 61 n. 7.

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relation to the other parts. In practice, since no group or party wields a specific power over others, the regulation of the whole becomes an objective or impersonal function in which the crucial determinant is law. The very individual whose interests are thus ostensibly promoted disappears, since, as we have seen, the regulatory apparatus of the State is concerned with him or her only as an instance or singleton.³³ In any case, if Capital cannot admit the ethical claim of those who lie outside its stockade, with what justification can it then preach rights to them? The doctrine of rights has nothing to say about political or ethical subjectivity: ‘no State regulation is ever concerned with the particular, infinite situation that we call an individual’ (CS, 240; cf. DO, 46). But that we should currently be in no mood to see this is hardly surprising: we are witnessing an immense ‘return to Kant’, and implicit in it is the assertion that ‘there exist formally representable imperative demands that are to be subjected neither to empirical considerations nor to the examination of situations’ (ES, 8). The idea of the ‘return to Kant’ may seem to sit very oddly alongside that of the prevalence of an implicitly theological ethics whose source is Levinas: but then the incongruity is exactly Badiou’s point, not least because he would clearly want to assert that what determines the current dominance of both, and arranges their contradiction as seeming non-contradiction, lies outside them, in the State itself. The submission of politics to the theme of rights in the contemporary democracies is precisely what facilitates the emergence of a basically sophistical ethics. Postmodern ethics is a sophistry insofar as it makes itself virtually indistinguishable from philosophy whilst refusing the crucial philosophical move, the decisive break with opinion. Sophistry is intellectual and ethical temporization, a way of settling with or for the dominant orthodoxies. So, too, as we’ve seen, the problem with the doctrine of rights is that its concept of humans and their rights ‘is always already there’: an immediate reference to law cancels any possibility of interrogating ‘the conservative identity that sustains it’ (ES, 33). The true political or ethical subject claims ‘right with no right’ (‘droit sans droit’), since his or her claim is founded only on the void (CS, 239). Our current fetishization of ‘the other’ is never a matter ‘of prescribing hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situation’ (ibid.). Self-evidently, a social-democratic or neo-liberal ‘ethics’ does not open up a different space ³³ The point is that, in set theory, the individual element is not the same as the singleton set whose only member is that element. A set is a new entity. There is a distinction between a and {a}.

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from that of the economy-based consensus. But then, neither does the intellectually more respectable version of ethics or the doctrine of rights.³⁴ Rather than being a transformative, outward-directed thought, contemporary ethics in general is a timid thought that turns inward, in a self-induced fear of the recurrence of evil. The democracies are obsessed with the fear of a recurrence of evil as exemplified above all in fascism. The principle of ‘the lesser evil’ is the dominant principle underlying contemporary political practice, which therefore proceeds in indifference to affirmative norms, ‘like truth or the Good’ (CS, 241). Evil is the grand abstraction to which it is imperative that we say no. This nay-saying is what chiefly orientates what we call our politics.³⁵ By the same token, we lack all conception of rigorous, singular political practices. It is crucial that certain formal and self-evident figures of Evil be anathematized, as in the case of ‘terrorism’. This procedure dispenses with the need for ‘a reasoned examination of political situations’ (CI, 50). The condition of ethics is a retreat from political singularities. Think for example of Miloˇsovi´c, reduced to the paradigmatic central European tyrant as evoked by the folkloric mindset one finds in Tintin stories (e.g. Ottokar’s Sceptre, CI, 77). Ethics is a form of doublethink and a sentimentalism, in that it feeds with a certain frisson off its proximity to evil, both historical (the Holocaust) and geographical (the Balkans). The monster is still prowling just outside our gates, so we cling on tightly to the precious little fetish of democracy as though it retained a substantial political content. The practice of ‘desingularization’ that is part of the abstraction of ethics is particularly abject and potentially disastrous (CI, 80). The slack-minded or disingenuous conflation of Miloˇsovi´c or Saddam Hussein with Hitler, for example, precisely ³⁴ This is not the case with every contemporary ethics. I would except the work of Drucilla Cornell and Thomas Docherty, for example. I myself argued, throughout Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel, for the imagination as a crucial ethical power in its capacity of ‘adumbration and speculation, a power to break up the given, to admit and elaborate the possible’ (Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge, 1999), 16). It is precisely the recent failure to sustain such a conception of the ethical disposition, within the very ethics it has partly been responsible for producing, that encourages a turn away from Levinas and towards Badiou. For a historical placing of the issue, see my ‘Ethics’, in Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 287–95. ³⁵ One might compare and contrast this ‘nay-saying’ interestingly with the ‘not-saying’ of those responsible for 11 September. Badiou’s account of the events of that day is interesting partly because it focuses on the eerie silence of those who took over the planes, their unwillingness to declare themselves and their purposes. The early saboteurs of the Resistance, by contrast, were precisely intent on manifesting their existence. The silence of the perpetrators of 11 September is what truly marks them out as nihilistic. See CI, 66–71.

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erases the extreme singularity of Nazi genocide, and its lessons for ethics and for political intervention. As far as Badiou is concerned, ethics can find nothing of interest in the, alas, historically banal condition of the victim. Contemporary ethics is nihilistic, writes Badiou, ‘because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death’ (ES, 35). His own conviction is quite otherwise, and takes its bearing from the belief that the philosopher’s proper concerns remain the True and the Good. Spinoza was right to assert that death above all things is of no concern to the philosopher, Nietzsche right to claim that philosophy is nothing if not affirmative. For thought is an affirmation that takes place in the wake of an event in the four domains of truth. Such an affirmation, however, is not irrelevant to a world of catastrophes and victims. Through it, the philosopher insists on the primacy of the new, its modes of arrival, its effects, and its demands, and therefore on the power of the events that may yet come to change what will otherwise always threaten to seem a desert landscape. In its attachment to these fragments, philosophy continues to insist on its repudiation of the powers that be and its connection with powers to come. Badiou’s Ethics, then, is in large measure a critique. Ethics is a term he treats sceptically, one whose contemporary usage he associates with ‘a threatening denial of thought as such’ (ES, 3). Yet the Ethics also has its own ethics to propose. Indeed, Badiou’s conception of ethics is more complex than it might seem at first, since ethics is an explicit if infrequent theme elsewhere in his work. There is an ethics of subjectification, for example, an ‘ethics required in the adoption of [the] power’ of a truth. This involves a ‘love of the unnameable’ (CS, 211). In ‘La V´erit´e: Forc¸age et innommable’, Badiou argues that there are limits to the power of a truth, limits to the work of naming. The process of ‘forcing’ is conditioned by an ethical recognition of those limits. In mathematics, a situation exists in which, though the mathematical language appropriate to it has been clearly defined, there is none the less one term, and one only, which cannot be identified by any formula within that language. The procedure of identification in question itself generates a single point at which it cannot be applied. So, too, Badiou argues, there is a limit to the capacity of any given truth to name the situations in and through which it proceeds. A truth always has its own singular ‘unnameable’. In ‘La Politique comme pens´ee’, Badiou makes the political implications of this idea quite clear.³⁶ ³⁶ See AB, 35–66.

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There is an ethics of naming. Politics produces new names. It cannot name itself, however, without starting to treat itself as an object and therefore taking up a distance from itself. In Lazarus’s phrase, it is impossible to give a name to the ‘interiority’ of a truth—to its hazardous, incomplete, future-orientated, subjective character—without betraying it.³⁷ Badiou chooses Beckett to exemplify the ethics of the unnameable. He also explicitly opposes him to Lenin. Given the point I have just made about Beckett’s rejoinder to Lenin, this is particularly interesting. Lenin claims that theory is all-powerful because it is true. But this in only half-right: ‘We must also add, ‘‘theory is powerless, because it is true’’ ’ (CS, 212). As Connor has shown in different terms, there is a paradoxical and intimate relationship between power and powerlessness in Beckett’s work.³⁸ Badiou restates this as an ethical paradox: the subjective intensity of a truth is exactly commensurate with a point beyond which that truth cannot go, a point of objective impotence. This is summed up by the very last line of The Unnameable, which is also the last line of ‘La V´erit´e: Forc¸age et innommable’, and concludes its argument: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (TR, 418; CS, 212). Certainly, as the Ethics argues, any particular effort to ‘force the unnameable’—‘to name the whole of the real’—results in Evil, as in the case of Stalin’s dialectical materialism, for example, or the final absolutism of the Dionysian Nietzsche (ES, 83).³⁹ The ethics of the unnameable is closely related to the ethics of modesty or ‘moderation’ outlined in ‘Le (Re)tour de la philosophie elle-mˆeme’.⁴⁰ Moderation is the philosopher’s virtue (remembering, of course, that, in Badiou’s terms, the philosopher is not the subject of a truth). Anyone inclined to defend or promote the interests of philosophy must admit the fact that it has repeatedly come up with criminal prescriptions. The problem is this: the philosopher is always in danger of identifying the multiple procedures of truths with Truth as a singular, all-embracing category, and thereby presenting philosophy itself as a truth-procedure. ‘Moderation’ or ‘critical virtue’ requires that the philosopher be scrupulous in his recognition of the multiplicity of truths, the several character of their domains, and the fact that, while philosophy seizes them and their relation to one another, it remains subordinate to them.⁴¹ Such moderation ³⁷ Sylvain Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 160; quoted AB, 39. ³⁸ See ‘Repetition and Power’, chapter 8 of Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 170–201. Cf. also the account of Worstward Ho in Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 80–9. ³⁹ See ES, 80–7. ⁴⁰ In CS, 57–78, especially at p. 74–5. ⁴¹ It is worth recalling that, in Badiou, the word ‘domains’ is borrowed from mathematics.

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would no doubt have saved Nietzsche from madness.⁴² Equally, however, the philosophical virtue is polemos, dialectical conflict. This might seem to be another paradox. Does an ethics of ‘moderate polemic’ not promptly give ground to the relativist or nihilist? Is it really very far removed from the rejection of intellectual vehemence common in postmodern ethics, or even from the social-democratic culture of ‘niceness’? Badiou’s point, however, is rigorously precise: if the philosopher engages in polemos in his relation to the sophist, his adversary, he must never decree that the sophist should be annihilated. Plato confirms this crucial ethical point in his case against the sophist in book X of the Laws.⁴³ In the end, for Badiou, the ethics of respect for alterity and difference is really an affluent humanism. It shares with humanism an insistence on the central importance of the surrender of the same to the other. Badiou’s ethics reverses this structure. It hinges by contrast on the rare emergence of the same from the banality of infinite difference. Badiou asserts that, in this respect, his ethics is the true heir to the anti-humanism of Lacan and Foucault. If we do not see this connection immediately, I would suggest, it is because Badiou cleanses his Lacanian and Foucauldian inheritance of all traces of melancholy. In Lacan and Foucault, too, the event is rare. Both are much preoccupied with the cast and tenor of a world from which it is absent. Badiou’s ethics deliberately eschews the melancholy of that preoccupation. Certainly, the event of sameness is rare. It is also frail and precarious. But for that very reason, the ethical task requires the most strenuous effort, a refusal of all contemplative detachment, a purposeful self-distancing from mood. The key feature of Badiou’s ethics is fidelity. Fidelity can be summed up in a single, Beckettian ethical maxim: ‘ ‘‘Continuer!’’ ’ (ET, 48), ‘ ‘‘Keep going!’’ ’ (ES, 53). Or, as Badiou puts the point when paying homage to his predeces´ sors at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure—Jaur`es, Herr, Nizan, Sartre, Cavaill`es, Lautman, Beckett, Celan, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan—‘Continuons!’ (‘Let’s keep going!’, CI, 11). Again, the ending of The Unnameable is cardinal and, as with that ending, we must unpack the logic of a simple formula. Fidelity is not a categorical imperative (Kantian, Levinasian). It is always singular and concrete, specific to situations, or what, as we shall see later, Badiou has more ⁴² The disaster of Nietzsche, of course, is not only that he does not subordinate philosophy to truths, nor that he thinks philosophy can name the new world after the event, but that he thinks the philosophical act—his own philosophical act—can create that world. See CD, 16. ⁴³ See Plato, The Laws, tr. with an introd. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 444.

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recently called ‘worlds’ (CO, 92). Fidelity is the ‘process’ of continuing with a situation from the point of view of the event that has come to supplement it (‘du point de vue du suppl´ement e´v´enementiel’).⁴⁴ In the case of those two great figures from his pantheon, Beckett and Cantor, Badiou calls it a form of ‘acharnement’, relentless determination (BK, 13; EE, 327). Fidelity is the determination to think a world according to the principle of what has come to change it, to make it new. This subjective fidelity to the event constructs a truth. Ordinarily, human beings are occupied with what Spinoza called ‘perseverance in being’ (ES, 46), the pursuit of interests, self-preservation. But this perseverance is the law of my being only insofar as I know myself. The experience of the event and the progress of a truth do not fall under this law. Ethics consists precisely in a fidelity to the interruption constituted by the event, in a continuing resistance to the law: ‘It is . . . an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: ‘‘Do all you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’’ ’ (ES, 47). Fidelity is perseverance in what has broken one’s perseverance in being. But this must also mean a pitting of the will against itself. Thus fidelity manifests itself as a vital conflict most easily grasped as occurring between the principle of interest and the principle whereby one becomes a subject. In a phrase of Lacan’s that Badiou returns to repeatedly, the ethical injunction is ‘ne pas c´eder sur son d´esir’ (‘do not give way on your [one’s, its] desire’, ET, 43).⁴⁵ This appears to suggest that we should distinguish the ‘one’ prior to the event and constituted by doxa from the ‘one’ constituting itself in the wake of the event, a subject in process. But the second does not displace the first in a neat, sequential order. It is important not to make fidelity sound simply like passionate commitment. Certainly, fidelity means militancy, not knowledge.⁴⁶ Fidelity to Marx, for example, is not a question of knowing Marx. Fidelity is a matter of persuasion, conviction, admiration, grace, conversion, enthusiasm, allegiance, ‘according to the type of event’ (EE, 364). But the ⁴⁴ ET, 38. I retain the original French ‘´ev´enementiel’ with paraphrase because I can’t reconcile myself to ‘evental’, Peter Hallward’s ‘slightly clumsy neologism’, as a translation of it. See Hallward’s explanation of his decision in ‘Notes on the Translation’, ES, pp. xlix–l. ⁴⁵ For Lacan’s treatment of the theme, see section 24 of Seminar VII. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. with notes Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), 311–25. ⁴⁶ ‘Its origin is the event, which knowledge ignores’ (EE, 371).

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subject after the event is not altogether discontinuous with what he or she was before it: Every truth, as we have seen, deposes constituted knowledges, and thus opposes opinions. . . . Now opinions are the cements of sociality [socialit´e]. They are what sustain all human animals, without exception, and we cannot function otherwise. (ES, 50)

It is therefore not surprising to find Badiou cautioning us that fidelity always includes a relation to the State. There is always an institutional element in it. It is not possible simply to step outside or have done with the realm of opinion. Thus, to a certain degree, ethics is purgatorial according to Beckett’s conception of purgatory (‘a flood of movement and vitality’ released by the ‘conjunction’ of two opposed ‘elements’, DI, 33). In the ethics of a truth, the vital question becomes: how am I to continue to exceed my own being, to remain true to the event that came to me from beyond the terms of my knowledge but will not simply thrust me clear of them? How am I to remain true to ‘son d´esir’, its desire, my desire as what I do not know about myself? How do I continue to will something that I could not have willed to start with, that could only have come to me through an encounter, that could only have been something that happened to me? Whatever the ‘vitality’ of a given fidelity, however, it is also and crucially a discipline, and demands rigour and exactitude. If fidelity does not mean producing or acquiring knowledge, in some ways, it looks as though it does. In Badiou’s sense of it, fidelity is not so much a quality as a process or a kind of work. It institutes ‘investigations’. The subjects who choose to be faithful to a particular event must try to separate its effects out from the ordinary train of things. They must then ‘connect’ those effects, arrange them in a certain order (EE, 362–4). Fidelity therefore involves a process of discrimination or deduction. Once again, it turns out to be a form of thought. However, the fact that it is a form of thought does not mean that it purifies the effects of the event. Fidelity does not cleanse truth; that is, it does not seek to expunge from a truth all traces of the situation or situations in which that truth emerges. If fidelity is not a form of knowledge and does not appear as knowledge, it none the less coincides with knowledge. To go back to a term that I introduced in the previous chapter: fidelity departs from the encyclopedia. But it also resorts to, borrows from, composes with, and leaves its traces in the encyclopedia. A fidelity is both describable as a form of knowledge, and in principle escapes

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such description. The very fact that fidelity involves ‘investigations’ means that its ‘procedure’ resembles the production of a form of knowledge (EE, 365). Of course, what sets fidelity apart from knowledge is the fact that it is futureorientated and has no prior sense of is own direction. This is the case with the theme of departure in H¨olderlin, or of anabasis in Xenophon, Saint-John Perse, and Celan (anabasis being a disciplined and inventive progress that is also hazardous and erratic).⁴⁷ Fidelity does not confirm a given situation in its existence. It rather perceives the fractures in the situation, its singularities, its fundamental instability. Any given situation is ‘on the edge of the void’ (EE, 289). This means that the regulatory apparatus at stake in it may always malfunction. The subject of a truth is aware of this possibility. Fidelity is never ‘le faible vouloir d’une conservation’, a feeble will to conserve (ibid.). It is a will to move on, a commitment to the future anterior. By the same token, however, the criteria that faithful subjects use in their investigation, in the work of separation and connection, are extremely uncertain. There is no law that determines or guides their task, which is therefore forbiddingly difficult. Indeed, it is ‘almost impossible’, as Badiou says of Marivaux, whose plays provide some good examples of fidelity, in Badiou’s sense of the word (EE, 257). The difficulty is hardly surprising, given how close to the void the faithful subject must remain. None the less, fidelity finally produces a coherent work, an ‘event-based consistency [consistance e´v´enementielle]’ beyond the ‘immediate sphere’ of the event (PP, 77). Thus the subject is not simply faithful to a truth that precedes him or her. He or she is also faithful in anticipation. Fidelity is never fidelity to a whole truth. Nor is it a form of adherence to a dogma. Fidelity to Marx is not the same as Marxism. However stark his differences with Freud, Lacan is faithful to the event of Freud where the American Freudians are not.⁴⁸ For the same reason, there can be ‘different fidelities’ to the same event that are produced according to different criteria (EE, 258). The exact meaning of fidelity becomes apparent if we contrast it with betrayal, as exemplified in the Thermidorean. Badiou devotes a whole essay to this figure.⁴⁹ The Thermidorean is a paradigm of ethical failure. The overthrow of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor brings a chapter of revolutionary history to a close. But that is not because the grim logic of the Revolution is finally exposed as such. Nor is it because the revolutionary impetus has run up against insuperable obstacles. Thermidor is ⁴⁷ See LS, 119–39. ⁴⁸ See for instance EE, 369, 474. ⁴⁹ ‘Qu’est qu’un Thermidorien?’, AB, 139–54.

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not a sign that a particular historical truth has reached the logical end of its trajectory. There is no such ‘logical end’. Yet the fact that there is no objective logic to Thermidor does not mean that Thermidoreans do not declare there to be one, a logic of historical events, an economic logic, or a logic of power. This logic prevails over subjective prescription. It even constitutes what Badiou calls a ‘r´evisionnisme e´v´enementiel’.⁵⁰ Thermidoreans make truth quite precisely unthinkable. Thermidor is not an objective disaster but a collapse of subjectivity, an inward exhaustion (‘´epuisement’, AB, 142). For the Thermidorean, the gains involved are obvious and indisputable: prosperity, efficiency, stability, tranquillity, security. But Thermidor also spells a retreat from subjectivity, the return to mere ‘perseverance in being’, the death of political invention and ethics together. The Thermidorean decides not to keep going. He or she gives up on his or her desire. AESTHETICS AND THE ‘ WAITING SUBJECT ’ So far, however, I have missed out one very important strand in Badiou’s ethics. This emerges from his insistence that truths appear in several distinct domains. In Th´eorie du sujet (1982), Badiou asserts that ‘every subject is political’ (TS, 79). By the time he writes ‘Philosophie et politique’ (1991), however, he has changed his mind: every subject is rare and depends on an event.⁵¹ This is not just a modification of the earlier definition. It is a different kind of definition. It is made possible by Badiou’s abandonment of the philosophical practice of what he calls suture.⁵² ‘Suture’ is the philosophical conflation of truth with a single, privileged domain at the expense of the others. There are plenty of examples of this tendency: Heidegger (poetry), positivism (science), Levinas (love), Marxism ‘in its dominant, canonical form’ (politics, MP, 42). Plato ends up extolling the virtues of the philosopher-king, Nietzsche those of the philosopher-poet, Husserl those of the philosopher as rigorous scientist. If philosophical modesty means renouncing the notion that philosophy can speak the truth, it also means renouncing the philosophical identification with a particular kind of truth. For Badiou, the refusal of suture becomes an ethical principle. He calls for a work of ‘de-suturation’ (MP, 48) in which theoretical work is no longer assimilated to a single form of truth-procedure. ´ ⁵⁰ ‘Huit th`eses sur l’universel’, in Jelica Sumic (ed.), Universel, singulier, sujet (Paris: Editions Kim´e, 2000), 12–20, p. 13. ⁵¹ See CS, 215–50, especially at p. 234, n. 41. ⁵² Badiou’s most succinct account of this concept is in MP, 41–8.

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Badiou’s aesthetics starts out with a rejection of suture. As a truthprocedure or truth-procedures, art is ‘irreducible to philosophy’ (PM, 21). It is not an object of and is not to be apprehended by philosophical thought. In the strict sense, the concept of an aesthetics—of a philosophical theory of art—is therefore misguided. Art is not the vehicle of a thought which philosophy can express better than it can. It is in itself a distinctive form of thought. This thought is intrinsic to artworks, and not simply their cause. It is both immanent and singular: immanent, in that ‘art is rigorously co-extensive with the truths it displays [prodigue]’; singular, in that these truths ‘are given nowhere else but in art’ (ibid.). If they are irreducible to philosophy, they are equally ‘irreducible to the other truths’ (ibid.). Philosophy, then, does not interpret works of art. Its concern is not aesthetics but ‘inaesthetics’ (PM, 7). The philosopher does not master art, but declares the existence of artistic truths, shows that they are there, distinguishes them carefully from the world of doxa. He or she arranges them in relation to other truths contemporary with them, thus telling us about their ‘compossibility’. But the philosopher cannot say what art says better than art says it itself. After his own fashion, Plato knew this: unlike philosophy, art cannot be ‘the thought of thought’ (PM, 46). But for Plato, art is merely a singular thought: that is why he wants to see it banished. For Badiou, on the other hand, the singularity of artistic truth is the very source of its importance. There is, however, a problem here. If art is a distinctive form of thought, then Badiou appears to entertain two different conceptions of the truthprocedure in art, one of which is more consistent with his larger theory of the truth-procedure than the other. Particular works of art, he says, are not truths. An artistic truth is a procedure ‘composed of ’ works (PM, 24). The work of art is a ‘local actualization’ of a truth (PM, 25). Truths are what constitute the unities of art, not artists or works. As we might expect, Badiou asserts that a ‘configuration’ of works appears in the wake of an event (‘dans la dimension post´ev´enementielle’, ibid.). Any such configuration breaks with a previous one. Examples would include the classical style in music from Haydn to Beethoven and the novel ‘from Cervantes to Joyce’ (PM, 26–7). It would seem logical for Badiou to focus on large aesthetic categories, like those of genre. In fact, the categories that most interest him, like theatre, cinema, and modern poetry, are still larger than that. Take modern poetry, for example. (This effectively includes Beckett’s prose; until recently, Badiou has shown very little specific interest in the novel or novelists, and tends to treat Beckett as a poet in prose.) Modern poetry is a

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singular truth-procedure. It produces ‘new methods of poetic thought, a new exploration [prospection] of linguistic resources’ (PM, 41). The particularity of modern poetry lies in its awareness of the limited jurisdiction of its truths, their powerlessness, of the existence of other truths. Thus it only half-says what it has to say. In this respect, Pessoa, who splits himself into different poets, is perhaps the great representative of modernity. Pessoa invents ‘a nonclassical logic’ (PM, 66), subverting the principle of non-contradiction. His poetry thrives on equivocation, on simultaneous affirmation and negation. In Pessoa, the principle of heteronymy—the poet Pessoa is also the poets Caeiro, Campos, and Reis—is precisely a recognition that truths are plural. Pessoa teaches us ‘to think only in terms of multiple singularities’ (PM, 73). He installs a contingent multiplicity at the very origin of his poetry. He finally presents us with the modern world itself, a world deserted by the gods, a world of actual infinity and the void. If modern poetry is obscure, that obscurity is a function of its limits, its recognition of the boundary between what it can name and what remains unnameable to it (‘son innommable propre’, PM, 42). Badiou remains wedded to a hermetic conception of poetry. But that is a consequence of his seeing modern poetry as a singular kind of thought. Modern poetry ‘de-objectifies’ the world (PM, 50). It tells us that the world is not an object or a collection of objects. This is what Mallarm´e meant when he said that poetry presents us with the ‘pure notion’ (ibid.). Mallarm´e’s poems are not objects to be interpreted, but forms of labour in which the reader participates. This does not mean, however, that his poetry is ‘subjective’: the subject in Mallarm´e is actually ‘radically anonymous’ (PM, 51). Modern poetry eclipses both subject and object. What we are left with, in between, as it were, is the ‘obscure scintillation’ of an enigmatic surface (PM, 52). The ‘pure notion’ is an enigmatic form of thought precisely because it is aware of its own limits. From Mallarm´e to Celan, the trajectory of modern poetry consists of different fidelities to the poetics of the ‘enigmatic surface’. Though Badiou does not exactly say so, it is clear that, seen in this way, modern poetry begins with the event that is Mallarm´e himself. However, the poetic event does not simply initiate a procedure, either in modern poetry or in poetry in general. Badiou also offers us another conception of poetry which places the poem, not as coming after the event, but as prior to it, as an anticipation, conjuration, or invocation of an event that may or may not take place. This conception seems at odds with his larger account of truths. For Mallarm´e in the melancholy years after the suppression of the Commune,

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for example, poetry becomes a form of ‘restricted action’ at a time when politics has failed (PM, 54). At such a time, poetry takes ‘as its point of departure’, not the event, but its absence (ibid.). The poem meditates on the lack of an event, on the conditions that might make events possible again. Thus, in certain circumstances, ‘literature can name a real to which politics would remain closed’ (PP, 31). Poetry performs a work of subtraction, a clearing of the ground or stripping away. Celan’s poetry explores the possibility, for example, of a fragile, aleatory break with stasis,⁵³ in a manner that begs comparison with Beckett. Celan’s poetry works, not towards a truth that is grasped in its supposed totality, but towards the possibility of freedom. He knows that there is inconsistency in being. He seeks to mimic it, breaking up the consistencies of his world in the hope of an event. Celan provides a succinct expression of his own poetic imperative in Badiou’s favourite quotation from his poetry: ‘Sur les inconsistances | s’appuyer’ (PM, 58).⁵⁴ I shall follow Hallward in not daring to retranslate this, merely noting that Badiou himself comes close to giving his own version of it as ‘Think irreconcilable multiplicity!’⁵⁵ The work of subtraction is the poet’s labour. Truths appear in ‘the retreat of all things’ (PM, 80), or as the world is subtracted to make way for them. Casting his net beyond modern poetry, Badiou asserts that the pre-Islamic Arab poet Labîd ben Rabi’a finds he can attribute ‘no poetic chance to a truth other than, perhaps, where there is only desert, or only the abyss’ (PM, 78). Prompted by Labîd, Badiou spawns metaphors for the destitution that precedes the event. Every truth—every poetic truth, in particular—is haunted by the fear ‘that there is only the indifferent place, sand, rain, the ocean, the abyss’ (PM, 81).⁵⁶ The ‘indifferent place’ is what I have been calling the remainder. If, as I’ve said, for Badiou, the remainder is antithetical to a purely affirmative philosophy and has practically no explicit place in his developed philosophical system, as I’ve also said, the pathos of intermittency that springs from the alternation of event and remainder repeatedly haunts his accounts of poetry. The logic at stake is stark enough. In an era that witnesses the collapse ⁵³ See PM, 56. ⁵⁴ Paul Celan, Zeitgeh¨oft I, Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), iii. 86: ‘An die Haltlosigkeit | sich schmeigen’. ‘Haltlosigkeit’ is more exactly translated as ‘unsteadiness’ or ‘unfoundedness’. Elsewhere, Badiou links the quotation to the theme of justice. See IT, 77. See also Hallward, BA, p. 116. ˆ des po`etes’, in Jacques Ranci`ere (ed.), La Politique des po`etes: Pourquoi des po`etes en ⁵⁵ See ‘L’Age temps de d´etresse (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), 21–38, 32. ⁵⁶ Fascinatingly, the metaphor of the desert recurs in Badiou’s writings about Lyotard in particular. See for instance ‘Custos, quid noctis?’, Critique, 40/450 (Nov. 1984), 851–63, p. 863.

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of the great historical logics, history breaks down into a plurality of microsequences. Since these are not motivated or constrained by any overarching sequence, they must necessarily be contingent. The crucial decision that Badiou makes is to think historical micro-sequences as not only contingent but rare. Events and truths appear only against the backcloth of the ‘indifferent place’. If art is a distinctive form of thought, then what it thinks above all is the event and its rarity in relation to this place, or the remainder. Certainly, modern poetry is made up of such thought. At one point in his study of Deleuze, Badiou writes of events as not just ‘rare fragments of truth’, but specifically fragments ‘that traverse here and there our bleak world’ (DE, 91). Having done so, in the gesture of the affirmative philosopher, he briskly shrugs his shoulders: in this respect, ‘our world is like any other’ (ibid.). The intermittency of truths is the banally self-evident condition of the philosophical affirmation. But on Badiou’s own account of it, it does not appear as such to the modern poet, and the modern poet does not repeat the philosopher’s gesture (as indeed, according to the principle of ‘de-suturation’, he or she logically must not repeat it). Celan and Mandelstam stay with the event by staying with the ‘bleak world’, by keeping it steadily in view. Badiou explicitly says of Mandelstam, for example, that his poetic thought is founded, not on a truth, but on a conviction of ‘historical lostness’ (‘´egarement’).⁵⁷ Furthermore, he says it in a book about the politics of poetry and its significance in a time of political distress. It is here that we may return at last to that key quotation ˆ et l’´ev´enement. It is the modern poet who from the ninth meditation in L’Etre is the true ‘guetteur’. Badiou’s identification of the ‘guetteur’ with the political subject is an aberration, and not one he usually repeats elsewhere. The ‘subject in waiting’ is chiefly the aesthetic and not the political (nor, for that matter, the scientific or amorous) subject. It is the poet who watches out for and awaits the event when it seems recalcitrant or unforthcoming. In modern poetry, as contrasted with politics, we find a new ‘subjectivit´e de l’attente’. This concept of subjectivity is not the one that is dominant in Badiou’s work, but it is much in evidence in Le Si`ecle. In Le Si`ecle, Badiou is concerned with a particular philosophical project. The proper philosophical response to what he calls the ‘si`ecle-bˆete’ (LS, 30) is an account, not of what happened in the twentieth century, but what was thought in it. The century is what counted in it—a set of truths—and nothing more. Le Si`ecle is therefore a philosophical history of subjectivities: the philosopher ˆ des po`etes’, 26. ⁵⁷ ‘L’Age

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concentrates on events and emergent subjectivities and brackets off the desert landscape. But the subjectivities in question include poetic subjectivities. Modern poetry serves as one of the book’s major examples, and the modern poetic project turns out to be strikingly at odds with that of Le Si`ecle itself. That the book actually gets its title from a modern poem (by Mandelstam) only enhances the sense of discrepancy. The poets repeatedly turn in a different direction from the one the philosopher is committed to taking. ‘As Heidegger says’, the modern poet is ‘ ‘‘the guardian of the Open’’ ’ (LS, 37); that is, he or she is a custodian, not of a truth or truths, but of the conditions which make it possible for a truth to appear. It will by now be obvious, however, that Badiou’s conception of ‘openness’ is as different from Heidegger’s as his conception of the event is from Ereignis or aletheia. For the poet can no longer be what he or she was in the nineteenth century, a figure of the vanguard. He or she is rather a ‘secret exception’. Modern poets commit themselves to ‘a poetics of waiting’, a poetics of the threshold (LS, 39). One example would be Breton’s ‘po´etique du veilleur’, his ‘poetics of the lookout’ amidst the horrors of 1937 (LS, 40). Mandelstam, too, creates a ‘subjectivity of waiting’ under Stalin (LS, 39). We can quickly add other examples, particularly if we stretch our definition of poetry a little: C´esaire in Martinique in the 1940s and 1950s, Coetzee in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Badiou returns to the very term he used in the ninth meditation: ‘the figure of the observer [guetteur] is one of the great artistic figures of the century’ (LS, 41). Vigilance—which Badiou also closely associates with Beckett—is an aspect of a subjectivity of the interim, the threshold, the d´echet, dead time. Crucially, the poet never crosses the threshold, as the militant must do. Celan, however, is perhaps the most interesting case, and the one in which the analogies with Beckett are most striking. For Celan does not commit himself to a ‘subjectivit´e de l’attente’ in the midst of disaster. He commits himself after it. He insists that we wait to catch up with disaster. Celan’s ‘Anabasis’ begins with the image of a narrow space between walls that is precisely reminiscent of the same image in Beckett’s Lessness, on which, as we saw earlier, Badiou also comments.⁵⁸ In a phrase of great poignancy and resonance, Celan invokes this narrow space as an ‘unwegsam-wahre | . . . | in die herzhelle Zukunft’, an ‘impassable-true’, a blocked passage to ‘the heart-bright future’.⁵⁹ Badiou picks ⁵⁸ See p. 37. ⁵⁹ See LS, 128–30; Paul Celan, Gedichte, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), ii. 256; translation mine.

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up on Martine Broda’s translation of ‘unwegsam-wahre’ as ‘impracticablevrai’.⁶⁰ Celan’s is a truth that is unlike a political truth precisely in that it cannot be put into practice. In effect, Celan says ‘not yet’. In another context, this is precisely what Mao says.⁶¹ It is also what the political subject says in a time of political reaction (like the present) which gives itself out as a time of resolution, reconciliation, or synthesis. There is a difference at stake, however, that is certainly one of tone or nuance, but where tone and nuance spell a crucial distinction between modes of subjectification. What Badiou directs us to, as does Ranci`ere, and, like Ranci`ere, probably in spite of himself, is an aesthetic melancholy which recognizes that the temporality of art or, perhaps better, the temporality with which art endows the world, is quite different from but also instructive for that of politics. If the truth-procedure of modern poetry departs from philosophical procedure, even more importantly, perhaps, it also departs from the truthprocedures of modern politics. A properly constructive politics categorically rejects all pathos. On this point, Badiou is consistent and emphatic. For politics insists on renewal ab ovo. Starting out from an event, ‘the subjective will can realize unprecedented possibilities in the world’ (LS, 142). The modern militant dreams of creating a new political foundation. That is the great modern political venture. But Mandelstam, Celan, and Beckett are all concerned with blockages in its trajectory, baulkings of the vector in question. Modern poetry is irresistibly deflected in the direction of the pathos of intermittency. Perhaps in spite of himself, Badiou has repeatedly to admit this of modern poetry, at least, in Le Si`ecle. At the same time, he admits it without letting the admission affect his larger philosophical arguments or filter through into his accounts of modern politics. To put the point rather differently: Badiou is far too responsive to modern poetry and far too good a judge of it not to introduce certain great modern poets into his account of the century, though he thereby risks creating a specific turbulence in his thought as a whole. The modern poet thinks the event, or, at least, the possibility of the event, but also recognizes that the event cannot be thought apart from its remainder. This has implications for the ethics of artistic practice. It has implications, above all, for the meaning of fidelity relative to artistic truth-procedures. Take for example Badiou’s argument with regard to Shalamov, whose accounts of life in the Gulag in Kolyma he contrasts favourably with Solzhenitsyn’s. ⁶⁰ See LS, 128–30.

⁶¹ See LS, 91–5.

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Badiou does not appear to conceive of Shalamov as the subject of an event. He does not present him, for example, as faithful to a Marxist–Leninist truth in the teeth of the ravages of Stalinism. Yet Shalamov is equipped with a tenacity that is close in its character to fidelity. He can hardly be said to be caught up in the progress of a truth; in that respect, his world is that of the ‘indifferent place’, the remainder. Yet, as an inmate of the camps, he is none the less able to hold to certain points of consciousness and practice which check what Badiou calls his ‘decomposition’ as a subject (PP, 36). Shalamov’s ethical adversary is not so much the henchmen of the State as camp low-life, the cheats, beggars, and petty criminals. To Badiou’s way of thinking, these figures belong with the Thermidoreans on the one hand and the lumpenproletariat of the Eighteenth Brumaire on the other. In his opposition to their cast of mind, what Shalamov asserts, what he even invents, is ‘non-innocence’ (PP, 39). Stalin’s purges are feasible precisely because they are massacres of innocents, those who have forsaken or never arrived at political subjectivity, never known that they might be capable of unity and political action. Kolyma is a grittily sustained testimony to the importance of the subjectivity they lack. This ‘exemplary and transmissible form of consciousness’ is what Shalamov bequeaths to the future subjects of other emancipatory truths (PP, 41). Shalamov’s fidelity, then, is not exactly that of faithful subjects in Badiou’s more abstract, philosophical accounts of them. Nor is the fidelity that Badiou associates with Mallarm´e which, as we’ll see, he also pointedly contrasts with Beckett’s. For the moment, however, I want rather to focus on the contrast between Mallarm´e and Rimbaud. For Badiou, Mallarm´e’s fidelity manifests itself, above all, as patience. This is precisely what Rimbaud lacks. Like Beckett, Badiou is powerfully drawn to Rimbaud.⁶² He uses Rimbaud’s concept of ‘logical revolt’ to characterize the philosophical enterprise itself (IT, 39; DP, 5). The passages of vehement denunciation in Badiou’s political writings share some of Rimbaud’s inventive rage and satirical flair, and appear to owe a stylistic debt to him. (Mutatis mutandis, this is also the case with the furious resistances of Beckett’s Unnameable to voices that are not its own). But in ‘La M´ethode de Rimbaud: L’Interruption’, Badiou sets himself at a certain distance from Rimbaud. He focuses on what he calls the moments of ‘interruption’ in Rimbaud’s poems, moments at which they appear to turn in a radically different direction, in a shift most commonly indicated by a ⁶² On Beckett’s love of Rimbaud, see for instance Knowlson, DF, 126, 137, 138, 160, 188, 189, 686.

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‘non’, ‘mais’, or ‘assez’. These caesurae mark the point at which Rimbaud feels that a promise cannot, indeed must not be sustained. They are in themselves what the poems are most concerned to engineer. At such moments, Rimbaud defects from the very vision or sense of grace that he appears to be about to confirm, and lapses into its opposite, ennui, nullity: In ‘Le Bateau ivre’, after a deluge of parnassian rhetoric, on the very threshold of a radiant promise—‘You million golden birds, the Strength to come’—[we find] the [lines] ‘I’ve wept too much, it’s true. Dawn breaks my heart. | All moons are atrocious, all suns bitter’, which function as an abolition, or the revenge of a degree zero of desire. (CS, 131)⁶³

On the verge of proclaiming the destruction of history and the inauguration of a new world, Rimbaud collapses into a muted evocation of the inexorability of the world as it is already given. This is not to say that his poems ultimately throttle the visionary impulse. The point is rather that, again and again, they trace the fissure between what the world can promise in the way of present redemption, and the threat it also holds of repetition, immobility, changelessness. Radical doubt constantly afflicts the Rimbaudian epiphany. A possible prose is always lurking within the poem. It is very important to note that, for Badiou, Beckett reverses this structure: in later Beckett, at least, there is a poem latent in the prose.⁶⁴ Rimbaud’s poetry is about the enigma of this kind of interruption. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that, for Badiou, the visionary dimension to Rimbaud’s work is essentially romantic. Quoting from ‘Une saison en enfer’, he remarks for example that the famous ‘derangement of all the senses [le d´er`eglement de tous les sens] accustoms us to ‘‘seeing, fair and square, a mosque where there was a factory’’ ’ (CS, 136).⁶⁵ It was precisely this vision of France that Mitt´errand’s first minister, Pierre Mauroy, flinched from when he responded to a massive French strike on behalf of immigrant workers with an adamant refusal to bow before ‘subversive Shi-ites’ and foreigners ‘with no sense of French realities’ (CS, 137). Rimbaud’s vision is of the situation transformed from the point of view of the disregarded, those who ⁶³ The translation of the lines from Rimbaud is from Collected Poems, tr. with parallel French text, introd., and notes Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 131. Badiou omits the question mark at the end of the first line quoted. Not surprisingly, the cadence of Beckett’s translation is better: ‘But no more tears. Dawns have broken my heart, | And every moon is torment, every sun bitterness’ (CP, 137). ⁶⁴ See for instance CS, 344–7. ⁶⁵ See Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 236. Badiou is actually slightly misquoting: the words in the original are ‘je voyais tr`es-franchement une mosqu´ee a` la place d’une usine’.

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have no stake, those who belong but are not included, the ‘sans-part’, as Ranci`ere calls them.⁶⁶ At ‘the opposite pole to the criminal errors [d´erapages criminels]’ of State doxa, the Rimbaudian d´er`eglement involves ‘the distortion [torsion] that is characteristic of a truth-procedure’ (ibid.). Rimbaud sees the political situation from the vantage point of a possible truth. At the same time, however, his poems repeatedly twist in the gap between possible truth and constraining actuality. Rimbaud suspends them on the very point at which two incompatible figures of being are divided from one another. Thus Rimbaud’s poetry is not strictly a poetry of an event and the truth that stems from it. It is a poetry poised on the edge of a truth-procedure, rather than engaged in one. In this respect, for Badiou, Rimbaud is a great poet of undecidability. But he is also clearly the poet of a decision, a decision in favour of the second of the two ‘figures of being’. Rimbaud consistently decides in favour of the prosaic universe. For Badiou, this decision is the most problematic aspect of Rimbaud’s work. Rimbaud always turns in the direction of the ‘d´ej`a l`a’, of the death or cancellation of promise (CS, 142). This leads in its turn to the Rimbaudian relish for abjection. It breeds a taste for what Badiou sees as a kind of ‘abject sublime’ that Proust, Beckett, and Genet will later share and that is significant for modern culture. What is more, the poems tend finally to rush into their decision. Ethically speaking, Rimbaud’s haste and abruptness are very significant. His poems lack a strength that art can always learn from mathematics. Mathematical thought is a slow, methodical process of deliberation. It also grows slowly, over very long periods. By contrast, Rimbaud lacks patience. Badiou understands patience as a category of thought and a relationship to truth. He explicitly asserts that the question is not one of ‘character traits’ (CS, 149). For Rimbaud, it is only the prosaic or disenchanted world that sees patience as necessary. For Badiou, however, in the confrontation with undecidability, patience is crucial. Fidelity is a process of slow and painstaking deduction, a protracted and meticulous working-out for which, as far as Badiou is concerned, the model is clearly the mathematical proof. Rimbaud is impatient. He knows that truth cannot be possessed, that it seizes us and not we it. But he wants his truth immediately, decisively, free at once of its stale entanglements with what already exists. Hence the quickness and intensity of his disappointments. In the end, he is impatient with the fact of undecidability itself. His most imperious desire is for incarnation, the ⁶⁶ See Ranci`ere, ME, passim.

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spontaneous and comprehensive embodiment of truth in experience. If truth is not given once and for all, as a whole—and for Badiou truths are not available ‘all in one go’; this is one of his points of agreement with Heidegger⁶⁷— then, for Rimbaud, it is always better finally to suppose that it is not available at all. He has no interest in the pure singularity to which the event might lead. He is indifferent to the infinity of a truth without predicates. His greatness lies in the very urgency of his need for undecidability. But undecidability is of itself no guarantee of the possibility of radical change. Alas, truths do not automatically transfigure the given world. Most of the time, truth does not happen. Thus Rimbaud opts for glum despair. He even produces an ironic mimicry of a world that, it seems, cannot but be as it is. In this respect, Rimbaud is a postmodernist avant la lettre. The real pathos of Rimbaud, however, is that, as the logic of his despair gathers weight, he finally interrupts the progress of his very genius for interruption. Like Rimbaud, Mallarm´e belongs to the ‘vacant time’ (‘temps atone’) that follows the crushing of the Paris Commune (CS, 151).⁶⁸ Like Rimbaud, he is concerned to sustain a trace of the possibility of the event in his poetry. Badiou reads both poets as thinkers of the event and its undecidability. For both, poetry is concerned with the heterogeneity of events to the ennui of the world as it already exists. Mallarm´e’s apprehension of the event, however, is finer, more complex and subtle than Rimbaud’s. Mallarm´e is a poet of the modalities of the event as Rimbaud in his impatience cannot be. For Mallarm´e, the condition of the event and of truth is one of extreme fragility. He is therefore preoccupied with the process of patient elaboration that will finally make a truth seem ‘veridical’, that will ultimately confirm a truth as knowledge. Thus, for example, in his remarkable analysis of ‘A la nue accablante tu’ in ‘La M´ethode de Mallarm´e’,⁶⁹ Badiou argues that Mallarm´e makes meticulous use of certain ‘vanishing terms’ (‘termes e´vanouissants’, CS, 111). These terms register the event, but only as having faded or disappeared. Furthermore, Mallarm´e also introduces a second set of terms into the poem which call the status of the first set in question. These secondary terms register the undecidability ⁶⁷ ‘All cannot be thought in one go’ is a phrase of Heidegger’s that Derrida is fond of quoting. See for instance Of Grammatology, tr. with a preface Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23. Badiou’s agreement is clear for example in Logiques des mondes, and in ˆ et l’apparaître’, CT, 179–200, especially at p. 190. ‘L’Etre ⁶⁸ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that Badiou’s interest as far as poetry is concerned is in modern poetry, which in effect is poetry ‘after the Commune’. See ‘Po´esie, philosophie, politique’, in Ranci`ere, La Politique des po`etes, 39–63, p. 43. ⁶⁹ CS, 108–29.

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of the event. They are followed in their turn by a careful indication of the delicate choices involved in giving the event appropriate names. In ‘Ses purs ongles tr`es haut’, by contrast, Mallarm´e provides a different set of terms. Unlike the ‘termes e´vanouissants’ of ‘A la nue accablante tu’, those in the second poem are irreplaceable. They do not serve as a trace of the event (the ‘rˆeve vesp´eral’ of the glorious sunset, CS, 114).⁷⁰ Nor do they cancel a previous cancellation, like the secondary terms in ‘A la nue accablante tu’. Their purpose is rather what Badiou calls ‘foreclosure’ (CS, 116–17): they indicate certain limits to the power of nomination. The truth that appears in the wake of an event does not exhaust the whole of the situation in which it appears. As Badiou puts the point in the Ethics: ‘At least one real element exists, one multiple existing in the situation, which remains inaccessible to truthful nominations’ (ES, 85). This ‘element’ is unnameable, and, as we have seen, forcing the unnameable is for Badiou a form of evil. There is thus an ethics at stake in ‘Ses purs ongles tr`es haut’. By contrast, ‘Prose (pour des Esseintes)’ is about the ‘pure notion’ itself, the appropriate metaphor for which is number, and which Mallarm´e elaborates with mathematical precision. This precision manifests itself, above all, in the care with which he sets up certain ‘schemes of rupture’ in the poem (CS, 120). These ‘schemes’ are the means by which the poem breaks free of all material and conventional ties, and finishes by being quite literally related to nothing. ‘Prose’ is the example par excellence of Mallarm´ean patience. It both involves and describes a slow, fastidious labour. This labour functions as a kind of clearing of the ground for the event, or an invocation of the event in its absence. Here Mallarm´e struggles, above all, with ‘the tenacious illusion (which is doxa itself ) of the tie [lien], the relation, familiarity, resemblance, closeness’ (CS, 129). All three poems are methodical explorations of the conditions of the event. All three follow very different trajectories. The accounts of Mallarm´e elsewhere in Badiou’s work add more variations on the theme. According to the discussion ˆ et l’´ev´enement, for example, Mallarm´e thinks the drama of of him in L’Etre the event, both the mise-en-sc`ene of its appearance and disappearance and the ensuing interpretation that fixes and preserves it.⁷¹ Poetry preserves a logic which, without its help, might have faded away unnoticed. Mallarm´e’s strength of purpose is precisely invested in this activity. Here he is concerned with what ⁷⁰ Stephane Mallarm´e, Œuvres, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Bordas. 1992), 81. ⁷¹ It is important to note that, here, Badiou writes of Mallarm´e’s interpretation of the event, rather than his involvement with what is, for Badiou, the much more commonly poetic question of naming it.

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Badiou calls ‘´ev´enementialit´e’ or ‘the event of the event’ (EE, 218), a concept that will be very important to some of my commentary on Beckett, though Badiou himself never uses it in relation to his work. Mallarm´e is even concerned with the event in its ‘absolute’ form, as an ‘eternal’ hesitation (EE, 215). Badiou’s involved account of ‘L’Apr`es-midi d’un faune’ adds further nuances. For he reads that poem as establishing a dialectic between the event and modes of consciousness or signification that Mallarm´e deems to be inappropriate to it. These include memory, which anaesthetizes the event, and narrative, which casts it into the form of a specific temporal logic. Indeed, Badiou actually suggests that the poem consistently calls the discourse of narrative into question. Only at the end of the poem is it clear that the faun is protected from such traps. This is because of a habit of methodical doubt which Badiou also associates with Descartes and Beckett, and which is emphatically not ‘de type sceptique’ (PM, 195). In his essay on Mallarm´e and Labîd ben Rabi’a, by contrast, Badiou rather focuses on Un Coup de d´es, and, in particular, on the theme of the unmasterability of the event and truth. In Coup de d´es, Mallarm´e develops a seemingly paradoxical conception of choice as involving a surrender of power and self-containment. He does so because he thinks of truth as the regulated effect of an event. The event takes place outside all relation. This thought, however, is not philosophical, as Badiou makes clear in a long footnote on Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Mallarm´e.⁷² Lacoue-Labarthe makes what Plato knew to be the great mistake: he confuses thought with the ‘thought of thought’ (CS, 126–7 n. 20). He cannot see that poetry constitutes its own (singular and immanent) form of thought. He cannot see the case for an inaesthetics. Badiou recognizes, not only the complexity and sophistication of Mallarm´e’s poetics, but its extreme singularity. Mallarm´e commits himself to a painstaking and scrupulous exploration of the site of the event, the circumstances and modes of its occurrence, the conditions which may enable or impede its consequences. By implication, there is an extraordinarily sustained and powerful will to negation lurking within Mallarm´ean d´elicatesse. But negation is not negativity: appalled, not only by the suppression of the Commune but also by the erasure of its traces, Mallarm´e none the less does not become its memorialist. Turning in disgust from a culture complacently gorging on its own pieties, he writes those pieties off. But he also writes politics off, expressly turning towards ‘a purely poetic duty’ (CD, 22). He cultivates an art of severe and ⁷² In Musica Ficta (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991).

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rigorous meditation on the situation that makes possible truths like that of the Commune, and on the ontological determinations of such truths. The choice of Mallarm´e over Rimbaud is anything but a simple issue. Indeed, says Badiou, at a revealing moment in the Rimbaud essay, who knows: it is Rimbaud one might want to choose tomorrow. But the general terms of the choice are clear. They are clear because Mallarm´e’s poetic practice is inseparable from an exquisitely demanding ethics. This ethics requires a host of careful, precise, and meticulous decisions in a way that Rimbaud’s does not. Like, say, Cantor, who labours in solitude and in the face of protracted and vicious obloquy to transform a scientific tradition, Mallarm´e should be counterposed to the proponents of a postmodern ethics; not, however, as an ‘ethical hero’, but as the subject of a truth. Mallarm´e and Cantor have been seized by the progress of a truth, and are not its heroic agents. Rimbaud is also seized by a truth. The terms that it dictates, however, are ultimately not sufficient for him. The hater of Thermidoreans finally gives up on his desire. Interestingly, however, Badiou ignores in Mallarm´e what he will later find in Mandelstam and Celan. He remains obtuse to the trace and the timbre of Mallarm´ean melancholy; alternatively, he coarsens it into Mallarm´ean ‘despair’, to which he declares himself indifferent, as opposed to the ‘affirmative capacity’ of Mallarm´e’s thought, by which he is gripped.⁷³ Can the affirmative capacity in Mallarm´e really be separated from the melancholy? If ‘Ses purs ongles tr`es haut’ is about the ethical recognition of limits, the condition of that recognition is ‘anguish’, as Mallarm´e says very clearly at the start of the poem.⁷⁴ Badiou’s detailed analysis simply ignores the word. Perceptive though Badiou is about subtleties in Mallarm´e, there are certain subtleties— dissonances, disjunctions, equivocations—to which he is unresponsive, certain cadences to which he is (sometimes obstinately) deaf. So too with Trakl: Badiou quotes Trakl—‘Il y a une lumi`ere que le vent a e´teinte’—as designating the historical site of our thought, which seems plausible, yet at the same time appears to hear the line as toneless, as though there were no possibility that Trakl might be nuancing the designation in question.⁷⁵ In the same way, he can describe Mallarm´e as ‘the wintry poet [po`ete hivernal] par excellence’, whilst intending it as a neutral observation on a poetic subjectivity that has freed itself from the object.⁷⁶ ⁷³ See ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, 16. ⁷⁴ Œuvres, 69. ˆ des po`etes’, 32. The quotation is the first line of Trakl’s beautiful ‘Psalm’, ‘Es ist ein ⁷⁵ ‘L’Age Licht, das der Wind ausgel¨oscht hat’. Georg Trakl, Gedichte (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 49. ˆ des po`etes’, 36. ⁷⁶ ‘L’Age

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The theme of Mallarm´e’s beautiful poem ‘Petit Air’ (on which Badiou does not comment) is certainly an event, the exultant plunge of the ‘fugitive bird [fugace oiseau]’; or rather, it would be, if the poet could be certain that it had happened at all.⁷⁷ But he is not: there may have been nothing save the destitution that made the event seem possible, ‘just any solitude | without swan or quay’ (‘quelconque une solitude | sans le cygne ou le quai’). This does not mean that the poem cannot be read in Badiou’s terms. The bird will certainly ‘never be heard again in life’. Its existence depends on the testimony of a subject, the poet himself, and on his response to what he must be sure he has seen and valued rightly. But once again, he is not sure. The end of the poem is emphatic, conditional, and aporetic together: Le hagard musicien Cela dans le doute expire Si de mon sein pas du sien A jailli le sanglot pire D´echir´e va-t-il entier Rester sur quelque sentier! The wild musician That one dies in doubt If from my breast not his The worse sob sprang He will stay torn On some pathway!

Has the poet proved a faithful subject, or not? Or has the event ‘died in doubt’? Mallarm´e does not resolve the issue. The conditional mood, chopped phrasing, and disconnected, ambivalent logic leave us uncertain as to whether the poem is an affirmation of the chance occurrence or a plaintive account of a melancholy phantasm. ‘Petit Air’ not only thinks the possibility of the event strictly in relation to an inert context. It thinks the two as irreducibly linked. Mallarm´e holds together a world enchanted by a truth and Rimbaud’s disenchanted world. He suspends his poem between them, where Rimbaud decides in favour of the second and where Badiou himself is reluctant to recognize Mallarm´ean ambivalence. Badiou claims to articulate a logic that is intrinsic to Mallarm´e’s poems and available nowhere else. In some respects, he does this extremely ⁷⁷ The poem is in two parts. See Œuvres, 66–7.

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well. But he also does it only insofar as he can make the logic at stake compatible with philosophical logic, insofar as he can make it logical (which also means sequential. Badiou tends to read poems in sequential terms, and to ignore anything in them that might resist or complicate sequence). In the end, for all his theoretical insistence on ‘de-suturation’, he treats Mallarm´e too much as though he were a philosopher, and thereby diminishes the singularity of his poetry. In a poetry of pure thought or the ‘pure notion’, questions of affect, or, better, as I shall insist again later, of a thought that is also affect, can apparently simply be bracketed off. The problem is not only that, in Mallarm´e’s case, Badiou is committed to an unrelentingly affirmative vision of philosophy, and therefore indifferent to aspects of aesthetic experience that might point in a different direction. It is also that he himself has not pushed the principle of ‘de-suturation’ far enough, in a way that would allow him to see, not how art might contradict his thought, but how it might modulate it, temper it, lend it other intonations. As we shall increasingly see, the same can be said of his account of Beckett.

3 Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism SOME CRITICAL POSITIONS Badiou’s accounts of Beckett dispute the emphases of a whole critical tradition. This tradition has too often turned Beckett into an absurdist or existentialist, a nihilist or tragic pessimist. In doing so, it has effectively always contemplated Beckett as its own opposite, as the negative to the unrelenting positivity of its own discourse. In its very admiration of Beckett, the tradition has declared its distance from him. That distance is also the measure of its own worldliness. It has invariably adopted the point of view of the proprietor, for whom possessions are ‘the sole proof of being and sense’ (CS, 331). For Badiou, the great founding principle of philosophy is resistance to injustice, which is always resistance to the world as it is.¹ The tradition of Beckett criticism has been ‘too appropriate [appropri´e]’ to that world.² It has been able to understand Beckett only as inverting what it takes to be a self-evident plenitude (of which more later). From a philosophical perspective, however, that plenitude—of being and meaning—is no more self-evident than is the supposed ‘poverty’ of Beckett’s art. What primarily commands the philosopher’s attention, here, is not a condition of existential deprivation.³ It is the evidence of labour, unremitting effort, and, above all, thought: ‘Beckett speaks to us’, Badiou writes, with existentialist criticism in mind, of something ‘much ¹ See ‘D’un sujet enfin sans objet’, Apr`es le sujet qui vient, Cahiers confrontation, 20 (Winter 1989), 13–22, p. 16. ² DP, 22. The phrase is not applied to Beckett criticism. But it indicates how Badiou sees the three major tendencies of twentieth-century philosophy, the hermeneutic, the analytic, and the postmodern-deconstructive, and fits precisely into the context of the argument in this chapter as a whole. ³ It is worth noting in this context that Badiou points out that the characters in Beckett’s plays never die. See RT, 133 n. 87.

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more meditated than this despair of the salon’ (‘beaucoup plus pens´e que ce d´esespoir de salon’, CS, 332). Strictly speaking, however, from an Anglo-American perspective, the critical tradition with which Badiou takes issue is one that now looks dated. It has been superseded by the theoretical turn in Beckett studies: the various theoretically informed, sophisticated, and often brilliant studies of Beckett that have been appearing since the late 1980s. Much of that criticism has itself taken issue with the tradition described by Badiou. Thomas Trezise, for example, has called what he refers to as ‘the pervasive association of Beckett’s work with the ideology of existential humanism’ into question, principally because it ‘derives from a phenomenological understanding of the human subject’ (IB, 5). Writing in 1996, Richard Begam suggests that readings of Beckett as either ‘a mimetic nihilist’ or ‘an existential humanist’ are being fast outstripped by a criticism that reads Beckett ‘through the discourse of poststructuralism’ and drastically reconstitutes our understanding of his treatment of ‘such fundamental issues as the subject–object dialectic, the metaphysics of presence, and the correspondence theory of truth’ (EM, 8). Badiou’s writings on Beckett do not refer to this criticism, and he appears to be unaware of it. This chapter is about Badiou’s reading of Beckett. But I shall not just give an account of that reading. I also want to position Badiou’s account of Beckett, not in relation to the criticism he in some small measure addresses, but in relation to a criticism with which he might appear more strikingly to compete for a contemporary terrain. This will help us get the measure of what is at stake in his reading of Beckett, not just for Beckett studies but in the larger context of contemporary culture. It seems the more appropriate, too, in that Badiou has taken issue with many of the thinkers who have chiefly inspired the criticism in question (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard). He has called for a reconfiguration of post-war French thought which would place himself, Sartre, and Lacan on one side, and contemporary Heideggerians, Bergsonians, and those heirs to the linguistic turn he calls the sophists on the other.⁴ I shall look at five principal concerns in the dominant discourses in Beckett criticism over the past fifteen years. I’ll call these respectively the logic of reversal; general economy; repetition; the instability of the name; and the dissolution of the subject. These five themes are by no means clearly and consistently distinct from one another: ⁴ See ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, Les Temps modernes, 526 (1990), 1–26, p. 23.

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they play against each other, and sometimes overlap. Nor can they necessarily be found in all the criticism to which I’ll refer. In fact, I will simplify matters by associating each theme with one Beckett critic in particular, scattering references to others here and there.⁵ In one form or another, however, the themes recur. Taken together, they represent a kind of disposition within Beckett criticism at the current time, a set of parameters within which it has been operating. Though there have been exceptions, the critical tendency in question has been to rethink the Beckettian project as determined less by mood (angst, despair, etc.) than by what I would call the diagnostic attitude. I shall counterpose the five themes to five emphases central to Badiou’s account of Beckett. The terms will be familiar, by now: subtraction; restricted action; the event; naming; and subjectification and fidelity together. Whilst Badiou might well want to open up a polemical gap between himself and the post-structuralist and postmodern Beckettians, I myself will not systematically cast him in opposition to them. He and the Beckettians actually share a good deal of common ground. Furthermore, whilst what Badiou has to say about Beckett is important, it is by no means immune to question, and nor is the general structure underlying his thinking about Beckett. To some extent, Badiou’s terms need to be applied rather differently from the way he himself applies them. All the same, they point to an understanding of Beckett’s work as involving, not a practice of theoretical diagnosis, but a project of thought, however nuanced by mood, whose implications are ultimately ethical, in Badiou’s sense of the word. Finally, the crucial difference between Badiou and the Beckettians lies in his insistence on the radical emptiness of Beckett’s art, on the crucial importance of its break with the world. According to the concept of the logic of reversal, in Beckett’s work, opposite terms are exchangeable, implode, cannot be kept apart. The architecture which once cemented them in place, baldly confronting one another, has come asunder. Its joints have sprung loose. From now on, interminably and indeterminably, there is play within the linguistic system. Beckett sees this before others (like Derrida, for example); alternatively, he sees and articulates it with a special penetration. Leslie Hill in particular has meticulously traced the logic of reversal through a range of Beckett’s works. Indeed, I have ⁵ There is no substantial discussion here of Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Poststructuralism, or the Deleuzean tradition in Beckett studies that it particularly represents. But see my ‘Badiou and Beckett’, in Richard Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 93–107.

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borrowed the term from him.⁶ Beckett is committed to defending the autonomy of literary texts, says Hill. His commitment leads him to define fiction ‘as an activity of language in which, paradoxically, the foundations of meaning are attacked by the uncontrollable, self-inverting character of meaning itself’ (ibid.). Beckett is concerned with ‘what could be called indifference . . . that which is in-between positions of meaning, neither positive nor negative, constantly shifting and irreducible to subject or object’. He therefore understands a logic of circularity—the ‘purgatorial cycle’ (BF, 10)—as being what constitutes a modern literary text. There is no dialectical union of opposites in Beckett’s work, but rather a movement of constant displacement. Thus at the very heart of Murphy, for example, there lies paradox, oxymoron, and chiasmus, contradictory apposition and rhetorical inversion, an unstoppable play of convergences and divergences. So, too, in Molloy, binaries become ‘both crucial and indeterminate, significant yet devoid of meaning’ (BF, 62). The significance of that great Beckettian figure, aporia—particularly in the Trilogy —is that it both describes and challenges the possibility of a ‘moment of passage’ (BF, 63), both articulating and suspending a structure of opposition. In effect, the logic of reversal instigates a hollowing or emptying out of value; except that, for Hill, it is not so much value as ‘positions of meaning’ that are at issue. This argument seems to me to be quite characteristic of recent Beckett criticism. However, it makes the gap between that criticism, and the existentialist and humanist criticism that preceded it, look narrower than it may initially have appeared to. Where Beckett’s concern was formerly deemed to be an absence of sense (‘absurdity’), recent criticism now takes it to be the activity of sense-making, understood as differentiation. In either instance, the question of an already existent meaning is of cardinal importance. By contrast, Badiou has been much concerned to turn philosophy decisively away from hermeneutics and towards an interest in the emergence of truths in their newness. This interest also involves a reduction of experience to a finite set of minimal functions. These are established axiomatically and are therefore beyond interpretation. Not surprisingly, Badiou does not read Beckett as engaged in a more or less deconstructive kind of work. For he experiences the weight of doxa as being more oppressive than most current deconstructionists appear to, and understands Beckett as labouring under the same oppression. ⁶ See BF, 6.

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In Badiou’s terms, Beckett ‘makes holes’ in knowledge. Badiou stresses the importance of antagonism: ‘thought is not subtracted from the spirit of the time save through a constant and delicate labour’ (BK, 5). Badiou’s Beckett is not primarily engaged in an activity of constatation, a diagnostic enquiry into a generalized structure of sense. With a force and decisiveness that finally makes him seem closer to Sartre than to Derrida, Beckett commits his art to opposition, a scrupulous but fiercely corrosive assault on contemporary orthodoxies, particularly as they are couched in language. Of course, one can hardly claim that this assault has gone unnoticed by previous or indeed by contemporary critics. None the less, the deconstructive bent of recent criticism has made it wary of attributing to Beckett’s art a rigorously negative power. Badiou, by contrast, has no such qualms. The key term in the sentence from Badiou’s Beckett book that I have just quoted is subtraction. It is subtraction, in effect, that Badiou counterposes to the logic of reversal. For Badiou, ‘since Plato, philosophy is a break with opinion . . . . For the philosopher, everything that is consensual is suspect’ (AM, 90). Truths appear as subtractions from opinion. They are not objects of knowledge but holes made in the orders of knowledge and representation and indiscernible to them. One example of this would be the art of Malevich. Malevich’s is above all a subtractive thought which makes the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘ground’ one of minimal difference (LS, 85–6). Minimal difference is the mode in which the arrival of the new is chiefly conceivable. With Lacan in mind, Badiou calls this process a reduction of the density of knowledge. Truths do not destroy a previous knowledge. They rather traverse and fracture it. Philosophy takes its bearings from a ‘subtractive’ conception of being. But philosophy itself does not exactly subtract. By contrast, Beckett’s work constitutes a primary instance of art as an activity of subtraction. Subtraction is not destruction. It is ‘measured’ and methodical where destruction is not (LS, 85). Beckett is concerned with subtraction as a patient, disciplined, vigilant elimination of doxa. Beckett himself, of course, said more or less the same, in the same terms: ‘I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtraction rather than adding’ (DF, 352, italics mine). In a fine phrase, Badiou even suggests that Beckett’s prose is itself the very movement of a ‘negligence’ of the mundane (BK, 24).⁷ It is seldom if ever, he asserts, that one finds a writer of Beckett’s ⁷ One relevant contrast, here, would be what Badiou makes of Pasolini’s account of St Paul. As ‘a man of the institution’, Pasolini’s Paul finally ‘inverts saintliness into priesthood’ (SA, 38).

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calibre so little exposed to the world and so little compromised by his relations with it.⁸ Badiou partly shares the continuing emphasis in recent criticism on Beckett’s quarrel with Descartes. He would also partly assent to Trezise’s case for an anti-phenomenological Beckett. He sees Beckett as inverting the Husserlian ¯epoch¯e and breaking with ‘Cartesian terrorism’ (BK, 38). But the inversion and break are finally less important than a fundamental allegiance, a commitment to subtraction shared with both Descartes and Husserl. In this respect, for Badiou, it would be crucial to register what Beckett said about the active force of his own ‘desire to make myself still poorer’.⁹ Self-impoverishment is an austere and necessary clearing of the ground for thought, as distinct from the incorrigible, muddy complicities of daily life (from which Badiou insists we cannot be free. I shall soon be saying more about that). True, the principle of methodical ascesis to which Badiou is committed has no immediate implication for subjectivity. But the structures that Beckettian self-impoverishment itself is concerned so rigorously to undermine are finally less those of selfhood than of the delusive cornucopia of extant knowledge. In any case, as we shall shortly see, Badiou’s account of Beckett’s development does not precisely correspond to his own very specific conception of subjectification. It is in his suspension of all that is inessential that Beckett has long been exemplary. Subtraction operates as a kind of clearing of the ground. In this respect, Beckett is an example of the modern will to separate ‘the real’ from what ‘envelops and obscures it’ (LS, 97). What he arrives at as a consequence of this is the ‘noir-gris’ or ‘penumbra’ of Being, Being on the edge of or indistinguishable from the void. Badiou repeatedly insists on this.¹⁰ But thought begins again from the ‘penumbra’, specifically, as a mode of ‘restricted action’.¹¹ The concept of thought as ‘restricted action’ is in pointed contrast to the shift in recent Beckett criticism towards a Beckett understood in terms of a general as opposed to a restricted economy. The shift is evident, ⁸ Cf. Badiou on St Joan: ‘Those who have known how not to be reduced to submission to the predicates imposed on them by their time, will endure.’ ‘L’Insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit, 238 (Dec. 1997), 26–33, p. 33. ⁹ See Ludovic Janvier, Samuel Beckett par lui-mˆeme (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 18. ˆ et langage’, BK, 27–32. ¹⁰ See for instance ‘Etre ¹¹ Thus Beckettian (or Mallarm´ean) subtraction is productive. The relevant contrast, here, would be Nietzsche’s ‘pure subtraction’, which only mimes out the intrinsic undecidability of the event. See CD, 16.

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above all, in Trezise’s book Into the Breach, which is where these terms chiefly figure. For Trezise, the general economy ‘produces the world . . . and exceeds it’ as a ‘strangeness constitutive of all familiarity’ (IB, 30). Since phenomenology conceives of subjectivity as a restricted ‘separation from exteriority’, the general economy is irreducible to its terms (IB, 6, 8). Beckett understands that, however originary it presents itself as being, all separation is itself conditioned. This is why he gives up on an art of ‘the feasible’: he recognizes that literature ‘in its very secondarity belies the priority of that world that originates in the dis-appearance of the sign’ (IB, 31). Beckettian art exposes the ‘illusory priority of consciousness’ and ‘its pre-originary involvement in an economy of signification’ that escapes it (IB, 32). Thus Molloy reverses the reversal by virtue of which closure or separation appears to precede, found, and condition ‘its own genesis’ (IB, 48); Malone Dies reverses the phenomenological pour-soi into the pour l’autre of signification; and the ‘non-self-coincidental voice’ of the Unnamable ‘thematizes literature itself as the ex-pression of a subjectivity beyond separation’ (IB, 97). The personages in the Trilogy are powerless because they cannot escape an ironical knowledge that, as speaking subjects, they articulate themselves only on the basis of a more fundamental intersubjectivity that they cannot articulate. The point is not exactly that Trezise’s concept of alterity has no meaning for Badiou, but rather that he sees alterity as banally self-evident, and therefore as without any great importance. ‘Infinite alterity’, he writes, ‘is quite simply what there is’ (ES, 25). What matters crucially is not alterity or ‘the infinite multiplicity of differences’, but sameness, understood as a feature not of what exists already but of what ‘comes to be’ (ES, 27). Badiou’s account of Beckett takes a very different direction from Trezise’s. For Badiou’s Beckett is not concerned with a generality, but rather with ‘restricted action’. Indeed, here again, with Mallarm´e, he turns out to be practically exemplary.¹² Beckett’s work is not a diagnosis of its own condition. The Beckettian project is rather a question of determination and therefore also a mode of action. It constitutes itself as a form of thought that is self-grounding or self-constituent, that establishes its own internal samenesses or consistencies. The literary work cannot be general or refer to any generality. It is singular, ¹² See for instance the Mallarm´ean-Beckettian concept of philosophy (and politics) in ‘Philosophy and Politics’: ‘Let us be militants of restrained action. Let us be, within philosophy, those who eternalise the figure of such action.’ IT, 77.

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a product of thought not knowledge. The work has no object or objectivity. In its self-constitution, as its own universe, it aims rather to deny or depose the object. It exists as the Mallarm´ean ‘pure notion’.¹³ Nothing confirms the universe constituted by and as the work as having a right to exist. In this respect, the work of art is pure affirmation (which is how Badiou can claim that ‘Beckett’s whole genius tends towards affirmation, in an almost aggressive fashion’ (BK, 13), and yet, in doing so, mean something quite different by affirmation from what existential humanists mean). Beckett reduces experience to a set of significant minima, ‘to certain major functions’ or ‘axiomatic terms’ (Movement, Rest, the Same and the Other, the Logos, CS, 330–2); to certain questions about these functions (Being and its place, the subject, ‘ ‘‘that which happens’’ ’ (‘ ‘‘ce qui se passe’’ ’, CS, 333), the existence of the pair); to certain responses to these questions (Being as penumbra, the solipsistic torture of the subject, the event and naming it, love). In this fashion, he produces an axiomatics of humanity.¹⁴ Like Rimbaud and Mallarm´e, Beckett decides a universe into existence, and proceeds to make it consistent on the basis of that decision. Beckett writes, says Badiou, at the very point at which the decision as to the being of the thing in question is made. He commits himself to a treatment of that which alone constitutes an ‘essential determination’ (CS, 331). This ‘determination’ is neither an objective essence nor established in its right to existence. It proceeds axiomatically, on the basis of a ‘soit’, ‘mettons’, ‘disons’, or ‘supposons que’. Recent Beckett criticism has been much concerned with repetition, the most significant and influential study being Steven Connor’s Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Connor does not simply assert the power of repetition over that of newness in Beckett’s work, but rather suggests that they share a complex and problematic interrelationship. Repetition does not necessarily have a stymieing effect on Beckett’s world. It is not an index of an essential paralysis. Nor does Connor read it as a centring or unifying force in Beckett’s work. Indeed, he suggests that Beckett’s practice ‘instances the

¹³ ‘Que pense le po`eme?’, in Roger Pol Droit (ed.), L’Art est-il une connaissance? (Paris: Le Monde, 1993), 214–24, p. 220. ¹⁴ Cf. IT, 68, where Badiou argues that Beckettian subtraction functions ‘to designate the naked existence of a generic humanity’. It would certainly be crucial to distinguish ‘writing the generic’ from any conception of Beckett as concerned to produce an account of an essential humanity or human condition (as for example in Eric Levy, Samuel Beckett and The Voice of Species (Towota, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980) ). A ‘generic humanity’ would be subtracted from doxa and thereby rendered capable of truth.

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powerful possibilities of reproduction over the sterile compulsions of replication’ (BR, 201). He argues that repetition brings with it ‘a principle of difference’, in Beckett, that it even activates a ‘perverse dynamism of difference’ (BR, 13). This is hardly surprising, since, according to Connor, Beckett tends to dissolve the difference between repetition and difference itself. Yet it is none the less the case that Beckett’s work ‘shows a self-constraining movement in which sameness always inhabits or inhibits what may initially present itself as novelty’ (BR, 2). Connor’s concept of a Beckettian ‘self-constraint’ actually bears a certain resemblance to what Badiou means by ‘restricted action’. But Connor’s Beckett can imagine nothing beyond the ‘self-constraining movement’ of his art. This means that that art is everywhere intrinsically ambivalent. In Krapp’s Last Tape, as Krapp listens to himself, repetition opens up possibilities, in that he recognizes his ‘ironic non-coincidence’ with himself, the truth of self-difference (BR, 128). On the other hand, it closes possibilities down, in that the play also demonstrates the Derridean principle of the graft, according to which ‘every utterance can be taken up or enveloped by some other occasion’ (BR, 130). The effects of repetition thus also tend towards inertia, a reminder of ‘the death into writing of every living word’ (ibid.). As Connor describes it, the ineluctable ambivalence of repetition in Beckett thus traps him, again, in the endlessness of Hill’s ‘purgatorial cycle’. There is no exterior to this purgatory. There cannot be, because the power of the relationships between repetition and difference transcends time and history. For Badiou, however, this is not the case, because there is always the possibility of an event. What is crucial is that, for Badiou—and this is what separates him from thought that takes the ‘linguistic turn’, and makes him quite remarkably distinct from many of his philosophical and theoretical contemporaries—there is a domain which is not subordinated to language from the start, in relation to which language itself has a secondary or subordinate function. He asserts that there exists ‘a regime of the thinkable’—the thinkable, note; this is not an ineffable realm—‘that is inaccessible to [the] total jurisdiction of language’.¹⁵ The domain in question is that of chance, of ‘that which happens’, of the event. As Badiou affirms the sheer radicality of the event in its rarity, so too he also affirms its radically heterogeneous relation to the orders of language. The event is unpredictable, incalculable, ‘outside law’ (BK, 41), a supplement to the situation at hand. As such, it is irreducible to ¹⁵ ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, 21.

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the terms of that situation, and is thus subtracted from any and every regime of sense. None the less, what distinguishes Badiou’s account of the Beckettian ‘purgatorial cycle’—which he interprets as a seemingly interminable oscillation between the penumbra of being and the solipsistic torture of the cogito—is that it ultimately presents Beckett with an impasse from which he gradually recognizes that he must work his way free. The structure of impasse and possible liberty is crucial to Badiou’s thought, as we saw earlier. It is also central to his account of Beckett. In its bare bones, Badiou’s argument is familiar: with Texts for Nothing, Beckett arrives at an impasse. But his account of the turn the later Beckett takes is quite distinctive. For Badiou claims that, after the Texts, Beckett’s work begins to open itself up to the event: to chance, the incident, ‘brusque modifications of the given’ (BK, 39),¹⁶ even to the possibility of happiness and love. Beckett takes this turn, not least, in abandoning the question of meaning. This is evident in later work from The Lost Ones to Enough to Ill Seen Ill Said. Worstward Ho even presents us with a kind of r´esum´e of Beckett’s trajectory, tracing the course of a long labour which ends at length in an impasse. This impasse, however, is decisively broken precisely by an event. If the event itself is not to sink back unnoticed into the penumbra of being—if it is to inaugurate a truth-procedure—it must be held, stabilized in a trace. This means that it must be named. Not surprisingly, in Beckett’s later work, the activity of naming becomes very important. Here, again, Badiou departs from recent criticism, which has repeatedly insisted on the instability of the name in Beckett, or what Carla Locatelli calls ‘the reality of semantic instability’ (UW, 229), with Watt’s deliberations on the word ‘pot’ as a kind of locus classicus or textual crux. For Locatelli, ‘the fundamental dichotomy between words and things’ is what powers the theoretical interrogation sustained by Beckett’s art (UW, 51). She pits Beckett unstintingly against naive referential fallacies and logocentric closure. Beckett moves steadily towards a ‘literature of the unword’ by means of a process of ‘active and lucid ‘‘unwording’’ ’ (UW, p. ix). His art does not exactly repudiate the practice of ¹⁶ Apart from Badiou, the critics who have perhaps come closest to this emphasis are probably Bersani and Dutoit, who quote Beckett on the van Veldes: ‘Art loves leaps’ (‘L’art adore les sauts’, DI, 128). See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment; Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 19. Interestingly, Beckett would seem to be referring ironically to the Leibnizian principle of continuity—natura non facit saltus —which David Hilbert sees Cantorian set theory as (rightly) challenging.

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naming. Instead, he institutes a ‘suspension of designation’ (UW, 6) which, by means of paradox, contradiction, lacunae, ‘pseudo-referents’ (UW, 58), ‘comic slippage’ and ‘irresolution’ (UW, 100–1), and other devices, produces ‘a type of verbal art that faces the problem of the visibility of reality by deconstructing the unity of saying’ (UW, 228). Badiou puts the familiar linguistic argument into reverse. If the event is subtracted from any and every regime of sense, it has no name. In effect, it calls for one, and this name serves as its trace. But the event cannot be named with reference to an existing lexicon. The name of the event cannot be derived from or included in le bien dire or proper speech. For le bien dire always affirms established significations, and the event cannot be rendered in such terms. Language functions as poiesis, originary naming. It is probably this more than anything that, in Badiou’s account of him, separates Beckett so decisively from Wittgensteinian pragmatism on the one hand and Derridean deconstruction on the other.¹⁷ To a greater degree than any other commentator on Beckett, Badiou approaches him, not with philosophers or novelists, but with poetry and poets in mind. As poiesis, the name of the event is improper speech, a disorder within or scandal for le bien dire. Crucially, given his emphasis on Beckettian subtraction, Badiou understands the event in Beckett’s work as ‘adding’ itself to the penumbra of being (BK, 41). After a long, patient, subtractive labour, the event arrives as an addition or supplement. It then requires naming. This name will be mal dit, missaid. For le bien dire, proper speech, always constitutes a return to well-established and familiar meanings. ‘Misseeing’ and ‘missaying’ are significant features of Beckett’s later work, Ill Seen Ill Said in particular. In Ill Seen Ill Said, the event appears as a ‘surprise in language’ (BK, 45) and produces ‘ ‘‘a gleam of hope’’ ’ (ibid.; IS, 55). According to Badiou, the relevant passage specifies the very stages by which the movement of ‘misseeing’ and ‘missaying’ develops: During the inspection a sudden sound. Startling without consequence for the gaze the mind awake. How explain it? And without going so far how say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. What time the event recedes. When suddenly to the rescue it comes again. Forthwith the uncommon common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little later if not enfeebled by the infrequent slumberous. A slumberous collapsion. Two. ¹⁷ Wittgenstein refuses to admit that poetry is a kind of thought. In so doing, he holds at bay a use of language that runs radically counter to his theory of language. For ‘poetry is the creation of a previously unknown name for Being’. See ‘Silence, solipsisme, saintet´e: L’Anti-philosophie de Wittgenstein’, BARCA! Po´esie, politique, psychanalyse, 3 (Nov. 1994), 13–53, especially at p. 29.

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Then far from the still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings. (IS, 55)

First: inspection, the normal activity of seeing, ‘proper seeing’ (BK, 44): what is at stake here is what Badiou refers to as the analytic attitude (I have called it diagnostic). Secondly, there is the event itself, which in its exceptional suddenness disturbs or cuts across the monotony of Being and the weary repetitiveness of analysis or scrutiny. Badiou is no doubt particularly fascinated by the ‘collapsion’ because it evokes Lucretius’ accounts of the clinamen, the ‘little reshuffling’ within atomic being that can none the less have large consequences in that it makes new ‘combinations and positions’ possible.¹⁸ But it is likely that Beckett shared this interest. There are a number of what look like Beckettian versions of the clinamen.¹⁹ Thirdly, the mind is ‘startled awake’, and a particular disposition towards the world emerges, a particular form of attention, a vigilance specifically determined by the event. Fourthly, the hermeneutic question is renounced in favour of the question of naming: to interpret the event is to thrust it back into an established regime of sense, into the familiar order of ‘right saying’, which has always already supplied its reasons beforehand. To seek to name the event, by contrast, is to assert an allegiance, not only to the event itself, but to the thought occasioned by and particular to it. Fifthly, there is the act of naming itself: the event creates a disturbance, or, better, a surprise in language. This ‘poetic composition’ foregrounds its own character as ‘missaying’. Finally, an accord is established between the event as what can only be ‘misseen’ or ‘poorly seen’, and naming as ‘missaying’. It is this accord that produces the gleam of hope in the ‘agonizing eye’ (IS, 45). Lastly: if recent Beckett criticism has reached a consensus on any point, it is surely that Beckett’s work pervasively dramatizes or effects a dissolution of the subject. Daniel Katz has provided the most elaborate and detailed account of this theme, noting the extent to which he offers a view of Beckett that is now widely shared. Katz argues that ‘current theoretical commonplaces defining subjectivity as an effect of language, rather than its origin or cause, find themselves scrupulously worked through on the most basic textual level of syntactic construction and grammatical continuity in Beckett’ (SI, 16). The Trilogy, for example, underlines the extent to which both the unconscious and temporality undo the very identifications by means of which the characters ¹⁸ See De Rerum Natura, I. 897–915; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, tr. R. E. Latham, introd. and notes John Godwin (London: Penguin, 1994), 31–2. Cf. CT, 36. ¹⁹ Cf. for example the slipping of ‘some little thing’ in Arsene’s account of the ‘alp of sand’ (WA, 41).

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seek in vain to constitute themselves. ‘When the trilogy’s thought-tormented characters listen and think’, Katz writes, ‘it is otherness they hear’ (SI, 90). The later prose works extend Beckett’s scrupulous meditations on the inscrutability of the voice’s origin to the subject, inverting ‘the metaphysical conception of a full subjectivity as origin of meaning’ (SI, 176). Of course, for Beckett, subjectivity is never properly eliminable. But it is always ‘an originary catachresis’ (SI, 12). He is everywhere aware of its secondarity, as ‘one figure in a chain and no longer that chain’s origin and destination’ (SI, 15). This way of thinking Beckett in relation to subjectivity is quite foreign to Badiou. For one thing, it takes Beckett’s ‘characters’ to be representative of the generalized conditions of subjectivity. But, for Badiou, there is no universal or general subject whose deconstruction has now become imperative. (Curiously, in this respect, deconstruction has ceaselessly to posit what it disbelieves in in order to deconstruct it.) The question of subjectification needs to be approached quite differently. Individual consciousness is already ‘deconstructed’, an indeterminate and heterogeneous flux. Identity is no more than a given state of this flux, a representation expressing a more or less habitual preference for certain features of the flux at the expense of others. The representation in question is what one customarily takes for the stable structure of a self. By contrast, subjects are subjects of events, and specific to them. The subject is constructed in a process of supplementation which makes the subject more and other than he or she has thitherto been; or rather, better still, it even ‘induces’ a subject. Routine perseverance in being can be broken by an event, an encounter with something that refuses to correspond to what one has taken for the law of one’s being and is not representable in its terms. It is thus that subjectification begins.²⁰ As we’ve seen, a concept of fidelity, of continuing with and within a situation from the point of view of the event that has come to supplement it, therefore becomes crucial to Badiou’s thought. ETHICS (II): BECKET T In Badiou’s account of him, Beckett is possessed of two qualities which might seem to indicate fidelity: ascesis and vigilance. These should be understood unheroically, and as intrinsically bound up with a kind of thought. Ascesis is ²⁰ That is, it begins, precisely, as a drive to sameness in all its rarity, as opposed to the banality of heterogeneous flux. For another Beckett scholar who has raised the same question, emphasizing ‘the drive to sameness in Beckett’s work’, see Phil Baker, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997), especially at p. 136.

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implicit in Beckett’s practices of subtraction and ‘restricted action’. Beckett engages in them with what is a kind of principled intransigence. In other words, he refuses to give up on a desire that has seized him. His is a ‘constant and delicate labour’ undertaken without promises or guarantees, and with no certain knowledge of where it is tending (BK, 5). Indeed, it led him precisely into crisis and impasse. But it is also at the very heart of the Beckettian lesson, which is ‘a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage’ (BK, 9). As regards vigilance: attentiveness—attentiveness, that is, to the possibility of the most radical difference that is the event, the attentiveness of the ‘guetteur’—is or becomes Beckett’s very principle. This is where the contrast with Mallarm´e is crucial. Badiou actually contrasts Beckettian vigilance with Mallarm´ean patience, the Irish insomniac with the French faun. But this is not to place Beckettian vigilance alongside Rimbaudian impatience: if anything, the opposite. Beckett’s fidelity has a different character from Mallarm´e’s. Mallarm´e is a patient ‘investigator’ but, for him, it is always possible to break from the poetic endeavour, to relinquish the effort, to suspend activities, to cease to pose the poet’s question. Mallarm´e can always return to the indeterminacy from which the poetic endeavour springs and will spring again. For Beckett, however, there is no possibility of relaxation. His work has no place for a suspension of operations. He is intransigent, not only in his asceticism, but in his injunction to watchfulness.²¹ This seems to me to be a considerably more plausible account of the ethical dimension to Beckett’s work than either the traditional humanist or the existentialist one. But Badiou’s account of Beckettian fidelity does not exactly correspond to his larger account of the structure of subjectification itself. Subjectification begins with an event, to which the subject then declares his or her fidelity. But Beckett is not the subject of an event; at least, Badiou gives no indication of this. Rather, Beckett is faithful to the exterior of a situation, to what lies outside the particularity of current knowledge. Initially, this commitment appears only in negative form, in the austere operations of subtraction and the singularity of ‘restricted action’. After Texts for Nothing, by contrast, it becomes a commitment to the possibility of the event. Neither commitment strictly involves fidelity, however, since there is a sense in which Beckett has nothing to which to be faithful. Indeed, Badiou prefers to speak of Beckett’s courage, rather than his fidelity. Of course, it’s possible to argue, here, that the ²¹ Interestingly, however, Badiou is not unambiguously enthusiastic for Beckettian intransigence per se. In particular, he is critical of Beckett’s desire to control interpretations of his plays, especially his partisanship for Roger Blin in France. See RT, 73–4.

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very extent to which Badiou’s version of Beckett departs from the terms of his own philosophy actually makes Badiou look less open than the new Beckett criticism to the charge of using Beckett for his own ends, as an exemplification of a prior set of decisions. The very rift between Badiou’s philosophical system and his version of Beckett’s art helps to preserve an aesthetic practice as both immanent and singular, a procedure whose truth is sui generis. Such arguments, however, do not wholly dispose of the problem. The question of what Badiou makes of narration is a very tricky one: the theme would appear to be one of those instances in which the imperative of philosophical consistency conflicts with the (tracing of the) singularity of truths. Thus in ‘Philosophie du faune’, narrative is suspect. Badiou associates narrative in Mallarm´e’s ‘Monologue d’un faune’ with the bad faith of a false memory whose fragments must be dissolved. He even suggests that it is the function of prose art to offer narrative up to doubt.²² Elsewhere, he denounces any and all ˆ et l’´ev´enement, ‘narrative legitimation’ as in principle mystificatory.²³ In L’Etre by contrast, he insists, not only on mathematical means of showing how fidelity works, but specifically on mathematical narrative, ‘r´ecits de d´emonstration’ (EE, 298). More significantly, in Deleuze: La Clameur de l’ˆetre, he insists on the necessity of ‘twists of narration’ in ‘constructively locating the actual forms of Being-true’ (DE, 57). In interview, he has even asserted that narrative in the novel is ‘apt to capturing the incalculable dimension of the event’.²⁴ Certainly, his accounts of the progress of a truth, the process of subjectification, and Beckett’s career all take an orderly, sequential, linear narrative form. The trouble here is that the structure of Badiou’s narrative of Beckett’s career does not conform to his narrative of truth and subjectification.²⁵ Furthermore, the first narrative will hold good only if modified to the point where it hardly looks like a coherent narrative at all. As we’ll see, the early Beckett does not commit himself to subtraction, for instance, without waverings and demurrals. So, too, Badiou claims that, in How It Is and The Lost Ones, Beckett turns away from the agonistics of the cogito and towards the other. But ²² See PM, 193–4. ²³ ‘Le Statut philosophique du po`eme apr`es Heidegger’, in Jacques Poulain (ed.), Penser apr`es Heidegger (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1992), 263–8, p. 263. ²⁴ ‘Paul le saint’, interview with Jacques Henric, artpress, 235 (May 1998), 53–7, p. 56. ²⁵ Of course, Beckett is not the only major figure in the Badiou canon whose trajectory slips out of true with the structure of subjectification. Pascal seeks, for example, to renew a fidelity in changed conditions. See EE, 235–45. Likewise, since H¨olderlin thinks Germany not only as an event, but as an event that lies in a ‘diagonal’ relation to another, Greece (EE, 285), he is an instance of that somewhat cryptic notion of Badiou’s, the double event. Compare the account of Pascal at EE, 236, and of H¨olderlin at EE, 285.

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both are also practices of ‘restricted action’ which offer no more obvious hope of liberation than did the Trilogy. This is indicative: Badiou appears reluctant to see that there might possibly be a paradoxical or problematic aspect to his twin insistence on the self-founding character of Beckettian thought and on Beckett’s desire to open his art up to the event or encounter. Is the relationship between these two principles always entirely coherent? Does Beckett’s work not give evidence of a kind of sporadic, irregular oscillation between them which cannot be reduced to chronological order? Here again, as in the case of Mallarm´e, Badiou cannot conceive of an aesthetic trajectory, whether the artist’s or the work’s, other than within the frame of a philosophical logic, or as having a logical structure. Not surprisingly, therefore, his account of the place of the event in Beckett seems unduly confining, in terms of both period (apart from Watt, Beckett shows no interest in the event until after 1960), and modality (the event happens, and is named). Is there no sense of events in the Trilogy, for example? If not, is that just the case because Badiou can only understand the event in one particular, narratable dimension, as founding the progress of a truth? Here, again, it seems important to supplement Badiou’s theory of the event with a theory of a play in being or the ‘´ev´enementialit´e’ with which Mallarm´e is concerned. Beckett’s treatment of the event is arguably multifarious, heterogeneous, and uneven, and cannot be encapsulated in narrative form. Leslie Hill has stressed the danger of taking ‘a misleading teleological approach to Beckett’s literary project’ (BF, 121). For all his own distrust of teleological assumptions,²⁶ it seems to me that Badiou has not been altogether successful in avoiding this trap. In fact, I would suggest that his narrative of Beckett needs to be worked over in an awareness of the very principle of disunity and complicating incoherence in Beckett’s work to which the new Beckett criticism has so successfully alerted us. As I said before and want to emphasize, the two critical dispositions must not be placed in polar opposition to one another. That said, however reworked and redistributed, Badiou’s terms of reference—the penumbra of Being, subtraction, ‘restricted action’, the event, naming-as-missaying, and vigilance—seem to me to offer an important new framework for understanding Beckett. This framework is ethical. Recent Beckett criticism has found in Beckett a writer concerned to elucidate or to deconstruct—to diagnose—the generalized conditions ²⁶ On ours as a non-teleological world, see for example ‘Y-a-t-il une th´eorie du sujet chez Georges Canguilhem?’, in Georges Canguilhem: Philosophe, historien des sciences (Paris: Biblioth`eque du Coll`ege Internationale de la Philosophie, 1992), 295–304, p. 297.

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within which meaning or truth is produced. Badiou, too, is interested in sets of conditions for truths and the formal criteria for their emergence. But for Badiou, truths rupture their conditions. The postmodernist or post-structuralist problematizes the conditions of an already given truth. In Badiou, by contrast, truths are added on to their conditions. This is the case because truths are singular and material, not general. They emerge historically, though their trajectory is universal insofar as they are available to all. This conviction categorically determines Badiou’s reading of Beckett. Beckett’s art is founded on a fierce resistance to doxa. It opens up a space for a different construction of the world through an axiomatic procedure founded on hypothesis. Failure never ceases to haunt this project. None the less, tentatively, contradictorily, fitfully, and by a variety of different means, Beckett edges towards a faith in possibility. This is also a faith in transformation whose token is the transformation of language itself. To return to the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason: one might think of Beckett as granting a minimal credibility to the assertion that ‘man exists only in flashes’. The ultimate bearing of this testimony is surely on the legacy of a century of disaster, one of ‘the times of the great massacres’ (DI, 131). Above all, however, Beckett’s courage lies in his fierce determination to state his ‘credible minimum’ in severely minimal but exquisitely shaded forms, as the faintest of traces or the subtlest of velleities that are none the less neither mandarin nor abstruse. There is a quite extraordinary finesse to Beckett’s ethics. Badiou, I think, is very sensitive to this, but finally not quite sensitive enough, because like, say, Marx but unlike, say, Agamben, he refuses to entertain the possibility that the remainder might have a value. I mean, not an emotional, certainly not a spiritual nor even, in the first instance, an ethical value, but a value specifically for thought. This is a very important point, and needs emphasis: ‘the pathos of intermittency’ is not at all sentimental, though it may be melancholic. It is above all a question for thought, in the sense in which, for Badiou, great poetry is a kind of thought. But it is the poets who think the pathos of intermittency, not Badiou. In, the following chapters, I will revise Badiou’s account of Beckett with this point constantly in mind. DIFFERENCES AND REPETITIONS Before I do so, however, I want to approach the pathos of intermittency in Beckett rather differently, by going back to Connor’s theme of repetition.

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Despite his occasional assertions to the contrary, for Badiou, in fact, no newness is absolutely new. The event must compose with elements of the situation as given. In this respect, he does not so much oppose the terms in which Connor constructs his Beckett as alter the proportions of those terms. This further implies the need for drastic complication of any overly simple contrast between Badiou and the critics. Is there not a theory of repetition in Badiou, if under another name? The account of the relationship between the event ˆ et l’´ev´enement is the point at which that question is most and its site in L’Etre markedly at stake. Events are always particular; that is, they are localized. For they are always radically distinct from the ‘situations neutres’ of which our existence is largely made up, and subtractions from particular, established representations (which Badiou associates with a given State).²⁷ Events are always particular to particular sites (‘toute action transformatrice s’origine en un point’, EE, 197). The site of the event is part of the situation, and exists ‘on the edge of the void’ (ibid.).²⁸ It is a kind of minimal structure, distinguishing the event from the void that founds it. An example of particular relevance to Beckett would again be Galois. Badiou claims that every theoretical impasse—like the one Galois arrives at—may constitute a site for the event (in Galois’s case, the ensuing discovery). The site as impasse even prescribes the event in that it contains an element that it cannot present and that is unknown to Galois’s predecessors. The relation between the site and this element is one of disjunction; that is, site contains element without having anything in common with it. The site of an event comprises a radical Other which is known as such precisely in and as a consequence of the event. Furthermore, and crucially, the event is always in composition with the site; that is, its elements derive partly from the site.²⁹ Badiou calls this assertion his hic Rhodus, hic salta.³⁰ Jambet suggests that it is the implication of the event in a situation, an actual context, that most distinguishes it from ²⁷ See EE, 197. ²⁸ On the relationship of site and situation, cf. also SA, 70. ²⁹ Cf. SA, 25: the event ‘mobilizes the elements of its site’. ³⁰ See EE, 200. The phrase is from Aesop’s ‘The Boasting Traveller’ and is addressed to a swaggerer who claimed he had made tremendous leaps in Rhodes. It is paraphrased by Hegel in the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right. But Badiou is surely more likely to have been thinking of the Eighteenth Brumaire, where the context seems eminently appropriate: Marx writes that proletarian revolutions ‘recoil again and again from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: ‘‘Hic Rhodus! Hic salta!’’ ’. See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), 14.

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‘the classic concept’ of it as a ‘vertical intervention’ in a ‘horizontal domain’, which is always in principle religious.³¹ To put the point in slightly different terms: the indiscernible (i.e. what cannot be ‘discerned’, distinguished from, or made out from within a given site) not only arrives in relation to an existing multiple. This multiple also furnishes it with its substance. The site is the material base of the indiscernible, and provides the conditions of its intelligibility. Restructured, these conditions allow us to recognize the event and its consequences. Language is chief amongst them. The name is part of the existing site, but also ‘supernumerary’ to it insofar as it becomes the name of the event (EE, 363). It is a ‘hypothetical’ designation that has first been supplied by the resources of the site (EE, 413). However, names ‘have in general no referent’ within the site itself, and their usage does not duplicate their previously established functions (EE, 436). For this reason, the names of a truth usually seem empty to someone who is not its subject. He or she recognizes them, but they seem to have no content. The scholar, expert, or established authority declares that they lack sense, that they are cryptic or hermetic in the manner of a ‘poetic language’ (EE, 438). For the names of a truth displace a given set of significations, leaving the referent void. Their full meaning will only be disclosed in the future. Here Badiou’s insistence on subjectification as scission is important. The relationship between site and event is an effect of scission. This is exemplified in the division of the subject in his or her relationship to the encyclopedia. He or she is ‘a local configuration’ of a truth-procedure (EE, 429). As such, he or she has no substance, is not counted in the situation to hand. For a truth-procedure is subtracted from all prior determination by language or the encyclopedia. Yet, at the same time, the subject always ‘falls under an encyclopedic determination’, since every local state of a procedure is an object of knowledge (EE, 433). As we have seen, if fidelity is not a question of knowledge but of militancy, it is also a process of ‘investigating’ connections and disconnections between a truth and its site. It involves a ‘subtle dialectic’ between knowledge and truth (EE, 365). It both is and is not determinable by and as knowledge. Badiou states that only one investigation into every multiple in a truth-procedure need avoid such determination. Here, again, subjectification is Janus-faced, turned both towards the event and the situation in which the subject finds him- or herself. ˆ et l’´ev´enement’, Annuaire philosophique 1987–88 (Paris: Seuil, ³¹ See ‘Alain Badiou: L’Etre 1989), 141–83, p. 172.

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The same point may be made of ‘forcing’. To force a situation is to approach it in terms of the future anterior, in the light of a truth that ‘will have been produced’ (EE, 438). The subject commits him- or herself to the progress of a truth on the basis of a decision which nothing categorically underwrites. However, the same subject may make statements which will at length be correct descriptions of the situation, as in the case of Mallarm´e’s definition of the poetic act. In mathematics, forcing describes a new set ‘using only the resources of the initial set’.³² In Badiou’s terms, the effect of forcing is to make a new situation exist, but as a ‘generic extension’ of and addition to an old one (EE, 449). To force a truth is to discover what will make it appear to be veridical by adding to a situation an element that has previously been indiscernible to it. The ‘subtle dialectic’ between knowledge and truth in fidelity produces the veridical. Thus if truths are in excess of the situation and its language, they also remain interior to them. Truths are always truths of situations and owe their consistency to the consistency of situations.³³ They are distinguished in this consistency from the inconsistency of Being. All the fundamental multiples of the old situation will therefore at length be presented in the new one. They merely ‘disappear’ according to the old situation, in that the new one effectively redefines or ‘disqualifies’ them, as Schoenberg disqualifies the statement ‘all music is essentially tonal’ (EE, 443, 446). Paradoxically, the new situation both repeats the multiples of the old situation and spawns innumerable new ˆ et l’´ev´enement, this argument leads Badiou to a multiples (EE, 446). In L’Etre crucial declaration: ‘Je m’´etais, je dois le dire, un peu e´gar´e’; he ‘went a little astray’ when, in Th´eorie du sujet, he equated the appearance of the new with the destruction of the old (ibid.). Truths do not grant subjects a power of annihilation. Forcing is not a relationship that implies or depends on superior force. The concept of scission is crucial in Badiou’s account of Deleuze, where he adamantly maintains that Deleuze pervasively suppresses the Two in favour of the One. By contrast, in conformity with his own ontology, Badiou himself seeks to produce scissions: the site and its Other; the transformation by the event of its own conditions; the splitting of the word by the event; the divisions inherent in the process of subjectification; the ambivalence of the veridical: all these are instances of scission. Logically enough, scission afflicts Badiou’s ³² Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, ‘An Introduction to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy’, IT, 1–38, p. 31. ³³ See EE, 456.

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insistence on the new itself. As we saw earlier, Badiou defies Ecclesiastes, asserting that ‘the new exists in being (Il y a du nouveau dans l’ˆetre)’ (EE, 231).³⁴ Yet elsewhere the note is cautionary: if the exercise of knowledge itself breeds innovation and produces the exception, even those most concerned in the process need to return to knowledge: ‘better, after all, to be learned [il convient, somme tout, d’ˆetre savant]’ (ibid.). When Badiou asserts that ‘I conceptualise absolute beginnings’ (DE, 90), he has therefore fallen prey to what he himself calls a ‘gauchisme sp´eculatif’ (EE, 232). There is no ‘commencement radical’ (ibid.). As Jambet says, for Badiou, the new is not absolute, and this conviction distinguishes his mature ontology from his earlier Maoism.³⁵ The later Badiou traces the ‘immanent break within the situation’ (ES, 42).³⁶ The subject of a truth ‘cannot revoke’ the great circumstantial principles of the situation, cannot just dissolve it (EE, 456). The impossibility of pure singularity or ‘absolute beginnings’ is very much a Beckettian theme, supremely, perhaps, in The Unnamable. But once again, where Badiou thinks it from the point of view of the event and its value, Beckett thinks it ironically, in the terms of the remainder. Not surprisingly, the Unnamable is sardonic, as Badiou is not: It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me saying who I am . . . (TR, 327, italics mine)

On the one hand, what stops such passages from actually capitulating to repetition is the savage determination to ‘continue’ none the less. That is the hallmark of apagogic reason. The ferocity of the Unnamable’s repudiation of the things ‘that don’t count’ is unmistakable, and unmistakably and pervasively Beckett’s. What stops them from becoming pure affirmation is the closeness of apagogic reason to irony. ‘Folly. Persist.’ Persist? Folly.³⁷ This ambivalence is especially Beckettian, for one obvious reason. The point is not just that beginnings are necessarily impure: in Beckett, the break with doxa can never be absolute. This is because, as we’ve seen, Badiou does not ³⁴ In Saint Paul, by contrast, Badiou suggests that ‘the lamentations of Ecclesiastes’ are a nihilistic version of a truth-procedure. See SA, 107. ³⁵ Jambet, ‘Alain Badiou’, 152. ³⁶ Cf. ibid. 172–3. ³⁷ The quotation, of course, is not from Beckett, but from Joyce’s Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, afterword by Michael Groden (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 9.42.

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appear to conceive of Beckett as the subject of an event. Nor does he conceive of his work as concerned with a process of subjectification in the wake of an event, in spite of its declaration of the break. But the work of subtraction must therefore be problematic, since, however intently it is pursued, it has no means of decisive rupture with the situation, the ‘d´ej`a-l`a’. Beckett begins with a gesture that seems to me to found his trajectory and often to recur within it. At one and the same time, he both affirms the break with doxa, and ironizes it. What emerges as a result is a wry account of the problematics of subtraction as a principle central to modernism.

´ E´ V ENEMENTIALIT E´ As far as repetition and novelty are concerned, whatever Badiou’s more emphatic assertions, his work does not in fact produce a set of theoretical configurations that are categorically distinct from Connor’s. In ‘Philosophie du faune’, Badiou claims that the unrepeatable is the very element of truth. Truths are betrayed when singularities are dissolved into repetition. But his insistence on the various forms of scission does not bear out any assumption of a theory of pure singularity. The event radically affects the disposition of the given situation, if according to what is often an extremely complex set of relations, but does not destroy it. One might argue that Badiou and Connor subject the relationship between repetition and novelty to a similar torsion, but with different consequences. Yet, at the same time, it is hard not to feel that, in the long run, Badiou encourages us to hold the very structure of a thought of repetition and difference at a certain distance. Neither term is of very much importance in his work.³⁸ In some respects, at least, it is certainly possible to be exact about the difference between old and new, if only because of the appearance of new names. This takes us back to the possibility of a kind of ‘play in Being’. But here we need to be very careful. If for Badiou, the event is rare, this would seem emphatically to distinguish it from the event in Deleuze’s thought. Badiou argues that, where his own concern is ‘the contingency of each event’ in its singularity, Deleuze’s is ‘the contingency of the One in all its immanent effects’, ³⁸ But cf. SP, 11; and IT, 62, where Badiou specifically argues that ‘an eventmental supplement interrupts repetition’.

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understood precisely as ‘the play of the All’ (DE, 75, my italics). Deleuze puts chance everywhere, thereby identifying it with the principle of repetition itself, and neutralizing it. By contrast, Badiou understands the event as a sporadic revelation of the void that underlies any situation whatsoever but is not commonly exposed as such. It is precisely because a situation always includes the void that the new can dominate a given situation, or at least, dominate it sufficiently to master repetition, rather than being mastered by it. Yet taken as a whole, both Badiou’s more theoretical and his more empirical accounts of the event make it appear more various and complex than the structure within which he locates it with reference to the four domains. The complexity I have in mind is precisely one that appears in the abeyance of the mathematical, in other words, when abstract mathematical descriptions are translated into more concrete terms. This is the case, perhaps above all, with Badiou’s writings on art. One example would be the account of the event in Ill Seen Ill Said (BK, 44) that I quoted earlier. According to Badiou, it describes what is in effect a phenomenology of the event and its nomination.³⁹ But exactly what kind of event is at stake in the ‘slumberous collapsion’? Obviously enough, it is not one that initiates a truth-procedure. The event in question is hardly of that kind or scope. Badiou clearly reads the passage as registering a first tiny foundering of what otherwise appears to be a grimly static ensemble. But the ensemble at stake bears no evident relation to the situations in which truths usually appear. So does Badiou see Beckett as dealing in a metaphor, here? Nothing suggests that is the case. The status of this event is obviously distinct from that of more ‘classic’ events, like the Commune or Haydn’s break with baroque. The relationship between the Beckett passage and the larger theory of the event seems oddly skewed. But the Beckett passage is surely rather about a play in Being or—to return to the word—what Badiou calls ´ev´enementialit´e. However concerned Badiou might elsewhere seem to repudiate this idea, as we’ve seen, it is strikingly evident in his accounts of Mallarm´e. This is particularly the case with what he says of Mallarm´e in ˆ et l’´ev´enement.⁴⁰ Though Mallarm´e may be a subject of the event that L’Etre was the Commune, the Mallarm´ean event itself is hardly comparable with ´ enement et le temps ³⁹ For a contrasting phenomenology of the event, see Claude Romano, L’Ev´ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). ⁴⁰ See EE, 213–20.

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that event, the event of the French Revolution, or of the atonal system. In Mallarm´e, the event attains to a reflexive status: he produces an event whose ‘content’ is ´ev´enementialit´e itself (EE, 215). He is concerned with the possibility or the conditions of the arrival of the event and, above all, with its undecidability. The discipline of poetry thus protects a peculiarly fragile and vulnerable form of thought. I once argued that truth in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing was not exactly what Badiou meant by truth, but rather the truth of ‘the event of the event’.⁴¹ As such, I thought, Badiou had no terms for it. In fact, I was wrong: that very ˆ et phrase ‘the event of the event’ crops up in his account of Mallarm´e in L’Etre l’´ev´enement. Badiou even suggests that Mallarm´e is concerned with the event in its absolute form, the ‘il y a’, whose context is an absolute, ‘eternal’ hesitation (EE, 215). This concept of the event, the event in its ‘absolute form’, is also clearly at stake in Badiou’s account of Beckett, though he is much less clear about it than in the case of Mallarm´e. It is at stake in the Beckettian ‘turn’ after 1960 and the passage about the ‘sudden sound’ in Ill Seen Ill Said. The ´ev´enementialit´e of the event needs to be clearly distinguished from the event itself. But it should also be distinguished from ‘micro-events’ (PP, 10) or ‘simulacra of the event’ (DO, 12), those ‘dislocations’ which inaugurate no truth, like the German demonstrations in Leipzig and the Russian miners’ movement in Vorkouta in the early 1990s (or the anti-war coalition in Britain in 2003): ‘de v´erit´e fid`ele a` ces surgissements, point, en sorte que tout reste ind´ecidable’ (DO, 11). In, Mallarm´e and Beckett, the event is not connected to the start or the faltering of a truth-process. It is a feature of the play in being that makes either possible, or both. Indeed, the concept of the event in its absolute form is even more appropriate to Beckett and Mallarm´e than Badiou himself realizes, and appropriate within the context of his own thought. As we’ve seen, Badiou is clearly aware of the complex and conflictual involvement of events with their specific contexts. As he describes their work, Beckett and Mallarm´e are principally concerned with the immediate modes of this involvement. How does the event appear? How does it affect the disposition of the site at which it appears? What kind of traces does it leave? These are the kind of questions that an account of ´ev´enementialit´e raises, as in ‘A la nue accablante tu’ or Ill Seen Ill Said. Beckett and Mallarm´e concentrate on the event of the event. Their work stands in a ⁴¹ See Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999), 152.

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peculiarly close relation to the site of the event and its paradoxical structure. Both repeatedly explore precisely the relationship between the event and the conditions which more or less determine, adulterate, or inhibit it, or block the possibility of the ‘commencement radical’.⁴² By the same token, both are concerned with the fitfulness of truth, its halting character, the fact that, as Badiou says of love, it proceeds by ‘limping along’.⁴³ The difference between Mallarm´e and Beckett, again, is that, whilst Mallarm´e’s poetics is a mode of fidelity to a prior event (the Commune), Beckett is not the subject of an event, but rather works towards what is at best a limited conviction of the possibility of subjectification. This work is inseparable from the vigilance of the ‘guetteur’. Earlier, I argued that both Badiou and Beckett think the event and the remainder; but that, whilst Badiou largely banishes the remainder to the margins of philosophy, as unworthy of thought, Beckett locates his work squarely within it, as the stuff of art. I hinged this argument on Badiou’s 1985 essay ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’. There, he writes of ‘[an] infinite patience before the inert’ as an attribute of truth-procedures. This ‘supple endurance of the infinity of the negative’ is not a theme that will subsequently appear much in his work.⁴⁴ But, as we have seen, it is very much a feature of his accounts of certain writers. Certainly, Badiou’s Beckett is endowed precisely with a watchful ‘patience before the inert’. Badiou’s narrative of Beckett’s trajectory inverts his narrative of the progress of a truth. Almost in spite of himself, perhaps, he cannot avoid the Beckettian irony of that inversion. If the relationship between event and remainder in Beckett’s work is very different from the one that is dominant in Badiou’s, Beckett’s version none the less affects Badiou’s account of him. At one moment in his early account of Beckett, Badiou actually admits the point that I have been insisting on: the relationship between philosophy and Beckett’s art often turns out to be close but ironical.⁴⁵ This acknowledgement seldom if ever feeds through into Badiou’s engagements with the detailed texture of Beckett’s works (which might have further ‘de-sutured’ them). Yet, perhaps in spite of himself, there is a sense in which, in his larger narrative of Beckett’s intellectual biography, the philosopher is finally contaminated by Beckettian ⁴² In this respect, Beckett and Mallarm´e are great antidotes to ‘le gauchisme sp´eculatif ’. ´ ⁴³ See ‘La Sc`ene du deux’, in De l’amour, sous la direction de l’Ecole de la Cause Freudienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 177–90, p. 187. ⁴⁴ ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’, Ornicar? Revue du camp freudien, 32 (Jan.–Mar. 1985), 39–67, and 33 (Apr.–June 1985), 120–49; ii. 121. ⁴⁵ SB, 4: ‘an ironical analogy . . . characterizes [Beckett’s] relation to philosophy.’

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irony. It is an irony which banishes all guarantees. Badiou has an astonishing reading of Beckett’s preoccupation with age: for Beckett, old age is a figure for subjectivity itself. No subject is really young, since he or she is only a subject in having been aged by at least one truth.⁴⁶ This seems to me to be a gripping idea, particularly with a single addition: if subjectivity is ‘ageing’, it is not only insofar as truths leave marks, but because their ironies do, too. ⁴⁶ See ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, Les Temps modernes, 531–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1990), 1: 14–22, 18.

4 The Break with Doxa: Murphy, Watt MURPHY AND THE BIG WORLD Badiou has recently called for an end to talk of the ‘end of representation’ (CR, 85) and shown interest in novelists whose work is comparatively representational (Melville, Conrad, Faulkner).¹ His aesthetic position has none the less always been closely linked to radical abstraction in art. Not surprisingly, then, he has nothing to say about Murphy or Beckett’s early realism, or Beckett’s turn away from realism after Murphy. This is one of the more striking lacunae in his narrative of Beckett’s career. There are very good reasons, however, for not neglecting Murphy here. First, the change in Beckett’s orientation that takes place between Murphy and Watt seems almost as decisive as the change that happens after Texts for Nothing, of which Badiou makes so much. Surely the logic that requires an emphasis on the second break also requires at least some attention to the first? Secondly, as we’ve seen, for Badiou, Beckett’s initial commitment is to a labour of subtraction. But Murphy is the Beckett text perhaps most explicitly concerned with this labour. Indeed, at the very centre of the novel is an image of radical subtraction, Murphy tied to his rocking chair, withdrawn from ‘the breakers of the world’ (MU, 66). At the same time, however, subtraction in Murphy is not merely a thought and a practice. It is also a theme for thought. This in itself is an indication of how far the novel complicates Badiou’s thesis. Here, at its very inception, his narrative of Beckett needs to be revised and its coherence cast into doubt. For Badiou, Beckett is neither the subject of an event, nor concerned with the emergence of a subject or subjects as the consequence of an event. He rather shares the classic modernist concern with getting beyond the existing encyclopedia and the veridicity of established knowledge. Yet there is no truth without an event. There is only veridicity. This leaves the early Beckett with ¹ See OB, 36; CR, 44.

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alarmingly little room for manoeuvre: hence the importance of the image of constraint, which will thereafter keep on recurring in his work. Murphy addresses a difficulty which hangs over much if not all of Beckett, but which Badiou never quite sees. A break with doxa that is not authorized by an event has no guarantee of its value. It is therefore at once problematic, if not comically absurd. Murphy commits himself to an extreme version of apagogic reason whose ironical futility is clear from the start: that is, he conducts himself ‘as though he were free’ in a world to which he ‘fondly hope[s]’ he does not belong (MU, 5–6). To commit oneself to the unauthorized or unfounded break in this manner is thus immediately to risk an Erasmian double-bind: the thought of truth may not be distinguishable from folly. This ironical account of the break with doxa is at the heart of early Beckett. There must always be an ironic dimension to subtraction, since, however intently it is pursued, without the authorization of an event, it has no means of decisive rupture with the situation at hand. The ambivalence of subtraction separated from the event is crucial to Murphy. I shall briefly trace its logic as it develops through the novel. Exceptionally in this context, I shall also historicize it, since the realism of Murphy allows us to do that, as other Beckett texts do not. Murphy begins with a gesture that founds Beckett’s trajectory and also recurs within it. The novel is concerned with subtraction, but also expresses hesitation or misgiving about a commitment to subtraction. This reservation is the more remarkable in that Beckett subsequently makes that very commitment. Beckett’s uniqueness consists partly in his inability either to give up on subtraction or to affirm it without irony. Critics have made much of Murphy’s repudiation of the ‘big world’ (MU, 103).² But their accounts of this world have sometimes seemed needlessly rarefied and abstruse. In one sense, Acheson is obviously right to claim that Murphy is not a 1930s novel with a political theme.³ None the less, the ‘big world’ is not a philosophical but a historico-political and, above all, an economic concept. Beckett states this quite directly: in Murphy, any ‘metaphysical considerations’ come second to the ‘question of economy’ (MU, 16). The ‘big world’ is primarily the thriving life of the market-place. Its principal feature is the blatancy of ‘Quid pro quo’ being ‘cried as wares’ (MU, 8). In this respect, Murphy hears the voice of the ‘big world’ from the very first page.⁴ ² See for instance C. J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 7/1–2 (Autumn 1997–Spring 1998), passim. ³ James Acheson, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1997), 41. ⁴ ‘Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo!’ (MU, 5).

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Lois Gordon has emphasized the importance of the effects of the Depression on the Britain that Beckett encountered when he arrived, in 1933, the year of the Jarrow March.⁵ Yet Murphy is clearly not a novel of the Depression as is, say, Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (which none the less provides an interesting point of comparison).⁶ The economic backdrop to the story is not a climate of slump. It is rather the cut and thrust of what Murphy calls the ‘mercantile gehenna’ (MU, 26). Murphy hears the voice of economic ideology in the era of ‘the post-war recovery’ (MU, 50). The phrase is less startling than it sounds. For Murphy corresponds quite exactly to what revisionist economists have long been saying about 1930s Britain: the nadir of Depression in 1932 was ‘followed by a revival, which lasted until 1937’.⁷ H. W. Richardson asserts that ‘there can be little doubt about the strength and vigour of Britain’s recovery after the depression of the early 1930s’.⁸ We might feel a little sceptical about this, and the effects of the recovery were certainly little felt in Jarrow. But Murphy is not set in Jarrow, but (mainly) in west London and the Home Counties, where the traces of the Depression had always been less visible.⁹ In one or two ways, Beckett’s novel is actually quite precisely focused on the recovery. This was chiefly ‘based on the growth of new consumer goods’, and Beckett’s novel is scattered with ironic references to them, like the ‘Valor Perfection oil-stove’ (MU, 94).¹⁰ But what is most significant is that Beckett’s use of the word ‘recovery’ is exact: the term becomes important in the economic discourses of the period from 1933 onwards. This was partly because 1933 saw the emergence of the rhetoric of Roosevelt’s New Deal.¹¹ The shift enabled Neville Chamberlain to make a budget speech, in 1934, that claimed that Britain ‘had gone from Bleak House to Great Expectations’.¹² ⁵ See Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett 1906–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 97–9. ⁶ Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole: A Tale of Two Cities (London: Cape, 1933). ⁷ B. W. E. Alford, Depression and Recovery: British Economic Growth 1918–39 (London: Macmillan, 1972), 15. ⁸ H. W. Richardson, Economic Recovery in Britain, 1932–9 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 21. ⁹ See for instance J. B. Priestley’s account of different Englands in the 1930s in English Journey (London: Gollancz, 1934). ¹⁰ Alford, Depression and Recovery, 15. ¹¹ See for instance Bertram Stevens, Great Britain: Economic Policy and Recovery 1931–1936 (Sydney: New South Wales Parliamentary Papers, 1937); J. D. Magee, Collapse and Recovery (London: Harper and Bros., 1934); Frederick Mills, Prices in Recession and Recovery: A Survey of Recent Changes (New York: Publications of the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1936); and T. P. Moon, Economic Recovery and Monetary Stabilization (New York: Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 1936). ¹² Quoted in Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, 95.

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‘I had to eliminate all the poisons’, Beckett said to Charles Juliet.¹³ The first half of Murphy is constructed around Murphy’s struggle to outwit a set of contemporary economic doctrines and their implication in sexual, affective, and domestic life. These doctrines are emphatically put forward as opinion. They are doxa that Murphy ‘hears’, as in the case of ‘the sense of time as money . . . highly prized in business circles’ (MU, 43). Beckett does not always present the struggle very seriously, as is clear from his comparison of ‘the belligerents’ in chapter 5: ‘On the one hand, a colossal league of plutomanic caterers, highly endowed with the ruthless cunning of the sane . . . on the other, a seedy solipsist and fourpence’ (MU, 50). The exquisite precision of the phrasing in the first half of the sentence shows the significance of what is at stake. Murphy emphatically endorses the hero’s disaffection. It does so in a number of different ways. It provides a satirical commentary on calculation or what Badiou calls ‘the reign of number’ (NN, 263), as in the case of Murphy’s ‘perfectly balanced meal’ (MU, 49) or the ‘permutability’ of the biscuits (MU, 57). It ostentatiously constructs Murphy himself as a ‘surd’, in pointed opposition to the calculating mindset or ‘chandler mentality’ (MU, 47). It is genially indulgent towards Murphy’s scams (cooking accounts to cheat Mr Quigley, MU, 15; defrauding ‘a vested interest’, MU, 47–8, 51). It responds to the doctrine of means and ends with aloof hauteur: ‘The end degrades the way into a means, a sceneless tedium’ (MU, 106). The narrator roughly shares Murphy’s point of view. His extradiegetic observations repeatedly make this clear, as when he gratuitously compares the ‘manic’ in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat with ‘all the self-made plutolaters who ever triumphed over empty pockets and clean hands’ (MU, 102). Murphy’s indifference to the economic claim—the aesthetic conviction of its baseness—was Beckett’s, too. According to Knowlson, he lent money to Tom MacGreevy, in 1933, with the words: ‘Let there never be any talk of debts and loans and all the other lousinesses of give and take entre ennemis between us’ (DF, 169). Knowlson’s biography provides conclusive evidence that this was repeatedly Beckett’s attitude to the economic imperative throughout his life. Leslie Hill rightly detects in Beckett an attitude of ‘indifference‘ that is also an ‘abdication from the world’s commercial round’ (BF, 9). Murphy everywhere embodies this attitude. This is the real point to Beckett’s famous quotation from Geulincx—‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ (‘Where you are worth ¹³ Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, tr. Janey Tucker (Leiden: Academic Press Leiden, 1995), 140.

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nothing, want nothing’, MU, 101)—which is about value and the limits to a sphere of value. In fact, Murphy is a late expression of the classic modernist hostility to the economic doctrines of the market-place. As such, it resembles Badiou’s Le Nombre et les nombres. Like much of Beckett’s work, it fiercely resists what Badiou calls ‘the fallacious idea of a link between number and value, or truth’, as evident above all in our current economic obsession and the arithmetical paraphernalia that goes with it (polls, surveys, statistical enquiries, etc., NN, 263). Like Badiou, Murphy insists that ‘the abundance of capital has as its reverse the rarity of truth’ (NN, 264). The crucial difference is that, in Murphy, this emerges as a sombre insistence on closure. For Badiou, subjectification involves breaking with the world of ‘business as usual’.¹⁴ Murphy cannot adjust to that world. His mind is not ‘on the correct cash-register lines, an indefatigable apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts’. It rather functions ‘not as an instrument, but as a place, from whose unique delights precisely those current facts withheld him’ (MU, 101). What follows from this, however, is neither a break with the situation at hand nor a process of subjectification. Murphy’s efforts meet with defeat and disaster. To understand exactly why, however, we must take a different direction, stepping away from Badiou as we do. ‘Nothing written for pay is worth printing’, raged Ezra Pound, in 1933, ‘ what has been written  the market.’¹⁵ If Murphy can partly be read as a piece of modernist anti-economism, there are obvious problems with doing so too straightforwardly. Certainly, the Olympian irony in Beckett’s novel is modernist, and may easily be found in Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and so on. But it also cuts another way. In theory, Murphy’s mind is a world of ‘unique delights’ (MU, 101). But the fake grandiosity of the phrasing hardly suggests that the world in question is much of an alternative to the world of the cash register. The irony in much of Murphy is ambivalent in precisely this way. It is an uneasy irony, because the novel is patently unconvinced that any plausible alternative to the logic of the market-place exists. This irony should be linked to a biographical one: as Knowlson again makes clear, the Beckett who was so magnanimous to MacGreevy was also living off the allowance from his father’s will. Still more importantly, he was financially dependent on the very mother he found so difficult to pay for the psychotherapy he was then undergoing. ¹⁴ Quoted in Daniel Bensa¨ıd, ‘Alain Badiou et le miracle de l’´ev´enement’, in R´esistances: Essai de taupologie g´en´erale (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 163. ¹⁵ Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 236.

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Paul Delany has brilliantly located modernist anti-economism in its own economic context.¹⁶ The economics of Victorian fiction was always a question of market forces. By contrast, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rentier culture made a different economics possible. The profits and savings of the accumulated wealth of two or three generations could now fund the novelist, as in the case of James or Forster. He or she could therefore afford to be indifferent to the market-place and resist commodification. The major modernists, like Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, aspire to the condition of the novelist of rentier culture. But they have no immediate access to its social and economic privileges. Since they set their face against the market as stoutly as did the rentier novelist, however, modernism becomes dependent on a patronage culture. Furthermore, the most important modernist patrons tended to be women: Lady Gregory (Yeats), Harriet Shaw Weaver (Joyce), Ottoline Morrell (Lawrence), Margaret Cravens, and Dorothy Shakespear (Pound). To some extent, these patronesses were supporting art that was an expression of ressentiment directed at the very culture that sustained it, and the patroness herself in particular. The modernists bit the hands that fed them, as in the case of Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ or Pound’s ‘Portrait d’une femme’, or Joyce’s treatment of Sylvia Beach. At the same time, however, Delany argues that a characteristic modernist response to the economics of female patronage was the separation of sexual from economic life. Thus Yeats maintains relations with Olivia Shakespear and Lady Gregory, Joyce with Nora and Harriet Weaver, Lawrence with Frieda and Lady Ottoline, and Pound with Olga Rudge and Dorothy Shakespear and Margaret Cravens. The irony in Murphy no doubt partly stems from the fact that, by 1933, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, the economic conditions in which patronage culture had thrived were ‘in ruins’.¹⁷ All the same, at the time he was writing the novel, Beckett was living out his own particular version of the relationship between the modernist and a relatively powerful, moneyed woman. The separation of the sexual and the economic spheres, the woman who is both a source of economic support and suspected insofar as she traffics or trades with the world or is ‘prostituted’: all these are central themes in Murphy. Initially, at least, Murphy’s situation is underwritten by two women who are themselves socially reduced, even parodic versions of the modern patroness: his landlady, ¹⁶ Paul Delany, ‘Who Paid for Modernism?’, in Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, The New Economic Criticism (London: Routledge, 1999), 335–51. ¹⁷ Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (1968; London: Penguin, 1999), 185.

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with whom he has an ‘understanding’ which guarantees his ‘honourable independence’, and Celia the prostitute, the chief source of the ‘small charitable sums’ on which Murphy otherwise depends (MU, 14–15). What then happens is that the woman asks the modernist intellectual to descend into the ‘mercantile gehenna’; to accept the existence of the economic sphere; in other words, to get a job. Murphy in his turn can only do this by separating the economic and sexual life, foregoing ‘serenade, nocturne and albada’ (MU, 46) for the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. In fact, he is caught in what Delany identifies as the structure of modernist valuation: either work and the economic world or authenticity (art, eros), but not the two together. Yet it is Celia who insists that Murphy enter the ‘mercantile gehenna’. Murphy places woman as the principal means by which doxa stakes its claims. This might seem unsettling. In fact, it doesn’t, because, if the novel can’t exactly convince readers that Celia is right, it certainly doesn’t persuade them that she is wrong, either. There is no event in Murphy, and therefore no axiomatic declaration that decrees that the ‘big world’ be repudiated. Or, to put the point differently, Celia has sense on her side and, in the absence of truth, sense prevails. For Murphy is not to be identified with the progress of a truth. Here, again, Badiou’s terms are appropriate, but at an angle that is oddly skewed. Murphy engages in a ‘restricted action’. It has two related stages. In the first, Murphy seeks release from the circumstances which have ‘detained him in the world’ (MU, 6). He does this to ‘appease’ his body in order that he may be ‘set free’ or ‘come alive’ in his mind (ibid.). The freedom and life in question, however, are inseparable from a ‘system’ (MU, 17), a presentation of presentation, of the actual infinity of Being itself. Beckett evokes this actual infinity, in terms that echo William James, as a ‘big blooming buzzing confusion’ (MU, 6). Reading the exact phrase in its context in James’s The Principles of Pyschology confirms the impression that Beckett intends an empirical approximation of actual infinity of the kind that I discussed in my introduction.¹⁸ The ‘system’ in question is that of Murphy’s mind, as conspicuously evoked in chapter 6: ‘a closed system, subject to no principle of its own, self-sufficient and impermeable to the vicissitudes of the body’ (MU, 64). ¹⁸ See William James, The Principles of Psychology, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, with a foreword by Frederick H. Burkhardt and introd. by Gerald E. Myers and Rand B. Evans, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), i. 462: ‘The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion’, before he or she is capable of the processes of discrimination and comparison.

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That Murphy’s mind is described as a system is important. We may recall that a ‘restricted action’ works coherently. So, too, here, as with any product of ‘restricted action’, the account of Murphy’s mind has structure and definition. It involves the kind of formalization that Badiou associates with a ‘restricted action’: that is, it distinguishes the criteria which separate a truth from the prevailing conditions of ordinary life. Chapter 6 in particular describes a ‘restricted action’ as a process of ‘discernment’ (as when Beckett brusquely rescues Murphy from ‘the idealist tar’, MU, 63). This process consists of a series of ‘investigations’ which encounter some problems that are ‘of little interest’, and others of ‘infinitely more’ (MU, 64). The investigations take place on the basis of a subtraction from knowledge—nothing preceding Murphy’s mind will explain it; it is evoked as sheer singularity—but also ensure that what the ‘restricted action’ produces ‘resembles a knowledge’ (EE, 365). The starting point of the process, of course, is a decisive reduction of the world in line with Murphy’s and the younger Beckett’s Cartesianism. Murphy’s mind presents itself to itself in terms of a founding subtraction. However, insofar as it is ‘hermetically closed to the universe without’, it also presents itself to itself in geometrical form, ‘as a large hollow sphere’ (MU, 63). This evokes the ‘closed systems’ of Beckett’s later work, particularly the ‘cylinder pieces’. Much of the difference between Murphy and those works lies in the fact that, in Murphy, it is only the character who assumes authority for the processes of subtraction and restricted action. Both subtraction and restricted action seem curiously otiose. They are pleasant, ‘so pleasant that pleasant was not the word’ (MU, 66). But they lead nowhere; their point is partly a kind of perverse hedonism not categorically distinct from the forces that drive the ‘big world’, which adds an extra dimension to an already plentiful irony. The pleasure in question is that of withdrawal, self-distancing. Subtraction is nothing more than loss of world. Here, again, Beckett’s Cartesianism is important: at this stage of his career, and, indeed as late as Texts for Nothing, subtraction remains inseparable from the diagnostic or analytic attitude. Badiou very clearly understands both the intensity of Beckett’s initial commitment to that attitude and his growing sense of the necessity of breaking with it. Beckett must eventually recognize that it is not what is ‘already there’ that matters most crucially. What matters for thought is what adds itself to what is ‘already there’. The young Beckett, however, remains in thrall to ‘Cartesian terrorism’ (BK, 38). He thinks that the subject is ‘already there’, to be uncovered or broken down

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into its constituent parts. Murphy can still speak of pleasure. But he is only a short step away from the futile ‘torture of identification’ (BK, 37) that will subsequently plague Beckett’s protagonists as far as Texts for Nothing. In Murphy, however, via Celia, the world continues to exert its claim on Murphy. Hence we get a second stage of ‘restricted action’, Murphy’s work at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat and, in particular, his involvement with Mr Endon. The choice of the MMM means another subtraction; a subtraction from eros pointedly underlined when Murphy returns to the room he has shared with Celia, but only to extricate ‘his bag and the chair’ (MU, 89). If Murphy has now found a job, this particular job still keeps him ‘hors du monde’, in the words of the epigraph to chapter 9 (from Malraux). Murphy formulates the issue as a question that is not only rhetorical but, in Badiou’s terms, suitably Platonic: ‘How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave?’ (MU, 101).¹⁹ This Platonism is reinforced by Murphy’s rejection of ‘the complacent scientific conceptualism that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being’ (ibid.). Working at the MMM means a ‘diligent labour’ (MU, 102) precisely akin to that involved in a truth-procedure: Murphy must ‘substantiate’ his ‘first impressions’ (of being among his intellectual ‘kindred’) through ‘strenuous work’ (MU, 100). Indeed, in elaborating seemingly frail conjectures (‘constructions’ that have no weight) in the teeth of official ‘pressure’, Murphy engages in a kind of forcing (MU, 102). Mr Endon is the paradigm of ‘that self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world’ common amongst the inmates of the MMM. As such, he is also an image of the attitude that Murphy has ‘chosen for himself’ (MU, 96). Murphy’s system progressively ‘close[s] round him’ (MU, 104). As it does so, he finds, in Mr Endon, the figure of his end. Hence the ‘restricted action’ of their uniquely peaceful and uncompetitive form of chess game. There can only be the most minimal relation between two closed systems, one which does not go as far as combat. The new rules of a ‘restricted action’—or, more precisely in this instance, its ‘Fabian methods’ (MU, 106)—have therefore to be invented. The form of this anti-game is purposeless and can thus be savoured as a means without an end. As such, ¹⁹ Murphy’s Platonism has not gone unremarked by critics. See for instance Sylvie Debevec Henning, Beckett’s Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation and Tradition (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 80.

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however, it is finally idle, a mere pastime. What Murphy finally wants is the ‘numb peace’ of the void, ‘the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite, naught is more real’ (MU, 138). He learns in his last encounter with Endon that the price he would have to pay would be absolute self-enclosure, ‘immunity from seeing anything but himself’ (MU, 140). Hence his final decision—too late—to go ‘back to Brewery Road, to Celia’ (MU, 141). There is of course a utopian dimension to Murphy and Mr Endon’s chess game. But Beckett locates it firmly in a lunatic asylum. He is also very clear: the inexorable consequence of Murphy’s choices is his death. In Murphy, subtraction, restricted action, and forcing are laced with a pervasive irony, and finally end in a cul-de-sac. This is exactly appropriate, since they have not proceeded from an event. Indeed, though the point to the first sentence of the novel cannot be summarized in another sentence, and I shall have more to say about it later, on one level, it clearly functions as an axiomatic proscription of the possibility of the event: ‘the sun shone, having no alternative, upon the nothing new’ (MU, 5). Badiou sees the early Beckett as perhaps supremely committed to this axiom: hence the fact that we are not really asked to identify with Murphy’s cause as opposed to Celia’s. If anything, the reverse: Beckett cannot and does not want to convince us that Murphy is right to sacrifice his ‘music’ with Celia for Mr Endon. Indeed, critics have tended to see Celia as the most sympathetically presented character in the novel.²⁰ It is certainly for Celia and not Murphy that the novel reserves any moments of poignancy. This is the case, above all, in its evocation of her feelings at being abandoned by him: When it was quite clear that this was the whole extent of the message Celia went on slowly up the stairs. Miss Carridge stood with a finger on the switch, waiting. The turn of the stair took the body out of sight, but Miss Carridge could still see the hand on the banister, gripping, then sliding a little, gripping again, then sliding a little more. When the hand also disappeared Miss Carridge switched off the light and stood in the dark that was so much less extravagant, not to mention richer in acoustic properties, listening. (MU, 89)

The Tolstoyan or Jamesian obliqueness may be a casual, offhand demonstration of versatility, like the adolescent Picasso doing Velazquez. This is none the less the moment at which Beckett most clearly and decisively tips the balance against Murphy’s choices. ²⁰ See for instance Acheson, Artistic Theory, 55; Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brusnwick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 48; and Mary Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (London: Macmillan, 1993), 30, 36.

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He can tip it like this because of the doubleness to the novel’s irony. Murphy has a methodical mind. Beckett equips him with the kind of commitment to strenuous and disciplined intellectual endeavour that Badiou associates with subjectification. Murphy is engaged in a process that is both an assured experiment in order and ‘an adventurous pilgrimage in disorder’. But his course of action is hardly ‘prudent’ (EE, 279). Indeed, like Watt’s, it differs from the process of subjectification in being essentially perverse. For it neither issues from nor corresponds to a founding event. Beckett is concerned with the scission which separates the subject from the world of ‘business as usual’. But Murphy experiences scission merely as conflict: mind versus body, the closed system versus Celia, the little versus the big world, the ‘unredeemed split self’ (MU, 106). Acheson thinks Beckett is ‘satirical’ at Murphy’s expense, thus confusing an elegant if world-weary philosophical irony with old-fashioned critical moralism. But the critic is none the less partly right: Murphy definitively fails to bear out Murphy’s part-Geulincxian and part-Schopenhauerian faith ‘in the rewards of self-transcendence’ via meditation and introspection.²¹ Nothing underwrites Murphy’s refusal of Spinoza’s conatus essendi, the life lived as a pursuit of interest. Thus the novel proposes a kind of hollow equivalent of subjectification, subjectivity as an irrationality or surd, a perverse commitment. This form of subjectivity, however, seems insubstantial. It is far too frail for Murphy’s last decision to go back to ‘serenade, nocturne, albada’ (MU, 141) not to seem the right one, if made too late. However reluctantly, Murphy recognizes that, faute de mieux, there is nothing for it but to return to the world. This choice is ironically reflected in the very stuff of the novel itself, with its archly presented welter of ‘demented particulars’ (MU, 12) and the amusing but often flagrantly redundant clutter of its sub-plot. The corollary of Murphy’s hollow subjectivity is his and the novel’s failure to escape ‘the gloomy panoply of melancholia’ that shrouds the inhabitants of ‘Mayfair and Clapham’ (MU, 102). ‘Panoply’ is an arresting word: it externalizes melancholy, setting it in a hinterland between subjective and objective worlds. Melancholy adheres to places, scenes. This should call the Anatomy of Melancholy to mind. According to Ackerley, Murphy alludes to the Anatomy of Melancholy as often as it does to Descartes.²² In Melancholy and Society, Wolf Lepenies sees the Anatomy of Melancholy as the origin of a specific tradition which treats melancholy as a condition of the State.²³ He argues that this ²¹ Acheson, Artistic Theory, 51. ²² Ackerley, Demented Particulars, 237, 239 and passim. ²³ Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, tr. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 10–22, especially at p. 13.

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melancholy is bound up with an observable political as it is with observable geographical landscapes:²⁴ But whereas you shall see so many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty, barbarisme, beggery, plagues, warres, rebellions, seditions, mutinies, contentions, idlenesse, riot, Epicurisme, the land lye untilled, waste, full of bogges, Fennes, Desarts &c., Cities decayed, base and poore towns, villages depopulated, the people squalid, ugly, uncivill; that Kingdome, that Country, must needs be discontent, melancholy . . . ²⁵

This melancholy of the State is never far removed from a countervailing strand of utopianism; indeed, Lepenies suggests that the first hundred pages of the Anatomy of Melancholy constitute what is actually the first utopia written in the English language. Certainly, in ‘Democritus to the Reader’, Burton is wholly explicit: Kingdoms and Provinces are melancholy ‘as well as private men’.²⁶ His own melancholy is not distinguishable from a melancholy sickness in the body politic. But a diagnosis of that sickness is possible only on the basis of an initial separation from the social scene and, perhaps above all, State time. If there is ‘no better cure than businesse’ for melancholy,²⁷ melancholy itself derives from the repudiation of ‘businesse’. The melancholic turns aside from the hurrying imperatives of a ‘headlong’ or ‘praecipitate’ age. He recoils from the ‘rush’ of the mundus furiosus and particularly from the ‘market’, where ‘our summum bonum is commodity’ and all is thus ‘a confusion of manners . . . a turbulent troope full of impurities’.²⁸ Beckett was certainly aware of the politics of melancholy in the Anatomy. Like ‘Democritus to his Reader’, Murphy owes its melancholy partly to the looming prospect of a European conflagration.²⁹ The grandeur of Burton’s melancholy is occasionally faintly audible in Murphy. It echoes, for example, in the irony at the expense of the hypocrite lecteur, the ‘monster of humanity and enlightenment’ discreetly washing his hands of a world of knaves and fools, a ‘mankind sterile with self-complicity’ (MU, 97). This irony, of course, is eminently well suited to a time when, in Gordon’s phrase, so many were showing a ‘remarkable indifference’ to or a will to rationalize the rise of ²⁴ The 1930s in particular provide some excellent examples of this correspondence, as in Auden’s poetry of the period. ²⁵ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. i, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhona L. Blair, introd. J. B. Bamborough (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 67. ²⁶ Ibid. i. 60. ²⁷ Ibid. i. 6. ²⁸ Ibid. i. 9, 35, 50–1. ²⁹ ‘Democritus to his Reader’ was written in 1620. In 1618, Frederick I had started what was to be the Thirty Years’ War. James I was coming under severe pressure to intervene on behalf of the Protestant cause. Europe was about to be plunged once again into savage turmoil.

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fascism.³⁰ Calling the Anatomy to mind can even modify our understanding of the first line in Beckett’s novel. For, in ‘Democritus to his Reader’, ‘the new’ is not change, but the news. Burton counterposes the world of the melancholic, in which there is ‘no newes’, to the world in which there is ‘new newes every day’.³¹ But it is the melancholy repudiation of the mundus furiosus of ‘businesse’ that is most precisely Murphy’s and that of Beckett’s novel. If the ‘post-war recovery’ is promising to replace Bleak House with Great Expectations, Murphy pointedly reverses the vector of that process. Yet, as we have seen, Beckett cannot set any values convincingly against the economic world. He thus casts Murphy’s rejection of the market-place in parodic form and puts it through a series of ironic tests and reversals. This double gesture—a repudiation of doxa, accompanied by a grasp of its implications as not only melancholic but comic and aporetic—is typical of much of Beckett’s work. INCIDENTS OF NOT E Some of Badiou’s key concepts, then—subtraction, restricted action, apagogic reason, actual infinity, investigations, subjectification, forcing—are appropriate to a reading of Murphy. But they should be placed in different relations from those they assume, not only in Badiou’s larger philosophy, but in his account of Beckett. Furthermore, the logic of their arrangement is melancholic. The same basic case holds good for Watt, though the relevant concepts and their relations are different. The world of Watt is that of Badiou’s Being. It is an actual infinity or pure multiplicity. Critics have more or less noticed this, though not formulated the point in quite that way. Cl´ement suggests, for example, that a specific form of language in Watt also implies a corresponding infinity of linguistic possibilities. If the material in the novel is often ‘derisory’ in character, that is because it is shadowed by ulterior versions of itself.³² Similarly, Rabinovitz sees Watt as concerned with a Cartesian rationalism which is not endstopped by the existence of God, like Descartes’s, and so skitters off into ‘an incomprehensible infinity’. This is evident for example in the novel’s ‘mysterious numbers’.³³ Rabinovitz also usefully notes that Russell equated Zeno’s paradox of the racecourse referred to in Watt with ³⁰ Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett 1906–1946, 103. ³¹ Burton, Anatomy, i. 8. ³² Bruno Cl´ement, L’Œuvre sans qualit´es: Rh´etorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 159. ³³ Rubin Rabinovitz, The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 125, 127.

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Cantor’s infinity.³⁴ We might add that Beckett’s laughter is precisely akin to the boldness of Russell’s step. Both effectively undo the purpose of Zeno’s paradoxes, which was to show that all efforts to counter Parmenidean monism end in absurdity. Beckett’s and Russell’s are anti-theological moves. Badiou would thoroughly approve. In my introduction, I argued that Watt does not poke humanist fun at mathematics.³⁵ Almost the opposite: whilst not exactly a ‘mathematical novel’, it aspires to the condition of mathematics, if rather whimsically. Suppose the pure multiplicity of Being ‘in the style of the atomism of the ancients’: it is a ‘flat surface of random multiplicities’ (‘multiplicit´es quelconques’).³⁶ Since the Greeks, the thought of this ‘flat surface’ has been called mathematics. The ‘flat surface’, I’d suggest, is what predominates in Watt, though it is also punctuated by the irregular, sporadic, monstrous, and illogical features which make up the strange richness of actual infinity. At the same time, ‘what mathematics shows us at every instant’ is that ‘things can be without existing’.³⁷ Mathematical objects or ‘things’ are always products of abstraction: Aristotle said as much of the mathematika. Mathematics always ‘denatures’ the concrete particularity of the world.³⁸ But, beyond that, modern mathematics tells us that mathematical ‘things’ need bear no relation at all even to numerables. Mathematics itself becomes the vehicle for acquaintance with its own objects. Infinitesimals do not exist. Nor do irrational numbers. They none the less have being, for ‘they are coextensive with thought’.³⁹ Watt is full of literary versions of such ‘things’. Knott himself is one. The figure whose ‘arms did not end at the hands, but continued, in a manner that Watt could not determine, to near the ground’ is another (WA, 225). As Jambet says, ‘intuitive translations’ of mathematical formulations are possible, if inexact.⁴⁰ Watt does not exactly provide such translations. But it might plausibly be described as a literary version of certain features of certain kinds of mathematical world. ³⁴ See Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 828–30. ³⁵ See p. 33. ³⁶ ‘L’Existence et la mort’, in Christian Delacampagne and Robert Maggiori, Philosopher: Les Interrogations contemporaines: Mat´eriaux pour un enseignement, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2000), ii. 293–302, 296. ³⁷ Ibid. 297. ³⁸ Aristotle, Metaphysics 1061a. ³⁹ Ibid. ˆ et l’´ev´enement’, Annuaire philosophique 1987–88 ⁴⁰ Christian Jambet, ‘Alain Badiou: L’Etre (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 141–83, p. 166.

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Watt seeks to evoke an actually infinite world in two ways, the lyrical and the logical. Lyrical efforts include the account of Watt’s ignorance of ‘the comings, and the stayings, and the goings’ in Knott’s house (WA, 36–7) and Arsene’s extraordinary vision of the ‘alp of sand’ (WA, 41). But the great evocation of actual infinity in Watt is the loopily methodical account of Knott’s ‘physical appearance’ (WA, 209–11). This is the final, extravagant cadenza of permutation in the novel—there are only a few isolated little occurrences after it—and it makes explicit the logic to the practice of permutation. Permutation makes it possible to suggest infinite possibilities within finite forms. Any given series in Watt develops in the recognition of the infinite repeatability of the serial principle itself. This is most strikingly the case with the series of series (‘the series of dogs, the series of men, the series of pictures, to mention only these series’, WA, 135). However, though the principle according to which they are produced is infinite, most of the series in Watt are finite sets; that is, they permute a finite number of elements. But in the case of Knott’s appearance, the principle of infinite repeatability is included within the series itself, most notably at the end of the passage: For daily changed, as well as [the figure, stature, skin, and hair], in carriage, expression, shape and size, the feet, the legs, the hands, the arms, the mouth, the nose, the eyes, the ears, to mention only the feet, the legs, the hands, the arms, the mouth, the nose, the eyes, the ears, and their carriage, expression, shape and size. For the port, the voice, the smell, the hairdress, were seldom the same, from one day to the next, to mention only the port, the voice, the smell, the hairdress. For the way of hawking, the way of spitting, were subject to daily fluctuation, to consider only the way of hawking, and of spitting. For the belch was never the same, two days running, to go no further than the belch. (WA, 211)

The series of series asserts a limit (‘to mention only these . . . ’). But the later passage applies such limits, not only to the series (‘to mention only . . . ’), but to the units within the series (‘for daily changed’). In doing so, it evokes an actual infinity as pure multiplicity. There are only multiples, and every multiple is itself ‘a multiple of multiples’ (EE, 37). It is at this point in Watt that Parmenidean monism and its theological legacy finally and definitively collapse. This is not Badiou’s own reading of Watt, however. He rather argues that the place of Being in Watt is hermetically sealed, thereby validating ‘a strict

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principle of identity’ (BK, 40). He also actually ignores most of the novel. His version of it is based solely on a few passages from the account of Watt’s stay in Knott’s house.⁴¹ But this section should not be taken as representative. Badiou none the less grasps a very important point about the early Beckett: ‘One might suppose that we are in a typically predestined universe. Knowledge lacks any kind of freedom, it consists of questions relative to the laws of place’ (BK, 41, italics mine). In Watt, thought confronts the obscurity of a given situation. It does so, in the end, to no avail. But that is because the thought in question is always retrospective. It is concerned only with the ‘d´ej`a l`a’, what is already there. Even according to Badiou’s rather limited survey of it, however, the world of Watt as a whole is in fact not merely a given and therefore a closed world: What saves [thought] is what functions ‘outside the law’, what adds itself to the situation—declared, all the same, to be closed and incapable of being added to— that Mr Knott’s house symbolizes. Watt calls these paradoxical supplements ‘incidents’. (ibid.)

Events are what liberate thought. They awaken it to something quite other than ‘the futile grasping of its own predestination’ (BK, 41). In principle, at least, the ‘incidents . . . of great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport’ (WA, 71) of which Watt is aware offer him the same possible freedom. The event is crucial to Badiou’s reading of Watt. Watt is unlike Beckett’s other early work in that it is partly concerned with events. Totality and law rule in Knott’s house. This means that ‘no breach [´ebr`echement] of its being’ is apparently thinkable. Yet ‘incidents’ do happen, and they provoke Watt to thought (SB, 18). Watt, however, is not engaged in a truth-procedure. For the ‘incidents’ only encourage him to ponder their possible meaning. He seeks to bring formal clarity to what he takes to be their impenetrable content. As critics have repeatedly underlined, Watt’s interests are hermeneutic; he is ‘an interpreter’ (BK, 42). For Badiou, this means that he misses what the event can offer as a stimulus to or occasion for thought. Instead, Watt turns ineluctably towards origin and repetition. His ‘obstinate will’ to give meaning to things also involves a desire to relate that meaning to a lost but rediscovered, ⁴¹ In fact, Badiou thinks of Knott’s house as a constructible set. Cf. Crossley et al.’s description of such a set: ‘Think of yourself as shut up in a room . . . able to see nothing but its elements. What sets can you talk about?’ J. N. Crossley et al., What is Mathematical Logic? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 71.

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original meaning. The insidious slide towards religion starts with exactly this move, with the assumption that ‘meaning has always been there, but man has lost it’ (BK, 42). The argument dovetails neatly with my own. In Watt himself, Beckett plays off an intellectual disposition that, finally, is fundamentally theological against a modern ontology of the kind made available by modern mathematics, and which cannot be reduced to theology. However, this bald statement reduces the complex logic of the meditation on the ‘incidents of note’ (WA, 69–77). Badiou pays no attention to this logic. In fact, it deserves the kind of strenuous attention that he is prepared to grant to the logical complexity of Cap au pire and Mal vu mal dit (PM, 137–87). Beckett begins the passage by quite clearly stating that Watt’s ‘incidents of note’ all have certain features in common, even as they all differ from each other. Perhaps their most important shared feature is that they do in fact have an initial meaning. This meaning is straightforward: it is the commonsense meaning attributed to the event by the world at large, the event as it is recuperated into doxa, and thereby smothered or ignored. Thus, here, the scene with the Galls is reducible to ‘a piano tuned, an obscure family and professional relation, an exchange of judgments, more or less intelligible, and so on’ (WA, 69). This meaning can be passed over quickly, and Beckett does so. It is unlikely that the event ‘had ever signified such things’ (WA, 70). In any case, this ‘outer meaning’ is characterized by its ‘fragility’. It quickly yields to an awareness of the ‘irrevocable caprice’ of the event and the pure ‘shifting detail’ of its occurrence. The word ‘shifting’ is important: the detail in question is not hard, firm, concrete, exact. It does not specify objects or pin them down. It is precisely not Balzacian detail. It is rather a ‘plastic content’, a mobile play of features—light and shadow, sound and silence, stillness and movement, speed and slowness, proximity and distance—abstracted from the concrete world. The ‘plastic content’ is not an objective content. It unfolds ‘in Watt’s head, from beginning to end, over and over again’ (WA, 69). It is both inseparable from subjectivity and replayable. The passage provides a methodical, considered, phenomenological account of the event that is not unlike the one in Ill Seen Ill Said. Here, however, it is the event that comes first, not ‘proper seeing’. The event does not immediately disturb ‘proper seeing’, either. Initially, at least, ‘proper seeing’ dictates its terms (BK, 44). Nor is Watt’s mind exactly ‘startled awake’. It grasps the event by replaying and meditating on it. Here, subjectification begins as the event is separated

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out from the established knowledge to which Watt was initially disposed to reduce it. In a process of sustained reflection, his ‘meticulous phantoms’ then increasingly take on substance (WA, 74). But this of course is as far as subjectification goes. For Watt does not make the next move specified in Ill Seen Ill Said. He does not renounce the hermeneutic question in favour of the question of naming. In response to the collapse of ‘outer meaning’, he opts for the hermeneutic question. He seeks ‘some [inner] meaning of what had passed, in the image of how it had passed’ (WA, 70). If, for Badiou, the event is an occurrence of the void in a given situation, it is precisely this occurrence of the void within the event that is so problematic for Watt: he ‘could not accept . . . that nothing had happened, with all the clarity and solidity of something’ (WA, 75). Watt cannot resign himself to the terms of the future anterior, according to which the ‘clarity and solidity’ of a truth, however evident it may be, is also as ‘nothing’ until its procedure is finished. We should note, however, that Beckett specifies a ‘second event’ (his phrase). This is the breakdown of the hermeneutic manoeuvre, when it becomes clear that the ‘incidents’ resist ‘all Watt’s efforts to saddle them with meaning’ (WA, 75). There is really no equivalent of this in Badiou’s thought, since the break with hermeneutics takes place at the very start of the process of subjectification. But in Watt’s case, we are really dealing with an aborted version of that process: hence the curious displacements and distortions in the telling of it. In Ill Seen Ill Said, the ‘startling awake’ of the mind is followed by the invention of a name. But Watt has turned to hermeneutics, which involves ‘wrapping [things] up safe’ in ‘the time-honoured names’ (WA, 80–1, italics mine). His discovery that no such ‘wrapping’ is finally possible leads logically to a critique specifically of ‘the old words, the old credentials’ (WA, 81): hence the passage that includes the famous account of the word pot (WA, 77–82). For Badiou as for Plato, mathematics is the very paradigm of the break with doxa. In Watt, too, it is enough of a paradigm for the novel to be much less ostentatiously intent on the break than either Murphy before it or the Trilogy after it. But the point is, of course, that, in its ‘mathematization’ of novelistic discourse, Watt has performed the break more or less from the start. In this respect, Watt’s linguistic crisis is merely a question of his being abandoned ‘by the last rats’ of doxa (WA, 81). The fifth and last stage in the phenomenology of the event in Ill Seen Ill Said is poiesis, the act of creative naming that is a consequence of the turbulent effects of the event on language. From the vantage point of established

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discourse, poiesis is malapropism. ‘Ill saying’ could scarcely be made more prominent, and certainly not more methodically prominent, than it is in Watt, as in the various ‘manners’ of speaking that Watt adopts in successive ‘periods’, beginning with talking ‘back to front’ (WA, 162–7). Yet his measured, formal sequences of gibberish are footling, and meant to seem so. They might be described as counter-arabesques. Here the logic of the event dribbles away into vacuity. But that is because it was skewed from the start. Watt’s ‘ill saying’ functions as a declaration of fundamental absurdity, a marker of a definitive collapse into nonsense from which only a principle of form can be salvaged. This is exactly appropriate: on the one hand, Watt has left the world of doxa behind him. On the other, though he has recognized the force of events, he has not been able to accept the implications that recognition might have for him. He has chosen, instead, to seek the meaning of events, and thereby hold them at a distance. As a result, he cannot be the subject of a truth. ‘Ill saying’ becomes an aimless gyration in the void. Slowly and at length, we end up with the detritus of a project (the Addenda to the novel) and a melancholic return to the world that is ‘already there’, to Case, Nolan, Gorman, Cack-faced Miller, et al. In this sense, like Murphy, Watt is the record of a failure. My reading of it has been one, too. To be precise, it has failed yet again, like other readings, including Badiou’s. For it is definitively inadequate to the tone of Watt. If, in Beckett’s novel, we are indeed confronted with a ruined phenomenology of the event, it is a phenomenology of the event as performed by a lugubrious, mandarin Pierrot. Like Pierrot, Beckett tells us not to take the performance seriously, whilst making the fact that we cannot do so seem properly woeful. Much has been written on the subject of the Beckettian clown, less about Beckett’s discursive clowning. Watt is always clowning, from the opening sequence, where Mr Hackett dispassionately observes the couple on the bench: Mr. Hackett decided, after some moments, that if they were waiting for a tram they had been doing so for some time. For the lady held the gentleman by the ears, and the gentleman’s hand was on the lady’s thigh, and the lady’s tongue was in the gentleman’s mouth. Tired of waiting for the tram, said Mr. Hackett, they strike up an acquaintance. The lady now removing her tongue from the gentleman’s mouth, he put his into hers. Fair do, said Mr. Hackett. (WA, 6)

The hilarity of this shouldn’t distract us (or should it?) from its (remarkably subtle) point. The couple quickly disappear from the novel, never to return. Hackett soon vanishes, too. Watt seems to begin in irrelevance. But if the

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scene is clownishly irrelevant in one respect, it is definitive for the novel in another. For the laughter it provokes depends on a form of modern decathexis that will predominate throughout, and that is irreducibly comic and melancholic together. In this respect, Watt resembles Murphy, though Murphy opens with the protagonist struggling towards an indifference that is taken for granted in Watt. From the very start, Watt declares that it will not be gripped, as the lovers are. It will not be caught up in anything like a truth-procedure. It turns out to be rather concerned with the disconnected and dispersed remains of what might have been one. In that respect, both Watt’s failure and the failure of Watt itself are written into the novel from its first page. THE LOGIC OF MEL ANCHOLY In a very recent essay, ‘Troisi`eme esquisse d’un manifeste de l’affirmationisme’ (2004), Badiou has argued for a purely affirmative conception of modern art.⁴² Modern art registers the possibility of sliding into the pure inconsistent multiplicity of Being, of being engulfed by the inert banality of actual infinity. It resists this slide with the ‘immoral energy’ of affirmation (CR, 86). In this resistance lies the birth of that rare and exquisite thing, modern beauty. Postmodernism subordinates art to particularity or provenance—‘look at me and where I’m coming from’—in concert with a commercial logic. By contrast, modern art is founded on an impersonality which manifests itself in subtraction and the production of consistency. In choosing subtraction and consistency, modern art communicates an idea of a world ‘to be valued’ (‘du monde a` faire valoir’, CR, 90). This idea is destined ‘to everyone’ (CR, 96). In the words of the great theatre director Antoine Vitez, art becomes an ‘ ‘‘Elitism for all’’ ’ (CR, 103). It is ‘an infinite subjective possibility’ that is both powerful and powerless, fragile and peremptory (CR, 97). The modern artist forgoes romantic expressiveness. He or she chooses the coldness and rigour of universality, for which the familiar model is mathematics. The argument sounds distinctly Beckettian: when Beckett distinguishes between the ‘expressive act’ as ‘obligation’ and ‘the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one’s ability’, he is asserting the principle and value of impersonality (DI, 142–3, 145). The chilliness of modern art is directly related to its inhumanity or, better, to the inhumanity of truth. For truth is inhuman in that, when it arrives, it ⁴² See CR, 81–105.

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arrives for the first time, does not have to happen, and is not contained by any prior thought of what it means to be human (which is always a matter of the encyclopedia).⁴³ Here the universality of a truth is inseparable from its ‘contingence e´v´enementielle’ (CR, 100). The truth of a new art is not ‘namable or calculable’ in the terms of a previous one (ibid.). Art ‘makes an event of a real that has hitherto been ignored’ (CR, 103). Modern art is an art of dynamic abstraction. It transforms the world available to the senses on the basis of the event of an Idea. This means that the sensible world is stripped of its self-evidence. The will to proceed ‘against the evidence’ is characteristic of modern art. Modern art is vision just barely extracted from the seeming impossibility of vision. It is important that we develop new forms of abstraction of (not from) the sensible world. They will be crucial in the struggle against the postmodern world of particularities. Modern art provides us with the paradigms: the ‘Troisi`eme esquisse’ offers an unusually long list, including not just Beckett, Malevich, Mandelstam, and Celan but Woolf, Mansfield, Claudel, Picasso, Kandinsky, Faulkner, Rothko, and Messiaen. There are one or two names in this list that will seem less convincing than others. More importantly: if modern art resists the slide into inertia with the energy of affirmation, by virtue of its very resistance, doesn’t it also abundantly testify to inertia as the implacable condition of and threat to affirmation? To any mention of Woolf’s, Rothko’s, and Celan’s suicides, Badiou would probably reply that it is the impersonal achievement alone that matters: ‘the affirmative subject of non-evidence is the work, and it alone’ (CR, 100). This is an argument that has real (philosophical and ethical) weight. But is it really possible to ignore the irreducible strain of melancholy in the work of most of the artists in his list? Outside the ‘Troisi`eme esquisse’, Badiou is by no means unresponsive to modern melancholy. In Le Si`ecle, for example, he writes very well of the ‘cindery sun’ (‘soleil cendreux’) of modern art (LS, 203). It is an art that is sombre even in its joys. For it cannot accommodate itself to the normal pleasures of Spinozan ‘perseverance in being’ (ES, 46) or (to anticipate a later argument) jouissance, in one particular Lacanian sense of that word. This is a recurrent motif throughout Le Si`ecle; but it remains a motif. Badiou registers the melancholy of modern art: what he will not do is think it. He proscribes melancholy, out of hand, as insignificant for thought. Thus he tells ⁴³ On the necessarily inhuman appearance of any properly human project or procedure, see ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, Les Temps modernes, 531–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1990), 1: T´emoins de Sartre, 14–22, p. 15.

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us, for example—to recall—that he is gripped by the ‘affirmative capacity’ of Mallarm´e’s thought but simply indifferent to his despair.⁴⁴ In that respect, I’d suggest, for all the brilliance with which, as we’ve seen, Badiou separates out what is still important in Marxist tradition from what is obsolete, he remains a prisoner of a Marxist insistence on unrelenting positivity.⁴⁵ At his crassest, he argues that anything else is bourgeois ‘pleurnicherie’ (‘snivelling’, LS, 179). Badiou is very astute about one of the most striking and depressing features of advanced Capital, its unceasing determination to talk itself up. Yet the principle of intransigent belief that he inherits from Marxism might seem oddly close to this boosterism. Furthermore, he tends to assimilate modern art to it. In this respect, he remains strikingly obtuse to certain elements in Beckettian logic. Above all, he is obtuse to Beckett’s awareness of the pathos of intermittency. From the start of this book, I have asserted that this is a question of thought not sentiment. In other words, there is a logic of modern melancholy. What powers the modernist rejection of the pleasures of ‘perseverance in being’ is a conviction of the inertia on which they are predicated. This theme is central to Murphy. Badiou associates inertia with any structuring of the pure multiplicity of Being, with existence as ‘regulated’ by nature or the State.⁴⁶ The modern artist’s commitment to ‘non-evidence’ stems from a persuasion of the unreality, even the falsehood of inertia. Mallarm´e contemplates his world as having surrendered to the falsehood of inertia. It lacks a ‘historical real’ insofar as no collective political subject has declared itself (RT, 12). Yet if truth is a question of the event, and is occasional or rare, truth is then the exception, and the falsehood of inertia the rule. This is the logic of the pathos of intermittency. As we’ve seen, in ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’, where Badiou comes closest to thinking this pathos, he argues for an ‘infinite patience before the inert’. The argument offers a significant theoretical gloss on his later concept of the modern artist as ‘waiting subject’. In ‘Six propri´et´es’, the patience in question is itself ‘an attribute of the strategy of truth’.⁴⁷ The subject can develop an ‘investigation’ by exploring the negativity that blocks, reacts against, ⁴⁴ ‘Saisissement, dessaisie, fid´elit´e’, 16. ⁴⁵ See for instance the desire to separate Marxism from any thought of passivity in Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Potemkine, 1981), 5–6. ˆ ⁴⁶ See ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, Les Temps modernes, 526 (May 1990), 1–26, p. 24; ‘L’Etre, ´ l’´ev´enement et la militance’ [Badiou interviewed by Nicole-Edith Th´evenin], Futur ant´erieur, 8 (Winter 1991), 13–23, p. 16; and Jambet, ‘Alain Badiou’, 149. ⁴⁷ ‘Six propri´et´es de la v´erit´e’, Ornicar? Revue du camp freudien, 32 (Jan.–Mar. 1985), 39–67, and 33 (Apr.–June, 1985), 120–49; ii. 121.

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or is the antithesis of a truth. Badiou describes this process as ‘l’entretien de l’inerte’ (‘dialogue with the inert’).⁴⁸ It requires what he calls a ‘supple endurance . . . within the truth-strategy’.⁴⁹ We should fight shy of the subject who believes that every day brings new discoveries and is always passionately engaged in investigations. For he or she will probably be quite convinced that they in fact already possess the criteria for truth. The subject of a truth must compound with inertia. ‘Beware’, says Badiou, ‘of the subject who is never bored’;⁵⁰ in other words, of the subject who does not know how to wait. Beckett’s recoil from the political agitator in The End is motivated by precisely this wariness. In effect, ‘Six propri´et´es’ proposes an ethics of melancholy. It is an ethics closely related to what Badiou takes to be the Beckettian ethics of vigilance. As a prodigious exercise in the ‘supple endurance’ of negativity, Burton’s Anatomy articulates an ethics of melancholy, too. So, very obviously, does Waiting for Godot, and so does Murphy. Murphy establishes the necessary distance between a subjective procedure and ‘the objective structure of the State’.⁵¹ He situates himself outside established discourses and asserts the vanity of the places they offer. Like the follower of St Paul, he assumes a ‘subjectivit´e du d´echet’.⁵² To ‘the perpetual commercial mobility’ of the world of Capital, he opposes ‘an inflexible principle of consequence’ (CR, 103). In the end, however, he finds himself literally engaged in the ‘dialogue with the inert’ exemplified in his relationship with Mr Endon. That the last two chapters of the novel should be particularly invaded by melancholy is hardly surprising: the core of the novel has been Murphy’s investigation. But Murphy has at length discovered that it finally has nowhere to go beyond negativity. Murphy is remarkable, however, in that it shows Beckett grasping the pathos of intermittency, the melancholy of a world without truth, before he begins to think the possibility of the event. In Beckettian terms, the logic of melancholy can precede the event. The point is, not just that the desire for truth in its absence is melancholic, as in Mallarm´e, but that the absence of truth is itself melancholic, whether it is understood as such or not. What makes this awareness possible, I think, is sensibility. To grasp the relation between the event and sensibility, however, we need to turn elsewhere, to the work of Badiou’s ⁴⁸ Ibid. ii. 120. ⁴⁹ Ibid. ii. 121. ⁵⁰ Ibid. ˆ ⁵¹ L’Etre, l’´ev´enement et la militance’, 15. ´ ⁵² ‘Saint Paul, fondateur du sujet universel’, Etudes th´eologiques et religieuses, 75/3 (Mar. 2000), 323–33, p. 328.

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erstwhile colleague Franc¸oise Proust.⁵³ Proust’s philosophy will loom large in my conclusion, where it will supply a very important context for understanding Badiou and Beckett together. For the moment, I want merely to offer a description of one particular aspect of her work. Proust’s is a philosophy in which a theory of the event is crucial. The experience of an event is a certain kind of modern experience of groundlessness. Existing series are ungrounded. Nothing binds them in place or decrees that they must forever remain in place. They are therefore always open to interruption. For Proust, the experience of the event is that of the power of the world itself in its indeterminacy, as a form without form. The power of indeterminacy is the condition of freedom. Freedom is not a psychological concept. It is the discovery of the possibility of origination. Thus far, Proust’s thought can easily be reconciled with Badiou’s. Beyond this point, they start to diverge. For Proust asserts that ungroundedness is to be experienced in a certain way. She is quite clear about this: if freedom is the discovery of an originary power, it does not involve the banality of a supposed self-discovery or self-fulfilment. It is rather the discovery of the power of surrender and is inseparable from sensibility. Sensibility and its cognates, receptivity, passivity, affect, are all key terms in Proust’s book on Kant (Kant and Benjamin being the twin poles of her thought).⁵⁴ It is the Analytic of the Sublime that brings these terms most sharply into focus. The experience of the sublime is born out of a receptivity to a movement whereby nature, the given, is displaced, transported, or overturned by an indeterminate force. The structure of this experience is an intricate structure of affect: ‘enthusiasm, chagrin, anger, sadness, exaltation’ are all part of it (PO, 43). The mind will necessarily cast affect into the form of ideas. But ideas are secondary effects. They have no pre-existing hold in the mind or on the world prior to events. They are produced by the impact of events on sensibility and the affective complex that impact produces. The mind is sensibility in the first instance. Sensibility is what Kant calls a Neigung, an inclination of the mind, there from the start. Kant’s great discovery—what marks him ⁵³ Proust was a Parisian philosopher, a teacher at the Universit´e de Paris I, and a colleague of Badiou’s at the Coll`ege Internationale de Philosophie, where she was a director of programmes. She died in 1998, at the age of 51. Badiou has written about her twice, in an essay of 1993 in Les Temps modernes that was effectively a review of Kant: Le Ton de l’histoire and a short essay, a kind of philosophical obituary, in Rue Descartes in 2001. ⁵⁴ I hope to show elsewhere just how comprehensively Proust rewrites the world of intermittency in terms of affect; see for instance her account of indignation and anger, DR, 52–60; and my Thinking Intermittency: Studies in Contemporary French Philosophy (in preparation).

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out as the first great modern, above all, in the Analytic of the Sublime—is not that of the faculties; or rather, it is of a faculty beyond the faculties that is the foundation of the faculties themselves. This ur-faculty is sensibility. In the first instance, imagination, reason, judgement, and taste are all an openness to affect, a power of being affected.⁵⁵ Badiou is critical of Proust in one particular respect, and it has to do precisely with the theme of sensibility. Proust gets the event quite wrong. She gets it wrong, says Badiou, because she understands it as a function of a ‘path´etique transcendentale’, ‘a transcendental theory of affect or the passions’ (ibid.).⁵⁶ Proust’s creative reading of Kant brings out the ‘inaugural demand’ of a ‘passive reception’ which is a priori. This concern with an ‘originary passivity’ is the motive force to her whole enterprise.⁵⁷ In Proust’s work, receptivity guarantees the power of the event over the subject: receptivity, says Badiou, not will. But events are not moments of ecstatic seizure; they are not experiences at all. The subject does not exist, not even as pure passivity, before a truthprocedure is already under way. The decision and resolute action involved in subjectification are the very principles of the rupture that is the event. Event, subject, and truth-procedure coincide. In the end, Badiou is peremptory, and makes his point quite baldly: no passive structure or condition can receive an event. The subject is not tied to the event by any ‘frappe premi`ere’ (ibid.). In effect, there is no reception of the event, and no such condition as receptivity. That the essays on Proust adopt this position may seem surprising. Is their relationship to Badiou’s philosophical system then an anomalous one? Are they at a tangent to the main thrust of his thought? That conclusion would be far too simple. So far as I can see, there is nothing in the elaborated theoretical ˆ et l’´ev´enement that indicand notably abstract account of the event in L’Etre ates, either that the event arrives to transform an original passivity, or that it arrives as a galvanic shock to a previously inert but none the less minimally ˆ et l’´ev´enement that is most relevant receptive structure. In the part of L’Etre here, the fifth section, Badiou rather emphasizes the intervention of the subject. Intervention alone discerns the event within a given situation. Without it, there is effectively no event. Yet in the Ethics, of course, the event is evoked ⁵⁵ It is hard to square this with Kant’s own account of sensibility as an inferior faculty. See for instance Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), no. 27, 140–3. Proust’s reading of him is a ‘symptomal’ one. ⁵⁶ ‘Depuis longtemps, depuis si peu de temps’, Rue Descartes, 33 (Oct. 2001), 101–4, p. 101. ⁵⁷ ‘Sur le livre de Franc¸oise Proust, Le Ton de l’histoire’, Les Temps modernes, 565–6 (Aug.–Sept. 1993), 238–48, p. 246.

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as ‘seizing’ and ‘breaking’ the subject before the subject seizes it in its turn (ES, 43). Equally, the ethical injunction, again, in Lacan’s phrase, is ‘ne pas c´eder sur son d´esir’ (‘do not give way on one’s [your, its] desire’, ibid.). Do not give up on its desire within you: persist in willing what in the first instance was not a matter of willing at all. True, in Peut-on penser la politique?, there is no suggestion that the subjects of political events are swept up by or caught up in them. Rather, the political event is produced by an interpretation. But in D’un d´esastre obscur, on the other hand, the protagonists in Badiou’s catalogues of insurrections, rebellions, and seditions have been ‘soudain saisis’, suddenly gripped, seized by political possibilities (DO, 32). In fact, when Badiou finds himself on more empirical terrain than that ˆ et l’´ev´enement, he cannot necessarily covered by the fifth section of L’Etre avoid describing events as experiences: his own experience of May 1968, for example, a ‘road-to-Damascus experience’, an ‘unconditional abandonment to the event’ (TC, 9); or reading Beckett: ‘a true encounter, a sort of subjective blow [frappe subjective], the imprint of which is ineffaceable’ (BK, 5). Intermittently, in fact, Badiou resorts to the very terms for the event—the ‘coup’, the ‘frappe’, being ‘seized’—that he finds so problematic in Proust.⁵⁸ This is symptomatic. Badiou himself has difficulty in sustaining a thought of the event without positing the relevance to it of at least a moment of passivity. Proustian sensibility is a spectre that he never quite succeeds in banishing from his work. What Badiou calls encounters are very important in his thought, notably in the case of love. The truth of love, he asserts, is produced on the basis of an event in which it originates, this ‘sudden thing of which Plato already speaks’ (CS, 257). Can the ‘suddenness’ of the encounter be imagined other than as involving some kind of openness to an exteriority, and therefore receptivity? If the event is pure subjective action, as Badiou seems to be saying, does it allow any space at all for alterity, in Badiou’s sense of that word? If the thought of the event is inseparable from a thought of alterity, can it ever be categorically separated from all notions of receptivity? The answer, I think, in all three cases, is no. We clearly need Proust’s concept of sensibility to fill out Badiou’s theory of the event and subjectification. In my conclusion, I shall consider some possible and, I think, important reasons why Badiou has trouble with Proust. ⁵⁸ Fascinatingly, the reverse is also true: in her work on Benjamin, Proust seems much closer to the very conception of the event that Badiou adduces to demonstrate the limits of her thought.

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If sensibility is an openness to affect and to the event, it is also an openness to supplementation (in the sense that the event itself is a supplement). In the absence of a truth (Badiou) or an idea (Proust), sensibility exists unsupplemented, in a state of incompletion. That state of incompletion is what I call melancholy, and is the condition of the pathos of intermittency. In Proust as in Badiou, supplementation happens only intermittently. The pathos of intermittency lies precisely in the fact that, if indeed truth is sporadic or rare, then its terms dictate the recurrence of melancholy, Neigung unsupported or unfulfilled, or what Beckett calls ‘hopeless inclination’ (MU, 6). That Murphy is and remains a creature of sensibility, for all his diligent intellectual labour, is categorically indicated in the account of his irreducibly ‘irrational heart’ on the second page (ibid.). He is a figure of passivity unsupplemented, receptivity with nothing to receive. In more or less abstract ways, this figure will be central to the rest of Beckett’s work. Murphy’s love for Celia is not a love in Badiou’s sense of the term, since it does not begin in an encounter. Murphy scoffs at the idea that they just ‘met’, and Celia’s own narrative presents her as having ‘accosted’ him (MU, 13, 25). The principle of passivity finds its full representation, again, in the blankly melancholic figure of Mr Endon, ‘the most biddable little gaga’ in the MMM (MU, 134). In the last two chapters, the novel’s melancholy abruptly deepens. Beckett said he saw the ‘necessary end’ of Murphy from very early on.⁵⁹ For all the wit and erudition that the novel has displayed, for all the laughter it has provoked, Beckett is also ruthlessly aware of where his logic has been leading. On the one hand, we have the miserable, hapless comedy of Murphy’s body in chapter 12. This is precisely a comedy of the body as material trash, as literally waste matter, the body as d´echet or remainder. On the other hand, in the aptly numbered chapter 13, we have the kite-flyers and the ‘ludicrous fever’ of their ‘toys struggling skyward’ (MU, 157). Beckett clearly intended this image to serve as correlative to Murphy and the fate of Murphy’s project. He had scarcely begun the novel when he told MacGreevy that ‘my next old man, or old young man, not of the big world but of the little world, must be a kite-flyer’.⁶⁰ Of course, in chapter 13, kite-flying is also associated with ‘the historical process of the hardened optimists’ (ibid.). Henning suggests ⁵⁹ Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 7 July 1936; quoted in John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137. ⁶⁰ Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 8 Sept. 1935; quoted in Pilling, Beckett before Godot, 126. See also Pilling’s account of the beginnings of the novel, pp. 126–7.

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that the irony is anti-Hegelian, a theme I shall come back to much later; it is especially exquisite if one imagines Beckett as having Chamberlain’s ‘Great Expectations’ partly in mind.⁶¹ The young Beckett’s point is that Murphy’s vain endeavour and the hopes of the optimists finally amount to the same thing. What sweeps through the chapter is the random wind, ruffling the vista ‘as though Time had suddenly lost patience, or had an anxiety attack’ (MU, 156). But this disorderly, aleatory principle does not hold out the promise of an event. It rather snaps the strings that bind hope and aspiration to the world. That Watt is a melancholy novel has not gone unnoticed.⁶² Here, again, the protagonist pursues an investigation that ends only in a cul-de-sac. Unlike Murphy’s, however, this investigation is the consequence of an event, or events. The condition of Watt is intermittency, as that of Murphy is not. In Watt, events arrive to disturb the monotony of an actually infinite world. If there is pathos in the novel, it is partly because of the rarity of the event. The inertia of actual infinity swiftly re-closes round the ruins of Watt’s project. But the pathos is also due to Watt’s misconstrual of events, his misapprehension of his own relation to them. In the terms I have just adopted from the ‘Troisi`eme esquisse’ and ‘Six propri´et´es’, Watt not only bears witness to the inertia from which affirmation proceeds. It recognizes the possibility of an insidious power of inertia within affirmation, the tendency to self-betrayal within the affirmative principle. If, indeed, an ‘infinite patience before the inert’ is necessary, then, for all the fact that he is certainly a figure of passivity unsupplemented, Watt is not possessed of that patience. It is the novel itself that shows the appropriate patience, and asks that patience of its reader. Badiou’s ‘supple endurance within the truth-strategy’ is what Watt has to offer; but only if we include within our definition of ‘truth-strategy’, not just the truth-procedure that follows the event, but the vigilance of the waiting subject. If there is an ethics of melancholy in Watt, it is certainly an ethics of vigilance, but also an ethics of settling with the power of inertia. Indeed, as we shall go on to see, ‘patience before the inert’ is crucial to most of Beckett’s work. Far from being an oddity in the canon, then, Watt actually sets up a model to which much of Beckett’s later work corresponds, the plays ⁶¹ See Henning, Beckett’s Critical Complicity, 80. ⁶² See for instance Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 390.

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above all. Badiou is quite right to suggest that truth, event, subjectification, and ‘investigations’ are all crucial to Beckett. He is also right, I think, to suppose that they have an imperative value for Beckett as for himself. I do not want to return Beckett to the ‘despair of the salon’ (CS, 332). My principal intention is to develop and even amplify Badiou’s conception of Beckettian rigour, rather than steering criticism back towards an assumption of Beckettian gloom. None the less, the problem remains: Badiou refuses to think the pathos of intermittency. He therefore misses the extent to which Beckett treats the concerns in question and their value from the point of view of their cancellation, absence, or failure. ‘You can’t even talk about truth’, Beckett told Charles Juliet. ‘That is part of the general distress.’⁶³ ⁶³ Juliet, Conversations, 149.

5 The Event of the Event: The Unnamable

LOGICS OF APPEARANCE There is at least one obvious objection to what I have just said about Watt, and a not-so-obvious objection to what I have said about Murphy. The two objections coincide. First, does Beckett really categorically exclude the possibility of the event from Murphy? The obvious answer would seem to be yes, look at the first line of the novel: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ (MU, 5). It seems to proscribe the event from the start, not least in its deliberately banal allusion to Ecclesiastes, and thus to introduce us to a world that is very remote from Badiou’s. But to say just this is to ignore the relationship between the locution and what it says. The strange, exquisite phrasing makes the sentence itself seem to wriggle out from underneath the sentiment it expresses.¹ It aims a perky little kick at the very inertia it posits and of which it takes the weight. This exactly captures the curious, wry, unrelentingly perverse quality of the most important strain in Beckettian irony. It even comes close to summing up my argument about his oeuvre as a whole. In any case, before long, the novel is telling us that, if the sun must shine on the same dreary old scenario, the light also never wanes ‘the same way twice’ (MU, 5). This does not corroborate the impression of unrelenting sameness conveyed in the opening line. As far as Watt is concerned: Beckett himself refers to Watt’s ‘incidents of note’ as events. But these events are pedestrian if not trivial. Am I really justified in conflating Beckett’s use of the word ‘event’ with Badiou’s? Certainly, Badiou does so himself. But in what sense can the Galls and the piano-tuning be equated with Paul’s intellectual recognition of the truth of the resurrection? ¹ Cf. Christopher Ricks’s account of this in Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 62–3.

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The Galls’ self-introduction may be beautifully cadenced, but its mock-heroic tone seems precisely designed to strip their arrival of any significance at all: ‘We are the Galls, father and son, and we are come, what is more, all the way from town, to choon the piano’ (WA, 63). This is hardly the way Paul announced himself. The question of the relative status of different kinds of event is one that persistently occurs in relation to Badiou’s work, particularly on art. Justin Clemens has recently put Badiou on the spot about this, asking him whether there are not ‘differences between a big event and a little event, in terms of force’.² Is the force of an event not itself contingent? Badiou promptly denies this: the event is always ‘nothing—just a sort of illumination’. It is a mere ‘weakness’, its being ‘is disappearing . . . The distinction between events is always a distinction between the consequences of events . . . there are major consequences, long sequences of truth, or brief sequences’ (IT, 187). This makes at least some sense if we are comparing political sequences (say, the revolutionary movement in Russia from 1902 to 1917 with the Polish workers’ movement between 1980 and 1984).³ It makes much less sense if we are looking at Badiou’s accounts of literary works. Does the arrival of the Galls or any of the other ‘incidents’ in Watt lead to a long or a short truth-sequence? If this question sounds ludicrous, it is because, as we’ve seen, art’s relationship to the event is actually different from that of the other truth-domains. Art can always concern itself with ´ev´enementialit´e, the conditions of the event, the event in its absolute form, the event of the event. Here I want further to specify the meaning of ´ev´enementialit´e by turning briefly to Badiou’s current work in progress. The full form of the extension to his philosophical system that this work involves will only appear with the ˆ et l’´ev´enement, Logiques des mondes. It is publication of the sequel to L’Etre none the less already possible to get a sense of some aspects of it. Hallward provides an excellent introduction to Badiou’s later concerns (BA, 293–315); I focus the ensuing discussion chiefly on the event and its remainder. Badiou’s recent philosophical interest has been in the logic or, better, logics of appearance. There is no set of all sets. We are always situated: we know Being only locally, in particular situations. Being cannot be thought as a whole from within a situation. The crucial question is the relationship between the actual infinity of Being and situations, or what Badiou has begun to call ‘worlds’. ² In ‘Ontology and Politics: An Interview with Alain Badiou’, IT, 169–93, pp. 186–7. ³ Another of Badiou’s examples of a political truth-sequence. See PP, 46 and passim.

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What exactly is the relation between Being and ‘the particularity of a situation’, what Badiou now terms its ‘being-there [ˆetre-l`a]’?⁴ How is pure Being ‘assigned to a world’ (LM 1, p. 38)?⁵ If appearance is the ‘logical capture’ of Being (LM 2, p. 24), what is at stake in this ‘capture’? Logic can tell us. It can specify the consistencies of appearance—the consistencies of a given situation—as ‘an organisational (or relational) seizing’ of the multiple (LM 2, p. 27). It clarifies the laws that lend coherence and unity to worlds and distinguish them from one another. As Hallward points out, however, Badiou’s use of the word logic is ‘obviously double’: if, on the one hand, logic is local, on the other, there is also ‘logic in general, that is, global, descriptive of what holds for any possible universe’ (BA, 303). Logic in the second conception of it is the science of the being of appearance. Indeed, Logiques des mondes will make it clear that worlds have certain features in common.⁶ Logic is therefore concerned with rules of coherence which hold good for all possible worlds. This fits in with Badiou’s insistence that appearance has no empirical meaning, that it is in no respect dependent on ‘space or time’ (CT, 191–2). Logic is not a construction of formal languages. To think of it as a generalized formal grammar is to continue to surrender to the terms of the linguistic turn in philosophy. Once again, mathematics releases us from this snare; or at least, it has the power to do so, if its significance is properly understood. Crucially, and hardly surprisingly, logic will necessarily be mathematical. For appearance is ‘an intrinsic dimension of being’. It ‘constrains’ Being (CT, 194). Since logic is not a question of linguistic or grammatical analysis, it is not primarily concerned with propositions or judgements. It is ‘a mathematical thought’ about what constitutes ‘a universe of relations’ (CT, 195). This thought is made available by category theory. A useful account of category theory or topos theory as developed by Eilenberg and Mac Lane and extended by Grothendieck, Freyd, and Lawvere is beyond the scope of this study.⁷ Apart from anything else, Badiou has not connected Beckett with category theory. However, category theory has become increasingly important to his larger philosophy. It is important, not in that it ⁴ ‘Politics and Philosophy’ [interview with Peter Hallward], Angelaki, 3/3 (1998), 113–33, p. 130. ⁵ The three chapters of the typescript of Logiques des mondes are separately paginated. All references are to the chapter number, followed by the page number. ⁶ In the first chapter, Badiou specifies three such features: (a) a ‘minimal degree’ of belonging; (b) a rule of ‘conjunction’ which makes two different beings compatible with each other in a given world; and (c) an ‘envelope’ which makes possible the global synthesis of a world. LM 1, pp. 4, 76. ⁷ For a useful introduction, see Hallward, BA, 303–12.

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founds a mathematical world, but in that it specifies the conditions required for such a world to be practicable.⁸ It seeks to describe relations—plus and minus, equation, exponentiation, and so on—between mathematical entities like sets. It represents these relations geometrically. It is perhaps most crucial for Badiou in that it works in terms of morphisms, that is, transformations of or correspondences between mathematical structures. For all its infinite complexity, the realm of set theory is static. The realm of category theory is similarly abstract but everywhere vectorized. Category theory actually rejects ‘the idea that there is a fixed universe of ‘‘constant’’ sets within which mathematics can and should be developed’.⁹ For Badiou, it supplies mobile models that allow us to think the relationship between ontology and logic in terms of the differing ‘degrees’ of ‘intensity’ of appearance (LM 2, p. 25), intensity being a ‘qualitative metaphor’ for what category theory describes (LM 2, p. 42). Category theory has emerged as the one serious modern rival to set theory insofar as it, too, encourages us to see mathematics as a whole as a cohesive enterprise.¹⁰ But Badiou does not see them either as contradictory or as cancelling each other out. Category theory provides the necessary supplement to set theory. It can do so because the two kinds of theory function as distinct kinds of description, the ontological and the onto-logical. If set theory provides us with such knowledge as we can have of Being as Being, the vectorized realm of category theory supplies us with logic and describes the constraint of Being by appearance. It starts out, however, from a remarkably meagre set of givens. As Badiou says himself, category theory deals only in ‘undifferentiated objects’ (objects ‘deprived of all interiority’, CT, 168). The geometrical exposition of topoi presents morphisms as arrows that go between these objects. The arrows proceed from one object as their source to another object as their target, or from an object to itself. Crucially, objects have no autonomous identities other than as they are defined by these arrows. Objects are only ‘marks in networks of actions’ (ibid.). Thus category theory allows Badiou to think the realm of appearance without lapsing into assumptions of unity and wholeness and without resorting to ‘the ‘‘linguistic’’ prejudice’.¹¹ ⁸ See ‘Platon et/ou Aristote-Leibniz: Th´eorie des ensembles et th´eorie des topos sous l’œil du philosophe’, in Marco Panza and Jean-Michel Salanskis (eds.), L’Objectivit´e math´ematique: Platonisme et structures formelles (Paris: Masson, 1995), 61–83, p. 73. ⁹ P. T. Johnstone, Topos Theory (London: Academic Press, 1977), p. xvii. He is quoting William Lawvere. ¹⁰ See Stephen Pollard, Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory (Notre Dame. Ind.: University of Notre Dame, Press, 1990), 5. ¹¹ ‘Platon et/ou Aristote-Leibniz’, 74.

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Category theory proceeds descriptively rather than axiomatically. Its power as a tool lies in large measure in its providing us with non-linguistic logical operators. It makes possible a description of the plurality of possible logics, and therefore of ‘the contingent variability of appearance’ (CT, 199). In the long run, it can provide a science of the relative stabilities and instabilities of situations.¹² Through the account of logic it offers, we can grasp any given situation as both stable and unfounded together, as at one and the same time a ‘pure multiplicity on the threshold of inconsistency’, and an intrinsically and solidly related appearance (CT, 200). It is precisely when there is a ‘local foundering’ of appearance—Badiou’s phrase is ‘effondrement local’, recalling both the Lucretian clinamen and the ‘collapsion’ in Ill Seen Ill Said —that there is ´ev´enementialit´e. Here the logic of the event is exposed. The event becomes possible at the ‘point of junction [jointure]’ between mathematical ontology and mathematical logic (ibid.). We should pause to underline the radical anti-Platonism of Badiou’s case, and to note its closeness to Beckett. The anti-Platonic aspect of Badiou’s position emerges in a brilliant and very important if sheerly surprising argument: the realm of appearance is not a realm of mobile, fleeting, insubstantial shadows as contrasted with a bright, stable, univocal realm of Ideas.¹³ The opposite is in fact the case: the realm of appearance is the stable realm. Where Being is intractably multiple, appearance imposes the notion of a singular logic (as, say, in the case of advanced Capital). The immediate realm, the realm of appearance, which Badiou describes as that of habit and custom, dominated by established points of reference, is the one that confers identity and offers security. Being, by contrast, is diffuse, anarchic, inconsistent, indifferent to signification. Where the realm of appearance is the realm of representations, Being is irreducible to representations, in the complex sense in which Badiou uses that term. The point is eminently Beckettian, though Beckett articulates it most clearly in Proust, where it is coloured by the young writer’s romantic subjectivism. In Proust, Beckett distinguishes precisely between habit (or ‘the boredom of living’) and ‘the suffering of being’.¹⁴ The suffering of being alone ‘opens a window on the real’.¹⁵ Habit is ‘[a]n automatic adjustment of the ¹² See ‘L’Existence et la mort’, in Christian Delacampagne and Robert Maggiori, Philosopher: Les Interrogations contemporaines: Mat´eriaux pour un enseignement, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2000), ii. 293–302, p. 300. ¹³ The argument is chiefly apparent in CT, 193. ¹⁴ Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 8. ¹⁵ Ibid. 16.

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human organism to the conditions of its existence’.¹⁶ As such, ‘it has as little moral significance as the casting of the clout when May is or is not out’.¹⁷ What matters are ‘the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile’. In these zones ‘the maximum value of our being is restored’.¹⁸ That is because ‘the mere animal instinct of self-preservation’—or, in Badiou’s Spinozan terms, the conatus essendi —‘is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept’.¹⁹ If we interpret this in Badiou’s terms, it is definitive for understanding Beckett’s Trilogy, chiefly The Unnamable, with one crucial piece of added emphasis: an account of the logic or logics of appearance must also be an account of the logic of the unrelenting familiarity of worlds. Beckett knows this from the start. If he never says it again as explicitly as he does in Proust, that is because most of his work confines the irreducible possibility of the ‘phenomenon’ within the cramping straitjacket of appearance. Even in Proust, he understands why this must be so: The respite is brief. ‘Of all human plants,’ writes Proust, ‘Habit requires the least fostering, and is the first to appear on the seeming desolation of the most barren rock’ . . . The fundamental duty of Habit, about which it describes the futile and stupefying arabesques of its supererogations, consists in a perpetual readjustment and readjustment of our organic sensibility to the conditions of its worlds [note the plural].²⁰

An account of the logic or logics of appearance is, inexorably, an account of the remainder or of inertia. In Badiou’s terms, it may even provide the logic of the ‘obscene permanence of the State’ (EE, 127). Badiou does not say this—he is almost certainly very reluctant to say it—but it seems to me to be the Beckettian conclusion to which his argument must surely lead. At this point, we may finally understand exactly why Badiou sets such store by the event, why, by definition, truths come after events, and only after events, and why the event takes hold of the subject, rather than the subject taking hold of it. Any given world is always contingent. As Badiou has recently put the point, in interview, reverting to his old terminology, ‘there is no intrinsic interior mark to the necessity of [a] situation’ (IT, 185). But no given world can give its inhabitants proper access to its own contingency, since they are entirely within it, and cannot be otherwise. More exactly, no ¹⁶ Ibid. 7. ¹⁷ Ibid. 9. ¹⁸ Ibid. ¹⁹ Ibid. 10, 11. ²⁰ Ibid. 16.

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given world will provide us with the equipment we can use rationally to ascertain its limits. This is a superb, crucial observation. Within a given world, it may indeed seem that the sun shines upon the nothing new. It is only by virtue of the destabilizing power of the event that a contingency is exposed that can otherwise not be calculated, or even properly thought. For the moment, it is impossible to know how far, as he claims, the new turn in Badiou’s thought is going to ‘transform’ his treatment of the event, the subject and truths (LM 1, p. 1).²¹ But if one consequence of his way of thinking appearance is a reaffirmation of ´ev´enementialit´e and the power of the event, another would seem to be a sober meditation on the strange, seemingly implacable mystery of the conservative principle or the power of inertia, Freud’s repetition mania. This provides a new perspective on the meaning of the pathos of intermittency and the significance of Badiou’s aesthetics. Political history and the history of mathematics may be riven by events of huge importance. But politics and mathematics do not include a thought of the event itself (as opposed to a specific event or events) within their truth-procedures. Art, however, is unique among the truth-domains in that it is both produced by events and capable of reflecting on them. I have argued that Badiou is sometimes too inclined to close the gap between art and philosophy. But there is a sense in which, in Badiou’s terms, the gap closes of itself. For alone of the four kinds of truth, but like philosophy, art can contemplate the conditions of freedom and justice themselves. Politics does not do so, because political truths are always immanent in particular political sequences. This is why Badiou almost wholly confines the concept of the ‘sujet en attente’ to the aesthetic domain. When Badiou writes of ‘the real as pure event’ (SP, 61), he is referring to a double contingency to which Being is subject, of worlds or situations, and the events that come to supplement them. Intermittently, events take place, because any given world is founded only on the void. Events are rare because it is seldom that this foundation, or rather, lack of foundation, is exposed. In a sense, this work of exposure is the function of art. As opposed to imperial culture—Hollywood cinema of the past quarter-century, for example—art exposes the ungroundedness of a given world or worlds. Art is much concerned with the double contingency, as the other truth-domains are not. It guards or ²¹ For some indication with regard to the subject, however, see CT, 175–7, particularly the references to psychoanalysis.

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protects the very principle that is intrinsic to the double contingency, the principle of ´ev´enementialit´e itself, of the event of the event. We might add, though Badiou does not, that, in the work of a Brecht or an Eisenstein, for example, it guards that principle at the very heart of a political truth-sequence. But there is no need for art to have any political commitment: here Badiou emphatically departs from the traditional (and increasingly defunct-looking) rigidities of so much Marxist aesthetics. Art’s truths are art’s. They are distinct from political truths. Mallarm´e’s and Beckett’s aesthetic meditations on the event—or, better, the conditions of the event—are no less significant than Brecht and Eisenstein’s political ones. OBJECTS AND INEXISTENTS To return to Badiou’s more recent terminology: we might say that art destabilizes the object, or, better, that it exposes the inherent instability of the object. This might not look like a very difficult task. After all, cardinally, ‘the object is not a category for designating existing things. It always implies relation from the start’ (CT, 157). An object conceived of only as a mark in a network of actions might seem immediately and self-evidently unstable. In fact it is not, because the category of the object belongs to the world of appearance. Indeed, in Logiques des mondes, Badiou appears to be opposing the event to the object: the event, he asserts, is the paradigm of what is not objective, ‘the exemplary non-object’ (LM 2, p. 1). The event has as its condition ‘that the logic of the object is disturbed’ (LM 2, p. 24). This seems to make of objectivity the very figure of inertia or the remainder. The notion is the more interesting in that what Badiou calls his materialism involves the assertion that the object comes first: ‘the subject is a belated and problematic construction’ (LM 1, p. 3). I shall just briefly follow one thread in Badiou’s description of the object that is relevant to my own concerns. Badiou introduces three particularly important terms to describe the process of objectification: localization, intensity, and transcendentals. A transcendental is what makes the object visible or evident as such. What is ontologically multiple thus becomes single in the world of appearance. A particular painting—say, Velazquez’s View from the Villa Medici in Rome, Midday (1650)—has a transcendental which shares out identities and differences within it. The transcendental values are localization and intensity. Localization is the structuring of Being via a transcendental. It is the process whereby the abstract elements of actual infinity are pinned

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to real ones, constrained, specified, embodied. The degree of the appearance of an element in an object is a question of intensity. The object is a multiple in which difference appears with varying degrees of intensity. Category theory conceives of degrees of intensity as crucial factors in the localization of objects. Once again, Badiou has non-mathematical versions of these. The right column in the Velazquez painting—brighter than the left column, and less obscured by a figure in the foreground—is the transcendental index of the painting’s vertical axis. But this element does not appear with the same intensity elsewhere. The column self-evidently has more intensity than the vertical dash of brown that largely constitutes the shadowy figure to the left of the left central column. The element of the vertical is relativized to a particular localization in the dash. Identity exists as and in degrees. Objects are defined by vectors which function as evaluations of degrees of identity and difference. The issue is not just the identity of and difference between an object and other objects in a given world. There is always a plurality of modes of self-identity. An object has differing relations to itself (as the arrows in category theory can start from and come back to the same object). Thus such consistency as an object may have will only be ‘relational’ (LM 2, p. 30). All of this would appear to suggest that the realm of objects is a radically unstable one. But it is also strangely resistant to events. There appear to be two main reasons for this. The first is the rigidity of the relations of compatibility and order. There is no appearance save in terms of order and compatibility, and they crucially structure objectivity. Compatibility is ‘a sort of affinity in appearance’ (LM 2, p. 40), a relation of formal identity, a certain degree of resemblance. Order establishes a relation of value between different elements in an object. Order is always hierarchical: it hierarchizes elements it posits as unequal, whether or not these elements are compatible. The second reason is still more important: the world of appearance has an ontological substructure. Every world is ontologically infinite: that is, if you take the parts, the parts of those parts, and so on, you create an extending sequence of numbers which surpasses the finite sequence of numbers assigned to the world in question. But this infinity is not accessible in itself; that is, it cannot be constructed from within the world. Worlds are only immanently open. Operationally, they are closed. Mathematical ontology tells us the first, logic the second. In its being, a world is thinkable other than as it is. What Badiou calls the ‘fixion’ of Being in a singular appearance (LM 2, p. 36) does not put an end to multiplicity. But this multiplicity is only theoretically available. Badiou asserts that the event is an ‘alteration of objectivity’ (LM 2,

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p. 23), that it changes the ‘transcendental setup’ (‘dispositif’, LM 2, p. 6) of a given world. But if worlds and objects are always relational, relations are not events. They suppose the ‘transcendental evaluations’ that operate in a world, and, of themselves, imply no changes in those evaluations. Badiou gives as an example the Mohawk revolt in Quebec in 1990. Rather than retelling that tale, I’ll go back to an example of my own, the demonstrations against the Iraq War in the UK in 2003. What Badiou says of the Mohawk revolt applies precisely, here: the demonstrations merely made already available objective existences appear as real. They activated existing differences but created no new ones. They did nothing to disturb the logical completeness of the world in which they took place. By logical completeness of a world, Badiou means the universal exposure of every relation in it. A relation between two elements is exposed if it is ‘visible’ to (evident to or knowable by) a third as, say, the relation between government and demonstrators was visible to a liberal British citizen. The relation is universally exposed if there is also a relation between two distinct exposures of it (its exposure, say, to liberal and conservative British citizens), in other words, if the initial visibility is itself made visible, and so on indefinitely. Within universal exposure, all is already given and transparent. There is apparently no obscure or as yet unnamed space from which the unforeseeable might emerge. Universal exposure, in fact, is the very rule of inertia. The rule, however, is never absolute or final, because every object has an ‘inexistent’. This is the ‘thesis of the rationality of the contingency of worlds’ (LM 3, p. 19). No object can appear as a complete whole: there is always ‘a real point of inexistence’ in an object. In other words, it has at least a minimal tie to the multiple of which it is a ‘realization’. This point of inexistence gives the measure of the degree of the object’s appearance in the world. There is no law of necessity determining its appearance. Every object is marked by this fact. It might not have appeared in the world in question, or might have appeared in another. The contingency of the objective composition of worlds is readable on objects themselves. Insofar as a multiple is available to thought, as set theory indicates, it is always separable from the world in which it appears (LM 3, p. 18). There is a reserve of Being that is subtracted from any given appearance. This reserve traces the contingency of appearance in appearance itself (LM 3, p. 19). Badiou gives as an example the disenfranchised Canadian ‘Indians’ in Quebec from 1918 to 1950. For an English reader in 2005, a more vivid example would have been illegal immigrant workers, notably the ethnically Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in the

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quicksands at Morecambe Bay in 2004. These were people contributing to the local economy, but with no legal or official status or identity. In the terms ˆ et l’´ev´enement, they belonged to the community but were not inof L’Etre cluded in it. In the terms of Logiques des mondes, they existed on the edge of the void. Their objective being was also a non-being. We might add that, by a peculiarly bleak irony, it was only in dying that they ‘appeared’ at all. They counted in the end, but as zeros. THE SIREN AND THE ROCK Evidently enough, the death of the cockle-pickers was not an event. It none the less testified to the contingency of a particular situation (inclusion in the British nation, ‘Britishness’ itself ). It was one of those ‘´ev´enementialit´es obscurs’—a ‘local foundering’ or ‘collapsion’—which bear witness to without transforming the arbitrariness of a social and political regime.²² In this respect, it bore witness to the ´ev´enementialit´e, the shakiness of any given logic of appearance which, in Badiou’s work, art above all specifically takes as its theme. Badiou’s account of logic helps us to understand ´ev´enementialit´e. It is a mediate condition poised between Being and the event, the stability and instability of the object. The concept of ´ev´enementialit´e or double contingency emerges particularly clearly in Badiou’s account of Mallarm´e. I want to return briefly to that account, and especially to Badiou’s account of Un coup ˆ et l’´ev´enement. By introducing some of the terms of Logiques de d´es in L’Etre des mondes, I shall finally reformulate this account to anticipate my reading of The Unnamable. The assertion that motivates Un coup de d´es is quite simple: a single throw of the dice will never abolish chance: a singular appearance does not constitute the whole. The siren (´ev´enementialit´e) resists Beckett’s ‘barren rock’ (objectivity).²³ We get the full force of Badiou’s reading of Un coup de d´es if we contrast it with a reading that is the very model of academic professionalism. Malcolm Bowie’s detailed analysis of the poem is a brilliant piece of work: subtle, precise, and careful. Its meticulousness, however, is inseparable from a scrupulous distaste for what Bowie calls the ‘allegorical subordination of ‘‘anecdote’’ to ‘‘philosophy’’ ’,²⁴ and here it loses as well as gains. For in ²² ‘L’Entretien de Bruxelles’, Les Temps modernes, 526 (May 1990), 1–26, p. 17. ²³ Proust, 16. ²⁴ Malcolm Bowie, Mallarm´e and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 132.

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just one respect, but an important one, Bowie gets Un coup de d´es very wrong. That is because he is unwilling to admit the relevance of the philosophical question. On the one hand, Bowie fully recognizes the sheer intricacy of Mallarm´e’s ‘picture of complexity and risk’. In his conception of them, however, risks are risk-free: modern poetry is as safe as bungee-jumping. For Mallarm´e treats complexity solely in relation to ‘those activities of will by which humans seek to discover pattern and purpose within their experience’.²⁵ But Mallarm´e is not concerned with an already established reality known as ‘human experience’. Un coup de d´es does not set out from a ready-made idea of the human or the nature of the human search. What Badiou alerts us to, surely rightly, is that the poem is rather concerned with what is not yet human, not yet known as possible within ‘human experience’, a ‘humanity’ that has yet to arrive, is yet to declare itself as such. It is a humanity known only in the future anterior.²⁶ The exquisite delicacy of Un coup de d´es to which both Badiou and Bowie pay tribute is no mere dandyism. It stems from a clear-eyed recognition of the apparent absurdity or impossibility of the task of writing about what is not yet human. For what is not yet human cannot be known as destined to become human until it has done so: it is inaccessible as and in itself. It is, in that sense, always obscure to us. What Mallarm´e also understands, however, is that, equally, to exclude the thought of what is not yet human as categorically beyond us is to court disaster. For it is to say that, in the terms of Un coup de d´es, nothing will take place but the place. If, then, as both Badiou and Bowie assert, Un coup de d´es is organized as a great hesitation or indecision, that is because it is poised on the edge of the event. Above all, the poem thinks the event of the event. This can only ‘take the form of indecision’, because the question of whether the event belongs to the situation is undecidable (where fidelity to a specific event involves decision). What separates Mallarm´e’s artistic truth decisively from a political or a lovers’ truth is that it never rescinds its founding assertion: don’t wager, for a single throw of the dice cannot abolish chance. This would seem to spell out, not Badiou’s beloved Lacanian injunction, ‘Do not give way on your desire’, but its opposite: ‘Do not identify with your desire.’ Do not consent to subjectification, ²⁵ Ibid. 142. ²⁶ Cf. Blanchot’s account of the poem: insofar as Mallarm´e’s goal is nothingness, it is so only in order that ‘something . . . exist other and purer than that which is’. See The Book to Come, tr. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 61. Blanchot is close to Badiou in emphasizing Mallarm´e’s concern with ‘the possibilities of historic action’ in an epoch conceived of as ‘a time of interval like a between-time’ (p. 231).

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for it is a form of self-blinding. To identify with the throw of the dice would be to prescribe what is human: that is why Mallarm´e recoils from it. The poetic duty is precisely to resist or refrain from that prescription. But how, then, can the poet save himself from slipping back into collusion with established definitions of what is human? The answer is that he identifies, not with a single throw of the dice, but with the very principle (of contingency) which makes it possible to wager. For to insist on ´ev´enementialit´e is to refuse to grant the given world and established knowledge any absolute status. It is in itself the guarantee that something else will happen. Thus in Un coup de d´es, we will never see ‘the master’ cast his dice. He neither decides to cast—which would both decree the arrival of the event and nullify it in declaring that it belongs to a situation—nor to refrain from casting, which would declare that nothing will have taken place but the place. The suspension of the master’s hand in the poem is a figure for the undecidability of the event. Badiou argues that the whole central part of Un coup de d´es is organized around the theme of undecidability via a great ‘fan of analogies’: the solitary feather, Hamlet, and, I think, most powerfully, the Siren and the rock: a delicate dark form upright in its siren twist the time it takes to slap with its impatient last forked scales a rock²⁷ The rock is a figure for the world of appearance, the ‘massive reality’ of the situation: it imposes a limit to infinity (‘une borne a` l’infini’).²⁸ The Siren is a figure for instability, the event of the event. But it is also suggests a temptation. In an aesthetic context, a poetic meditation, the temptation is prescription or decision. The Siren issues an invitation to cast the dice. On its own, it would force a choice, threaten to localize the event in a situation and dissolve the limits to the infinity of indecision. We are always within a situation, and must accommodate ourselves to it. But the Siren remains impatient, and its impatience with the rock is crucial. Think of a seductive Sartre repulsing a flinty and charmless Rorty. For Mallarm´e, the whole trick—the poet’s task—is to ²⁷ St´ephane Mallarm´e, Œuvres, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Bordas, 1992), 440–1. ²⁸ Ibid.

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maintain an ‘eternal hesitation’ between Siren and rock, a hesitation within the situation or within objectivity. No rational choice will abolish chance. To assume the contrary turns the event into a situation. Does this then mean that the vitality of the event must always escape thought, that the power of the situation is always overweening and that reason must therefore risk yielding to the irrational? Does the event transcend the human world? That would effectively mean that nothing happens and that poetry cannot get beyond language as doxa. This was Sartre’s view of Mallarm´e: ‘a Mallarm´e poem’, he complained, ‘is an act of inertia qua inertia.’²⁹ Mallarm´e entertains this defeatist possibility in the tenth folio of his poem. However, he rejects it in the eleventh and last. The famous appearance of the constellation in the last folio is not an event in itself. It is a symbolization of the contingency of the object, an ‘absolute symbol’ of the event. In the constellation and ‘the essential figure of number’ (EE, 219), the event is finally presented as that which arrives in itself, and as an abstraction. This is possible because, as we can now see, what the poem has insisted is not that the event cannot arrive, but that its arrival cannot be calculated from within a situation. The event can only be indicated as beyond the situation, though it is necessary to wager that it can take place there. The constellation is the pure Idea of the event. At the same time, the poem finally recognizes that, in the end, of course, there must be decisions. The poet himself decides, if in favour of indecision. What the poem can help us grasp is that decisions come at the point of the undecidable itself. It is not possible to tell from within a situation whether the event exists or not. Its undecidability is the guarantee of its remaining exterior to Being. We must therefore legislate where there can be no law. The event with which Un coup de d´es is concerned, then, is a secondary event. Mallarm´e makes an event of the thought of the event. Every thought that deserves the name bears witness to ´ev´enementialit´e. Un coup de d´es must finally assert this formally. But in all its extraordinary nuance and finesse, its shelvings and disintegrations, its ambiguities and aporiae, it has effectively articulated the intimate connection between thought and ´ev´enementialit´e throughout. Val´ery’s account of an enthralled first reading of the poem captures this very well: ‘At my leisure, I contemplated imperceptible moments [d’inappr´eciables instants]: the fraction of a second, during which an idea lit ²⁹ See Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarm´e, or the Poet of Nothingness, tr. and introd. Ernest Sturm (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 142.

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up, shone, and died.’³⁰ Folio 11 does not represent a new development, but an abstract summation of the poem as a whole, the point at which it turns to contemplate or to ‘symbolize’ itself. Thinking the absolute event can only produce a hesitation that is itself absolute. The Siren will always aim its slap at the rock,³¹ but, for the poet, the lure of any specific invitation to cast the dice must be resisted. The poet must remain in the same state of suspension as the master’s hand, between Siren and rock, the object and the contingency of the object. THE IRREPRESSIBLE EPHEMERAL According to Badiou, in the period in which Beckett produced the Trilogy and Texts for Nothing, he was still caught up in a Cartesian conception of the subject which sets it off against the ‘noir-gris’ or penumbra of Being. Beckett works to diminish this subject, to have done with the ‘haunting exception’ (‘exception lancinante’, BK, 33) that it constitutes, by reducing it to a voice. The voice can only identify itself in seeking the ‘pure point of enunciation’ that is the origin of its own language. But this ‘point of enunciation’ ‘is silence’ (ibid.). Hence the ‘fundamental hope’ of the Unnamable, which is to produce its own silence (BK, 34). It can only be deceived in that hope, and is therefore trapped in a futile labour that spells torture and even terror, since the labour in question destroys, not language, but the subject itself. Texts for Nothing takes this to an extreme limit. Beckett finally recognizes that the torment of the subject who seeks self-identification is a hollow joke, since subjectivity finally dissolves at a point where the penumbra is indistinguishable from the void. There is nothing to be done, then, save to start again with a work that will always lead to the same recognition, namely, that the task was impossible from the outset; that is, a work that will confirm that there is nothing to be done. The Beckett of the Trilogy is playing a hopeless Cartesian endgame, to which the only solution is finally to break with ‘Cartesian terrorism’ itself (BK, 38). This is quite a familiar way of reading the Trilogy, and I have my doubts about it. Like Badiou, I shall focus my own reading on The Unnamable. My first misgiving is that, as we have already seen, Badiou’s reading relies on a narrative of Beckett’s career as reaching a crisis point from which he then has to recover. ³⁰ Paul Val´ery, Fragments sur Mallarm´e (Paris: Ronald Davis, 1924), 19. As one might expect, Val´ery chooses his words carefully: ‘inappr´eciable’ also means ‘felicitous’. ³¹ Mallarm´e’s word ‘souffleter’ can also mean ‘to box the ears’ or ‘to treat with contempt’.

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But as I assume throughout this study, the relationships between Beckett’s works are very much more complex that Badiou’s linear and sequential construction of the career suggests. Secondly, for all his distrust of existentialist or nihilist readings of Beckett, Badiou shares the common assumption that The Unnamable is a tormented text. The torment is certainly evident—a ‘[l]abyrinthine torment’, says the Unnamable, though interestingly it adds that the torment is not one that can be suffered (TR, 316)—but so, too, in at least equal measure, are irony and aggression (the first of which has certainly been recognized, the second of which has largely been overlooked, not least because of the canonization of ‘Saint Sam’). Thirdly, though it is possible to find support for the idea that the younger Beckett was really in search of silence,³² I don’t share Badiou’s conviction that Watt is the only one of Beckett’s prose works before 1960 that shows any interest in the event or a pre- as opposed to an extra-linguistic domain. The theme of the event and language is simply particularly explicit in Watt. I’d suggest that a more compelling reading of The Unnamable than the one that Badiou himself produces is available to us from elsewhere in his own philosophy. This reading means recognizing that the text falls into five main sections, though they do of course overlap: an aporetic exordium or what the Unnamable calls the ‘preamble’ (TR, 293–304); an account of its struggle with others (TR, 305–48); the Worm section (TR, 349–71); review and revision (TR, 372–96); and an increasingly intense meditation on ending and perseverance (TR, 397–418). I proceed on the assumption that, as Beckett surely knew, The Unnamable belongs within the tradition of radically abstract modern literature inaugurated by Un coup de d´es. It is concerned with very similar questions to Un coup de d´es, and often responds to them in similar ways, but also with certain very important differences. Badiou can alert us to this because he sees what is at stake in the post-Mallarm´ean, modern tradition in writing with exceptional clarity, even if he doesn’t always see it in the right places (like the Trilogy). For the key to the discourse of the Unnamable is surely its refusal to sign its own ‘life-warrant’, its ‘inaptitude to assume’ any identity (TR, 333, 361). Gabriele Schwab quite rightly suggests that the Unnamable’s ‘commitment is to avoid any trace of self-manifestation’. But that is hardly an indication that, as she also suggests, Beckett is exploring the ‘relentless consequences’ of ‘the ³² Perhaps the most obvious example is his German letter of 1937. See DI, 51–4, 170–3, especially at pp. 53, 172.

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death of the subject’.³³ The Unnamable is not an instance of the death of the subject (in Schwab and many others’ sense), but of a willed refusal to be one: The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere, neither where Mahood is, nor where Worm is, nor where I am, it little matters thanks to what dispensation. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line . . . (TR, 341)

This is very like the insistence in Mallarm´e’s poem. What the Unnamable is saying, in effect, if with a very significant difference in tone, is that, like Mallarm´e’s master, it must and will refrain from casting the dice. It will not identify with any of its ‘bran-dips’ (TR, 394). The decision is even an axiomatic one, as indeed it is in Un coup de d´es: the Unnamable insists on ‘deciding, it doesn’t matter how, that I have [no voice]’ (TR, 357). At the same time, it is a paradoxical or minimal decision, a decision to remain undecided. What is most important is that the Unnamable resists both the general logic and all specific logics of appearance. If we have not quite been able to see this, that may be because, in spite of Beckett’s continuing popularity, the dominant culture makes us almost deaf to him, or at least to this aspect of his work. It is currently almost impossible to think the great universe of difference, as the Unnamable does, Beckett surely did, and Badiou certainly does, not, according to the fantasy of both social democrats and the market, as there already in the world of appearance or, more precisely, the situation in hand, but as intrinsic to the banally infinite multiplicity of Being. We are also quite likely to neglect the sheer rage against doxa that, as much as anything else, seems to me to power The Unnamable. Here, certainly, at least insofar as the Unnamable repeatedly asserts the imperative of ‘not being a dupe’, whatever the ironies that cluster round it, Beckett sounds like a Platonist. (Of course, it also asserts the imperative of ‘not being a dupe of not being a dupe’, TR, 216. But whilst that unplatonically ups the ante, it hardly subverts the initial imperative.) The Unnamable belongs to the tradition, inaugurated by The Republic, of texts whose first principle is the bracketing off of established ideas, the interrogation of the world as given. The great main section of the text is primarily concerned with its refusal to internalize the voice of the other variously identified with ‘my master’ (TR, 312), ‘your ³³ Gabriele Schwab, ‘The Politics of Small Differences: Beckett’s The Unnamable’, in Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (eds.), Engagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 42–57, p. 45. But Schwab also argues convincingly that the Unnamable is engaged in ‘a politics of meditative detachment from words and worlds’, p. 48.

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Lordship’ (TR, 315), ‘a whole college of tyrants’ (TR, 312), ‘these maniacs’ (TR, 329), ‘my delegates’ (TR, 299), ‘my purveyors’ (TR, 354), ‘the devils who beset me’ (TR, 350), ‘the beleaguerers’ (TR, 396), and Basil, Mahood, and the ‘old gang’. ‘The things they have told me!’, it exclaims. ‘About men, the light of day. I refused to believe them’ (TR, 299). ‘They’ seek in vain to ram ‘the inestimable gift of life’ down the Unnamable’s gullet (ibid.). In its turn, it obstinately repudiates the world dished up to it. In other words, it commits itself to the principle and never gives up on the project of radical subtraction. There are two important points to be made about The Unnamable as a work of subtraction. First, though the Unnamable itself certainly often discusses the work of the ‘tyrants’ in terms of a language they have imposed on it, its principal concern is neither its construction as a subject in language nor, more Wittgensteinianly, the limits of language and the problem of ‘ineffability’.³⁴ This is clear enough from the fact that it repeatedly states that the imposition includes mathematics. The ‘tyrants’ have rather sought to stuff it with their ideas: love, intelligence, reason, charity, solidarity or fellowship, and, of course, above all, man; hence the various references to education, college, lectures, courses, and so on. Language is included but not all that is at issue in the list. The Unnamable’s work of subtraction takes place in relation to the world of opinion. It presents this world as always particular but always with us. In other words, it hollows out Badiou’s local and global logics of appearance together. Its dismissal of ‘all their balls about being and existing’ (TR, 351) is a particularly sly example of this: in the context of existentialism in Paris in the 1940s, the seemingly general terms have a quite specific historical ring. The Unnamable’s denunciation of the ‘tyrants’ as ‘paltry priests of the irrepressible ephemeral’ is crucial (TR, 318). Like Un coup de d´es, but much more furiously and less fastidiously, it struggles above all to avoid capture in the nets of the ‘irrepressible ephemeral’. In this respect, it seeks to reverse the Nietzschean reversal of Platonism, the Nietzschean commitment to the world of appearance. That it does so with no conviction as to the supernal realm of Ideas gives the exact measure both of the risk it takes and of the apagogic character of its reasoning, of which more in a moment. It is hardly surprising to find the Unnamable tempted to cast itself as scapegoat or sacrificial victim, as in its ³⁴ For the second view, see for instance Bruce Kawin, ‘On Not Having the Last Word: Beckett, Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language’, in Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter, Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 189–201.

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claim that ‘they loaded me down with their trappings and stoned me through the carnival’ (TR, 327). The Unnamable’s resistance to all logics of appearance is inseparable from its effort to think itself ontologically, as pure multiplicity or banal infinity, ‘finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again’ (TR, 304). It precisely shares Molloy and Malone’s sense of limits and limitlessness together, of their existence as at once bounded and lacking a terminus: ‘if by dint of winding myself up I must inevitably find myself stuck in the end, once launched in the opposite direction should I not normally unfold ad infinitum, with no possibility of ever stopping . . . ?’ (TR, 319). Its ontological effort is particularly marked in the ‘preamble’, before it begins its dispute with the ‘tyrants’, the logic of which it thus makes clear from the start. Not surprisingly, the colour of the opening pages is ‘noir-gris’, that of the penumbra of Being. The Unnamable dreams of identifying with Being itself, of fading into the penumbra. It strenuously resists any determinate localization in a singular appearance: ‘These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, or if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere’ (TR, 303). This is the point to what Thomas Hunkeler sees as Beckett’s turn to bˆetise.³⁵ The Unnamable’s resistance to any localization is also resistance to the terms of knowledge or veridicity, and thus an intransigent stupidity. This must inevitably set it on a collision course with the ‘tyrants’: ‘I always liked not knowing, but [Mahood] said it wasn’t right’ (TR, 311). But to repeat: Being has always already entered the realm of consistency. Ontology is always situated. There is no experience of Being ‘beyond all structure’ (EE, 34), beyond any particular situation. There can be no representation of Being. This, I think, is the point to the outlandish account of the Unnamable’s ‘world tour’ and its return to its family (TR, 319–26). The terms it finds for its traversal of the ‘vast and heaving wastes’ while ‘the periods of Ptomaine grew pale’ are patently, ludicrously extreme (TR, 320). Language struggles haplessly to ‘say Being’. But the Unnamable is also caught in a classic Beckettian irony. It is not the subject of an event. It can therefore only resist the situation in the situation’s terms. Hence its pervasive conviction of the untenability of its position and its chronic agitation. It can fight its ‘tyrants’ only with the weapons they have already given it. They in fact ‘dictate this ´ ³⁵ In the Trilogy as a whole. See Thomas Hunkeler, Echos de l’ego dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 213.

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torrent of balls’ (TR, 338). Its plight is quintessentially comic: ‘a parrot, that’s what they’re up against, a parrot’ (ibid.). The whole of the Worm section is devoted to extending the irony in question, in effect, to writing it into The Unnamable as deeply and subtly as possible. The Unnamable seeks to represent in Worm what it cannot represent as and in itself, since it has no resort other than the torrent of balls. It does so, however, only to find the ‘rascal’ being swept away by the same torrent and progressively ‘humanized’ in its turn (TR, 361). Here, if anywhere in The Unnamable, the possibility of a Dantean eternity of repetition seems to loom dismally large. Thus a text that I have tried to evoke as intense, aggressive, furious, even violent is also a vision of the inertia of the remainder. (Indeed, one of Beckett’s more extraordinary insights is into the connection between extreme violence and inertia.) The Unnamable is trapped in the seemingly irreducible falsehood of inertia (‘what falseness instantly’, as it says itself, TR, 413). It speaks ‘knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says’ (TR, 309). But, as in Un coup de d´es, rock coexists with Siren. The condition of The Unnamable is inertia and ´ev´enementialit´e together—´ev´enementialit´e understood, in Bersani and Dutoit’s terms, as the impersonal ‘initiating power’ that Beckett recognizes as the preserve of art.³⁶ Certainly, events are not to be expected or predicted. No logic, line of development, process, or movement inexorably leads to an event: ‘none of your hoping here, that would spoil everything’ (TR, 365). Indeed, any transformative power of the event is eminently open to question, even as pure alea: ‘If one day a change were to take place, resulting from a principle of disorder already present, or on its way, what then? . . . No, here all change would be fatal and land me back, there and then, in all the fun of the fair’ (TR, 297). Yet the power of that judgement is overturned by the power of another: simply, ‘the best is not to decide anything’ (TR, 294). From the start, the Unnamable commits itself to the hesitation of Mallarm´e’s master, to ‘aporia’, however impure and non-simple, to ‘affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later’ (TR, 293). It pointedly contrasts this with the discourses of knowledge and the hermeneutic move, which always involve throwing the dice: ‘Into the dossier with it . . . in support of whatever thesis you fancy’ (TR, 347). I’d underline the fact of a commitment: the Beckettian choice of aporia is as much a commitment as Mallarm´ean hesitation, not least to a protractedlabour. ³⁶ Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42.

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Aporia spells extremely hard work. Certainly, the Unnamable understands the irony of its choice. It treats the choice ironically, too, as a ‘tedious’ exercise in ‘equipoise’ (TR, 365). But this is not because Beckett surrenders where Mallarm´e persists, but rather because the odds have radically lengthened, in that historical experience has made the task still more formidable. What remains is a radically attenuated form of the ‘waiting subject’. The Unnamable is a sardonically reduced and almost self-cancelling version of Mallarm´ean attentiveness. It remains alert to what it calls the occasional ‘manifestations’ of a disorder ‘the meaning of which escapes me’ (TR, 296). It also understands, as Watt did not, that such ‘manifestations’ are not to be interpreted: ‘Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what’ (TR, 298). It recognizes that ‘encounters’ might be the means of ‘possible deliverance’ (TR, 301–2).³⁷ It even anticipates the image of the ‘collapsion’ in Ill Seen Ill Said, in its meditation on the ‘little stir . . . some tiny subsidence or upheaval, that would start things off, the whole fabric would be infected, the ball would start a-rolling’ (TR, 388). This is not a bad description of a truth-procedure. The trouble is that it is merely hypothesized en passant. Most of all, however, in the weird, austere, awesome rigour of its shifts, suspensions, reversals, and dissolutions, the Unnamable sustains and preserves the link between thought and ´ev´enementialit´e. Here Beckett is quite as implacable as Mallarm´e. Like Mallarm´e’s, too, his intransigence is a function of his concern with what is not yet human. Paul Sheehan has provided a remarkable account of Beckett’s disparagement of humanist orthodoxy, not least with reference to The Unnamable.³⁸ Certainly, it is hard to overstate the sheer power of the Unnamable’s rejection of extant conceptions of humanity. Simon Critchley writes of Beckett’s ‘massive and unrelenting critique and dismantling of the illusoriness of what passes for life’.³⁹ The Unnamable offers perhaps the supreme instance of the actual practice of that critique. It will have no truck with ‘the life that’s on every tongue, the only possible!’ (TR, 352). To find itself ‘there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation’ is also to find itself ‘dumb with howling to be put out of my misery’ (TR, 318). ³⁷ Admittedly, none of the encounters we come across in the Trilogy would bear this out. See ´ Hunkeler, Echos de l’ego, 227. ³⁸ See Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 167–76. ³⁹ Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 171. Quoted Sheehan, Modernism, 178.

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We know very well what the ‘incriminated scenes’ are: in the late 1940s, they came unbidden to the pen.⁴⁰ Images of massacre, persecution, and torture are pervasive in Beckett’s novel, if handled with great discretion. Celan and Sebald apart, few have been more aware than Beckett of the implications of these images for what he called ‘the haze of our smug will to live’.⁴¹ ‘Haze’ is interesting: it suggests a contrast with the crystalline rigour of significant thought, art, and writing that would be pleasing to Badiou. What runs contrary to the ‘smug will’ is not despair or the death-drive, but the intellectual demand. Beset by manifold and intricate ironies, the Unnamable must none the less continue to utter ‘the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles’ (TR, 328). Here indeed it sounds close to Badiou, who argues that ethics means ‘not consenting’ to ‘what is presented to us’ (CS, 319).⁴² Unconsenting man is man refusing to be what is meant by man even as he has to call himself man, man invoking that which is unknown as man.⁴³ For both Badiou and Beckett, this quite distinctively radical refusal to consent is where the labour for both freedom and justice begins. But when Sheehan suggests that Beckett’s characters are enslaved to an inhuman and mechanical principle, he assumes that Beckett presents the world as both full and static, without possible addition.⁴⁴ In this respect, he ends up coinciding with the very humanists of whom he is so critical. But one of the Unnamable’s most important self-images is of ‘the galley man, bound for the Pillars of Hercules, who drops his sweep under cover of night and crawls between the thwarts, towards the rising sun, unseen by the guard, praying for storm . . . towards the new day that promises to be glorious’ (TR, 339–42). Theoretically, at least, the break with enslavement is always imaginable. Of course, the Unnamable adds the mordant rider that it has ‘stopped praying for anything’. But this underlines the point rather than ironizing it: to pray for a new humanity would precisely be to risk determining it according to an old one. Beckett commits himself to the thought of the event in an even ⁴⁰ For a brilliant and much extended version of this argument with specific reference to the Trilogy, see Adam Piette, Cold War Insiders (Oxford University Press, forthcoming ). ⁴¹ Proust, 5. ⁴² Badiou is certainly placing himself in relation to the Mallarm´ean lineage, here, and may be consciously echoing the Unnamable. ⁴³ Cf. Bersani and Dutoit: Beckett’s works have to do, not with ‘anything rich or moving or complex in the human but rather the major point of entry into the human’. Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 54. ⁴⁴ This is only part of Sheehan’s case. He also argues, in terms very close to my own, that ‘Beckett’s is a quest for the human as difference, an ‘‘impossible’’ search’. Sheehan, Modernism, 177.

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more demanding way than Mallarm´e. Mallarm´e suggests that we cannot prescribe the event without foreclosing it, without stripping it of the pure arbitrariness that is constitutive of its power. For Beckett, however, any insistence even on the possibility of the event is to establish an unwarranted connection between what we have and what we might have. Thus the Unnamable is concerned with ‘my inexistence in the eyes of those who are not in the know, that is to say all mankind’ (TR, 347). It insists on the power of ‘the one outside of life we always were in the end, all our long vain life long’ (TR, 349). Interestingly, like Badiou, it is concerned with two kinds of inexistence that it identifies with one another. On the one hand, there is the inexistence of what is not yet human. On the other, there is inexistence as the condition of belonging without being included (Canadian ‘Indians’, cockle-pickers). Thus, in an almost uncanny forecast of Catastrophe, the Unnamable pleads, ‘let it go through me at last, the right [voice], the last one, his who has none’ (TR, 350). It would thus be mistaken to suggest that, pervasive though irony is in The Unnamable, irony is everywhere definitive of it, its nec plus ultra. Irony is the ineluctable context of the Unnamable’s struggle. But there are also important moments when it recognizes the limits of irony: ‘It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness’ (TR, 326). For irony turned inside out is apagogic reason: it would be absurd to deny that humanity is a radically unfinished project, that, as Bakhtin put the point, the greater part of humanity has still to be uttered in a language of the future. But that future is unthinkable and its language not available. We might put the logic at stake in terms that precisely bring home the gulf between The Unnamable and established forms of radical politics: it is the language of the future which gives meaning to politics, which is to decree the impossibility of politics, which is not to give up on politics. At historical moments when the thought of what is not yet human seems imperative, like the late 1940s or the beginning of the twenty-first century, the task in which one must persevere is itself stamped with ‘the absurd of not being able’, as the Unnamable says in its own remarks on apagogic reason (TR, 349). It is a ‘strange notion in any case, and eminently open to suspicion, that of a task to be performed, before one can be at rest’ (TR, 313). None the less, ‘to go on and get on has been my only care’ (TR, 323). What I take to be the fourth section of The Unnamable partly reviews the themes of the first three. But it also changes some of what have become quite fixed points of reference: thus the creature in the urn is firmly named

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as Mahood (TR, 374), the ‘gang’ are presented as no worse than anyone else (TR, 375), the culpability of the ‘everlasting third party’ is called into question (TR, 379), and so on. Here, too, the ‘hypotheses launched’ (TR, 392) accumulate to the point of extreme redundancy. Thus the Unnamable suggests that it might be ‘a sperm dying, of cold, in the sheets, feebly wagging its little tail’ (TR, 383), that it is involved in a ‘public show’ with an ‘audience’ (TR, 385), that it is the ‘tympanum’ of an ear (TR, 386). There is a kind of desperate proliferation of outlandish logics of appearance. This betokens exhaustion: ‘so long as, so long as, let me see, so long as one, so long as he, ah fuck all that, so long as this, then that, agreed, that’s good enough’ (TR, 403).⁴⁵ The manic but futile explosion of mock-throws of the dice begins to draw towards its end. ‘Ah if only this could stop’, says the Unnamable (TR, 374); and then, finally, ‘I’m going silent, there’s going to be silence’ (TR, 397). The Unnamable’s awareness of getting close to its end focuses the last section of the novel on the relationship between ending and continuing or persevering. What kind of ending fits a work that, discursively, has been all protasis and no apodosis? The answer, of course, is that it must be an ironical ending, one that disowns its finality: ‘I’ll go on’ (TR, 418). Here again irony reverses into apagogic reason: first, what the Unnamable is saying is that it will and must continue with a work that looks absurd in the eyes of the world. How could it not, since radical subtraction is subtraction of the world itself, a radical denial of the situation in hand? That The Unnamable ends on a victorious note has seldom if ever been suggested. But if Mahood and the ‘tyrants’ have stated that ‘not knowing’ isn’t right, the Unnamable’s closing assertion—‘I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know’ (ibid.)—suggests that it has successfully refused to be cowed. It insists on an intimate connection between perseverance or continuation and nonknowledge. Secondly, if ‘going on’ matters, it is as perseverance with what has broken the perseverance in interest, and therefore with a pitting of the will against itself. The ambiguous tone of the Unnamable’s closing words ⁴⁵ It is the proliferation of logics that is specific to this part of the novel, not their outlandishness. The latter has been a staple feature of Beckett’s art at least since Watt, and will continue to be so long after. Beckett’s presentation of the body seems to me to be predominantly according to outlandish logics of appearance. Young Beckett scholars have recently produced brilliant work on Beckett and the body. See for instance Ulrika Maude, ‘Beckett’s Landscapes: Topography, Body and Subject’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of York, 2001); and Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body’ (Ph.D. thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2004). None the less, it seems to me that Beckett is never really concerned with the being of the body as such, but with the body as appearance.

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suggests exactly this. It is both assertive, and grimly resigned to what it cannot help. Thirdly, the perseverance at stake is much more obviously relevant to the aesthetic than it is to Badiou’s other three domains. What Porter Abbott calls the Beckettian ‘trope of onwardness’ spells perseverance with and in the break itself, rather than a disciplined pursuit of its consequences. Beckett repeatedly fractures ‘the emergent familiarity of his own work’, creating ‘occasions of renewed surprise’.⁴⁶ The Unnamable’s labours may have left it on ‘the threshold of my story’ (ibid.), the threshold in question being the threshold of what, for Badiou, is historical time, the time of a truth-sequence that begins with an event. But it is not Beckett’s concern to take us across that threshold. The Unnamable belongs to a world in which appearance is no longer a specific instance of essence. It is a localization of an infinite and inconsistent multiplicity. Appearances are at one and the same time extremely stable and highly volatile. This is how the Unnamable experiences itself and its world. insofar as appearances are volatile, it is because they are localizations of Being. Being is anarchic and inconsistent. However, the anarchy of Being is not accessible in itself. This means that the volatility of appearance (of a situation) is only exposed haphazardly, by an event. Nothing in the Unnamable’s world rules out the possibility of an event, but no event takes place. Thus the Unnamable’s world is characterized by its inertia. But it is also characterized by its instability, by ´ev´enementialit´e. Beckett wrote of O’Casey that he discerns ‘the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion’ (DI, 82). This does not necessarily mean that the solidities actually explode. We might also recall Beckett’s image of Geer van Velde’s work as the interior of a stone plagued by ‘an insurrection of its molecules . . . a thousandth of a second before it comes apart’ (DI, 128). So, too, in Still, a motionless figure is also ‘trembling all over’ (DF, 593). Beckett is gripped by this kind of image. It is his version of Mallarm´e’s poise between Siren and rock, between appearance and ´ev´enementialit´e. If, at the very end, the Unnamable may conceivably be on the threshold of its story, the implication is that the novel itself is not finally about the death of the subject, but the possibility of the birth of one. By the same token, it is preoccupied with what Badiou understands as objectivity. The Unnamable meets the conditions of an object: it is made evident by a transcendental, ⁴⁶ H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 32.

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whether conceived of as the title of the work, or the assemblage of particular words in a particular order which allows us to talk about it. Equally, it exists as a proliferation of modes of self-identity with differing degrees of intensity: Mahood and Worm, for example, as compared to Malone as compared to Yerk; or, less literally, self-interrogation as opposed to romanticism (‘murmuring Shelley’, TR, 396). Its consistencies are relational. It could be mapped in terms of mobile models, as vectors that start from it and go elsewhere or return to it. But it is not localized as an object: it both appears in a large and chaotic array of localizations and refuses any determinate localization. If it has no apparent hope of becoming a subject, it also resists objecthood. It sustains the thought of the point of inexistence, the trace of a link to the infinity of Being. It can never identify with the point of inexistence, but the point of inexistence none the less faintly marks the limit of any given appearance. In that respect, the arduous fidelity of the Unnamable—here, indeed, a via negativa—is to ´ev´enementialit´e, the event of the event.

6 The Thought of the Good: Enough, The Lost Ones, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho PL ATO AND L ACAN We might say of the Unnamable what Lacan says of the subject in Seminar VII, a text that has been very significant for Badiou: ‘If there is indeed something that can be called his good or his happiness, there is nothing to be expected in that regard from the microcosm, nor moreover from the macrocosm.’¹ Lacan’s terms of reference, here, derive from Aristotle. The microcosm is ‘the uncontested order that defines a certain character’ and involves the acquisition of habits.² The macrocosm is the ‘more universal knowledge’ with which that order ‘is unified’, and is where ethics (and the subject) intersect with politics (and the State).³ Aristotle is concerned with this distinction from the beginning of his thought, notably in the Nicomachean Ethics. For the most part, the Nicomachean Ethics does not read like a work of political science. However, Aristotle repeatedly says that it is one. It even ends with a programme for the Politics.⁴ Right from the start, it asserts that the Good is a question concerning both the individual and the State, together.⁵ Lacan, however, is very clear: the Good cannot be derived from either the established social order or character as a structure of habit. For desire has always been divided by the signifier: ‘It is insofar as the subject is situated and is constituted with relation to the signifier that the break, splitting or ¹ Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. with notes Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), 34. ² See the beginning of book II. Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a 33– b 25. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, tr. with an introd. David Ross, rev. J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28–9. ³ Lacan, Seminar VII, 22. ⁴ See Nicomachean Ethics, 1181b 12–23, pp. 274–6. ⁵ See the beginning of ibid. 1094a 19– b 12, p. 2.

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ambivalence is produced in him at the point where the tension of desire is located.’⁶ The structure in which the subject is situated constitutes him or her ‘as fundamental alienation’. He finds himself only in losing himself. How could he or she ever know the Good from within this structure? How could he or she ever find him- or herself within a social order which forgets itself from the start, which starts by forgetting itself, since it is founded on what Lacan calls ‘the service of goods’, and therefore on a turn away from itself ?⁷ This is not absolutely to deny the possibility of the Good. All the same, Lacan in 1959 seems close to echoing Beckett in 1945, not long before he wrote the Trilogy: there is ‘no more sense’ in ‘the inward than the outward search’ (DI, 97). Like the Lacan of 1959–60, the Beckett of 1945 was arguably working at an exquisite point of intellectual scruple, rather than expressing a blank negativity. At any rate, Lacan’s insistence on the difficulty of the Good, its inextricability from ‘the tragic sense of life’,⁸ places him very close to Beckett—and Badiou, up to a point. Badiou argues that a concern with the Good of the subject is chiefly evident in Beckett’s work after 1960. But this is to resort, again, to a specific narrative of Beckett’s development with which we should be familiar, by now. To some extent, David Cunningham is right to view this narrative with incredulity.⁹ As we’ve just seen, Beckett does not simply turn to a thought of the event in the work after Texts for Nothing. The thought is present in The Unnamable, for instance. Yet that an aesthetic shift takes place in the later work is one of the critical commonplaces about Beckett that are surely indisputable.¹⁰ Badiou is not altogether mistaken, either, in assuming that the shift involves a change in disposition towards the event. However, two points in his account of the shift need stressing. First, he emphasizes that it takes place irregularly, unpredictably, ‘not without hesitations and second thoughts’ (‘non sans h´esitations et repentirs’, BK, 39).¹¹ The hesitations and second thoughts, however, don’t obviously figure in his actual ⁶ Lacan, Seminar VII, 317. ⁷ For this argument in context, and for the full meaning of ‘the service of goods’, see the last section of Seminar VII, ‘The Tragic Dimension of Psychoanalytic Experience’, 289–325. Quotations are from pp. 293, 317. ⁸ Ibid. 313. ⁹ David Cunningham, ‘Farts and Formalization’, review of OB, Radical Philosophy, 126 (July–Aug. 2004), 44–6, p. 45. ¹⁰ See for instance Susan D. Brienza, Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds: Style in Metafiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 4. ¹¹ To translate ‘repentirs’ as ‘repentances’, here, would be pleasing, and it has had that meaning, as for example in Baudelaire: ‘Nos p´ech´es sont tˆetus, nos repentirs sont lˆaches.’ But its current meaning is closer to ‘crossings out’.

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readings of the later work. This is not surprising: though he may appreciate them in principle when he finds them in Beckett, Badiou has little attachment to hesitation and arri`ere pens´ee as features of an intellectual manner. This is the case because they raise the problem of the encounter with the remainder. For the same reason, they will be important to this chapter. It is worth pointing out that, whilst Badiou repeatedly finds points of comparison between later Beckett and Mallarm´e, the ‘hesitations’ he specifically mentions in Beckett’s work are not exactly the Mallarm´ean hesitations we encountered in The Unnamable, though again, as in The Unnamable, they are the hesitations of a ‘waiting subject’. Secondly: obviously enough, the differences between Beckett’s earlier and later prose include significant differences in vocabulary and tone. Think for instance of the final injunction of Ill Seen Ill Said (‘Know happiness’, IS, 59) or the sudden ‘Joy!’ in Worstward Ho (WH, 29). Interestingly, Badiou associates Beckett’s later effort to open up to the event with a treatment of great, simple themes. He does this, too, without neglecting the sheer originality of that treatment. He is very well aware that Beckett locates the themes within extremely complex structures. There is no trace of a more or less covert return to humanism in Badiou’s Beckett. This is the case above all with love, as we shall see when we connect Enough with Badiou’s formulation of love as a truth-procedure, which is decidedly not humanistic. By way of testing Badiou’s account of the later Beckett (excluding the drama, for the moment) I shall look at the four of Beckett’s later prose texts that have most interested him: Enough (1965), The Lost Ones (1966, 1970), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983). The grand theme in the late work that I particularly want to emphasize is one of the two introduced by my quotation from Lacan: the Good. The question of the Good is very much a theme in Worstward Ho, though its treatment is punning and seems oblique, even sardonic: Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all . . . . The head. Ask not if it can go. Say no. Unasking no. It cannot go. Save dim go. The all go. Oh dim go. Go for good. All for good. Good and all. (WH, 8, 19)

By contrast, as we’ll see, Ill Seen Ill Said is partly concerned with what it calls evil.¹² It is to Badiou’s credit that he has taken the question of the ethics of Beckett’s later work seriously, in a way that others have not. For a firm grasp ¹² See IS, 9.

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of certain aspects of that ethics, however, it is helpful to turn to a philosophical context that Badiou supplies elsewhere in his work. I began the chapter with Lacan’s response to Aristotle. However, Badiou is much more interested in Lacan’s response to Plato, as particularly emerges in ‘L’Antiphilosophie: Lacan et Platon’. Here Badiou raises the question of the Platonic conception of the Good.¹³ In the first instance, the concept of the Good must be freed from ‘the theological straitjacket [gangue th´eologique] in which it has been plunged for centuries’.¹⁴ But this does not mean that it must then be conceived of ‘as an imaginary projection on to an impenetrable void’ (CS, 319). The Good is an ‘end point’ (‘point d’arrˆet’, CS, 312):¹⁵ that is, the term designates ‘a point of radical alterity’ to Ideas and the relations between them (ibid.). This may sound rather odd: alterity is not usually a concept of any importance to Badiou. Indeed, insofar as it emerges within a currently dominant, Levinas-inspired ethics whose foundation is theological, he is extremely distrustful of it. We need to proceed carefully. Badiou sets out from Lacan’s critique of the Platonic theme of recollection. This theme appears with particular clarity and point in the Meno. Socrates and Meno are concerned with the question of knowledge of the Good and how it is attained. Socrates argues that ‘searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection’.¹⁶ In order to show this, he turns to Meno’s slave. The slave has had no education and knows nothing of mathematics in particular. Yet Socrates shows that he can see what the right answer to a geometrical problem must logically be. But where can the slave have derived this knowledge from? He can only have found it ‘within himself’, as a recollection:¹⁷ As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.¹⁸

Socrates will develop this line of thought further in the Phaedo, where the theoretical knowledge that arrives by recollection is now also made to include the Platonic Forms.¹⁹ ¹³ See CS, 306–26. For Plato on the Good, see for example the ninth chapter of Republic. ¹⁴ CS, 312. More neutrally, ‘gangue’ also means matrix. The anti-theological bent of Badiou’s reading of Plato is perhaps the clearest index of its radicalism. ¹⁵ ‘End point’ is the Platonic term: see for instance Republic 511c; Plato, Republic, tr. with an introd. and notes Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 239. ¹⁶ Meno 81e. Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, tr. G. M. A. Grube, rev. John M. Cooper (2nd edn. Indianapolis : Hackett, 2002), 71. ¹⁷ Meno 85d; Five Dialogues, 77. ¹⁸ Meno 81d; Five Dialogues, 71. ¹⁹ See Phaedo 73a–76d; Five Dialogues, 110–15.

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There are obvious reasons why Lacan should be interested in the Platonic treatment of recollection. Socratic maieutics can look remarkably close to the analytic situation. As the ‘sujet suppos´e savoir’, Socrates induces and organizes a transference or transferences.²⁰ In the Meno itself, through conversation, he leads the slave ‘to give his own speech its true meaning’.²¹ Badiou fastens in particular on Lacan’s reading of Socrates, in the last great sequence of the Symposium, after a drunken Alcibiades has broken in upon the banquet, as telling Alcibiades to ‘Look to [his own] desire’; that is, to recognize what is truly at stake for himself in his fulsome encomium on Socrates’ virtues.²² However, Lacan is crucially intent on distinguishing between Platonic recollection and recollection in analysis. As Badiou notes, for Lacan, Platonic recollection is in fact a futile play of mirrors. For it refers thought away in an infinite recession: If present experience presupposes reminiscence, and if reminiscence is what ensues from the experience of previous lives, then it must be the case that these experiences have also been had with the help of reminiscence. There’s no reason why this recurrence should come to an end . . . ²³

On the one hand, there is the inaccessible world of Platonic reality. This world is preordained and immutable. On the other hand, there is the infinite recession of the imaginary. In effect, for the subject, there is only recollection: there is only the backward look to the purity of a reality that is forever beyond the order of simulacra. By contrast, recollection in analysis ‘is not the return of a form, an imprint, a [sic] eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from beyond’.²⁴ Analysis recognizes ‘the creative power of the symbolic order’, the ‘true capacity of beginning contained in the symbol’, where Plato blocks and denies them (CS, 311). For indeed ‘there is an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the signifying chain as a distinct order and which isolates in their own specific dimension the memorable and the remembered.’²⁵ For Lacan, this creative principle is of great ethical ²⁰ See Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Alan Sheridan, introd. David Macey (1977; London: Vintage, 1998), 232. ²¹ Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–54, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. with notes John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 278. ²² See Symposium 212d–223b, especially at 222c–d. Plato, Symposium, tr. with an introd. and notes Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 56–71; Lacan, Seminar XI, 255, ´ and Ecrits: A Selection, tr. from the French by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 322; and CS, 316–17. ²³ Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli, notes John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 15. ²⁴ Lacan, Seminar XI, 47. ²⁵ Lacan, Seminar VII, 214.

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importance, and I’ll come back to it at the end of this chapter. But it has no place in Plato’s thought. Badiou challenges this account of Plato in one crucial respect: Lacan ignores Plato’s conception of the Good. The Good is not an Idea.²⁶ It is subtracted both from Ideas, and their ‘exposition’ as the shadows that we take for reality (CS, 313). If the Good is an end point, what it brings to an end is precisely recollection, the infinite recession from existence to Ideas and between Ideas themselves. At the point of radical alterity that is the Good, all reflection is suspended. For Plato, the Good is the other that places language under the law of truth: . . . it’s goodness which gives the things we know their truth and makes it possible for people to have knowledge. It is responsible for knowledge and truth, and you should think of it as being within the intelligible realm, but you shouldn’t identify it with knowledge and truth, otherwise you’ll be wrong. For all their value, it is even more valuable.²⁷

The italicized phrase is terser and more evocative in the French translation that Badiou quotes: ‘le Bien ‘‘prodigue la v´erit´e aux connaissables et la capacit´e au connaissant’’ ’ (CS, 313). Plato’s reference to ‘knowledge and truth’ together confuses two concepts that Badiou keeps separate. Here it is important to be as exact as possible. In ‘L’Antiphilosophie’, Badiou does not really distinguish his own version of the Good from Plato’s. But his is not Plato’s as opposed to Lacan’s. It is rather Plato’s as filtered through Lacan’s anti-philosophical rigour, as supremely exemplified in Seminar VII. If the Good is prodigal, it is not as donation, as a ‘univocal power of Being’ to which its simulacra ‘joyously attest’ (DE, 25). The power of the metastructure of the State makes this impossible.²⁸ It is Deleuze whose Good is inseparable from ‘the univocal sovereignty of the One’ (which incidentally exposes him as an ‘involuntary Platonist’, DE, 46, 60). If the Good places language under the law of truth, it also ensures the specificity of the law of truth: there is no truth of truths. We should remember that Badiou conceives of truth ‘as a random course or as a kind of escapade’ (DE, 57). ²⁶ See CS, 312–13. Cf. DE, 26. Not everyone thinks Plato is saying this. For example, R. E. Allen argues the reverse. See Plato’s Parmenides, tr. with comment by R. E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. iv (rev. edn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 222. ²⁷ Republic 508e–509a, p. 236, italics mine. ²⁸ Cf. Lacan’s assertion that, with modernity, happiness and the good become a ‘political matter’ and are thus ‘indefinitely postponed’ (Seminar VII, 291–3). As he also asserts, ‘ ‘‘there is no satisfaction for the individual outside the satisfaction of all’’ ’ (p. 292; he is quoting his own formula). Beckett surely hears a very similar assertion in the line from Lamartine—‘Un seul eˆtre vous manque, et tout est d´epeupl´e’—that I comment on a little later.

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The Good is the point of excess which ensures an undetermined plurality of truths and their rare and singular emergences. We should recall Badiou’s account of the point of excess in the Timaeus. The Good is what I have called a flicker or wobble in Being, a principle of fundamental ontological instability that errs ad libitum through the world and is a potential threat to all stasis. In the end, for Lacan, Plato is a sentimental moralist, without the impassivity and strenuous attention that are required of the analyst by the discourse of the analysand. The discourse of the analysand is that of a truth in process, and emerges at the very point at which signification confronts the void. Plato is a sentimentalist because, in Lacan’s reading of him, he projects the Good on to the void. But Badiou asserts that this is not the case: in Plato, the Good is the place where the encounter with the real (in Lacan’s sense) is always possible. It summons us to make the hazardous break with the serial condition of an established situation. As book VII of the Republic makes clear, it tells us to refuse any ‘simple adaptation’ to the given, to ‘what is presented to us’, to ‘the service of goods’ (CS, 319. Here Plato and Lacan coincide; they coincide with Beckett and Badiou, too). What commands this break is the Good conceived of, not as an imaginary projection on to or ‘filling in’ of the void, but as the event which makes the void apprehensible. The Good is not discovered by thought in a confrontation with the void. It happens to thought in the unpredictable and incalculable moment at which the event arrives. Lacan cannot see this. He identifies Plato with the philosophical drive to master Being.²⁹ But, in the Sophist, Plato tells us that, in the ‘intelligible realm’, Being and non-Being coexist. Ideas do not render Being as completed knowledge. They are mixed: as the Sophist tortuously makes clear, they ‘infect’ Being with non-Being (CS, 320).³⁰ Badiou’s argument fits very well with Plato’s ²⁹ Badiou himself has been associated with a return to philosophical ‘mastery’. See for instance Cunningham, ‘Farts’, 45. But insofar as Being can be ‘mastered’ at all, for Badiou, it is the mathematician and not the philosopher who masters it. Furthermore, truths appear only in the four domains, and are not philosophical. They, too, are not to be mastered by the philosopher, who must resist suture. Badiou’s claims for philosophy are tightly reined in. The ‘strength’ of the voice that Cunningham takes as revealing Badiou’s will to power is in fact that of an axiom. It is born above all of a passion for resistance, a Platonic disentanglement of truth from opinion. But Plato’s global conception of truth can no longer be sustained, which leaves philosophical resistance in a markedly precarious position, since truth has a remainder. Cunningham’s Nietzscheanism and contemporary, ‘democratic’ bent means that, like others, he can hardly hear Badiou at all, or see how close, in some respects, Badiou is to the Adorno whose side Cunningham himself thinks his review is taking. ³⁰ See the ‘dangerous discussion’ in Sophist 237a ff.; Plato, Sophist, tr. with an introd. and notes Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993): ‘that which is not somehow is’, says the Visitor from Elea, ‘and then again . . . that which is somehow is not’ (241d, p. 31). On the ‘intelligible’ and ‘visible’ realms, see Republic 508c, p. 235.

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admission that it is impossible that the Republic should be achieved, and his final indifference to the question of its viability. The Republic is model N , an ‘id´ealit´e a`-venir’ (EE, 473).³¹ Badiou is very aware of just how complex, subtle, and even innovative Lacan’s reading of Plato is.³² Lacan’s Plato recognizes that intellection is not possessed of complete self-knowledge, that it has an aleatory or unconscious aspect which is irreducible to knowledge. Lacan recognizes the possibility that Plato is an essentially comic writer, an ironist who ‘leaves all the questions open’ and whose real meaning remains latent or hidden.³³ Badiou himself even seems to have been influenced by Lacan on this point. But Lacan cannot see the connection between the dialogic, ironical, and aporetic elements in Plato’s works and his conception of the Good itself. LOVE , ENOUGH The later Beckett, I think, like Badiou and the Lacan of Seminar VII, is concerned with a rare Good, but in a conception of it so austere that it is always in danger of being overcome by irony or abnegation. The later prose text in which he most effectively protects this conception is Enough. Not surprisingly, for Badiou, this has been an unusually important text. Beckett’s turn after 1960 involves relinquishing the search for or thought of the One, of a singular or unitary entity, whether Being, the cogito or the origin of the voice. He turns to multiplicity instead. Since Beckett is always concerned with the simplest possible formulation, the chief form of the multiple is two: hence the significance of the couple in his later work, and the turn to drama, the literary form, above all, that is concerned with exchange, dialogue. For Beckett, subjectivity is no longer associated with self-interrogation, but emerges in the encounter with another. This encounter singularizes the Beckettian subject and rescues him or her from a fearful anonymity. Along with love and the Good, the later Beckett is also concerned with the possibility of happiness, chiefly as it is available to the couple. Badiou takes love to be a crucial theme in Beckett’s later work. The loving couple is a specific phenomenon. It is the consequence of a specific kind of ³¹ See Republic 472a–e, 592b, pp. 190–2, 343. On model N, see p. 66. ³² A better sense of the sheer complexity of Lacan’s reading of Plato (and of course Badiou’s) might save critics from the egregious simplifications involved in playing good new Beckett off against bad old Plato. See for instance Brian Duffy, ‘The Prisoners in the Cave and the Worm in the Pit: Plato and Beckett on Authority and Truth’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 8/1 (Autumn 1998), 51–66. ³³ See Lacan, Seminar XI, 197, pp. 232–4.

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event, the chance encounter. Love proceeds from this encounter as a form of fidelity, not just to the other, but to the hazardous character of the encounter itself. As such, it is a precise instance of the inseparability of subject and truth. For the encounter and the truth deriving from it are known only to the couple concerned and have no objective status. Badiou says that the loving couple are ‘subtracted from the boredom of the objective’ (BK, 59). The truth of love is a ‘savoir e´merveill´e’, an ‘amazed knowledge’ (BK, 60). Love is a strong but also a ‘strange’ form of happiness (BK, 56). We will soon see the relevance of this. Thus love is opposed to the knowledge the Beckettian solitary previously and vainly sought outside the barren doxa that others took for knowledge, and that was cast into such extreme doubt in The Unnamable. The possibility of the ‘amazed knowledge’ of love is evoked, perhaps above all, in the ‘prodigious text’ that is Enough (PM, 174). Enough is a brief monologue by a speaker of unspecified gender.³⁴ It recounts and comments on a long love affair—‘Ten years at the very least’ (CSP, 189)—between the speaker and an anonymous male figure. We are told that this love affair is over. The love in question can be traced to an event: the speaker is clear that he or she has forgotten everything that preceded it. His or her truth is precisely and only that of a shared love. The event has ruptured an established order, as Badiou says it must, or set an established order at a distance. The title of the story has four points of reference, one of which I shall leave until later. First, the speaker has had ‘enough’ in that he or she has been the subject of a truth. Not only does he or she use the strangely unBeckettian word ‘satisfaction’ (CSP, 186). He or she can give substance to it: ‘in my life it was eternally mild. As if the earth had come to rest in spring’ (CSP, 191). Secondly, the speaker has ‘had enough’ of the ensuing loss of truth. Thirdly and crucially: elsewhere, Beckett uses the word ‘enough’ in a radically different fashion, most notably, perhaps, in Worstward Ho, where it serves as a prelude to the image of the ‘three pins’ and ‘one pinhole’. I shall discuss this moment in detail later. For Badiou, it constitutes an event. The word ‘enough’ heralds the point at which an established order is set at a distance. In Beckett, the word can function to draw a line under a situation or state of affairs, to declare it defunct, to write it off. This, too, is relevant to ³⁴ Pilling and Knowlson argue this point convincingly, and I follow them here. See John Pilling and James Knowlson, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979), 152. Badiou assumes that the speaker is feminine by virtue not of gender but of sexualized ‘position’ (BK, 58): ‘No Two pre-exists the encounter, and in particular no duality of the sexes’ (CS, 357). Cf. also SB, 26.

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Enough. Pilling and Knowlson underline this when they suggest that the first line, ‘All that goes before forget’, can be read as advertising ‘the uniqueness of Enough’, marking it as a break with the preceding corpus (CSP, 186).³⁵ Beckett himself seems to have been taken by surprise: ‘I don’t know what came over me’, he confessed.³⁶ On the one hand, then, there is a firm basis for reading Enough as about a truth. This truth is the consequence of an event that is specified as an encounter and inaugurates a new way of being. On the other hand, it seems like a distinctly unpromising example of the theme. Take for instance the description of the encounter itself: Our meeting. Though very bowed already he looked a giant to me. In the end his trunk ran parallel with the ground. To counterbalance this anomaly he held his legs apart and sagged at the knees. His feet grew more and more flat and splay. His horizon was the ground they trod. Tiny moving carpet of turf and trampled flowers. He gave me his hand like a tired old ape with the elbow lifted as high as it would grow. I had only to straighten up to be head and shoulders above him. (CSP, 187–8)

Pilling and Knowlson argue that romantic readings of Enough are ‘reductive and misguided’.³⁷ This passage seems self-evidently to bear them out. But the anti-romantic deflation is not like that of the Trilogy (‘But is it true love, in the rectum?’, TR, 57). The effect is rather monstrous or outlandish. Badiou briefly notes that such moments generate irony, but treats the irony in question as negligible. Yet it is insistent throughout both the English and the French versions. The seeming contradiction in Enough is exactly explained by my discussion of the relationship between event and site in Chapter 3. The event has a site, the existing multiples of which furnish it with its substance. There is always a scission, a split between the event as break and the persistence of elements from the context within which it arrives. If a truth overthrows the terms of an already constituted knowledge, it does not simply thrust the subject clear of those terms. It must enter into composition with them. Paradoxically, the new situation both repeats the multiples of the old situation and spawns new multiples. This precisely explains the extraordinary character of a text like Enough, the simultaneous familiarity and unrecognizability of its ³⁵ Pilling and Knowlson, Frescoes of the Skull, 149. ³⁶ Quoted in P. J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 105. ³⁷ Pilling and Knowlson, Frescoes of the Skull, 153.

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world. Here the question of language is very important. The site of the event includes established linguistic formations. The event itself does not simply dissolve these. It rather leaves its trace as what, from the point of view of an already constituted knowledge, is deformation or partial intelligibility. This is why Badiou places so much emphasis on ill-saying or missaying in Beckett’s later work. What is at stake in Enough is the concept of the singularity of a truth, a singularity known above all in love. But this truth must compose with terms that exist already and are not singular. The truth will therefore be ill said, will take monstrous or outlandish forms. The ambivalence in question snakes its way through Enough in a number of different ways. The extraordinary or outlandish aspect of Enough—and indeed of many of Beckett’s later texts—is an indication of their fidelity to an ethics of the event. Fidelity separates out and insists on those features of the lovers’ situation which depend on the event. The speaker says that his or her ‘decade’ of love must have resembled ‘those that went before’ like ‘blades of grass’. But it also ‘veils’ them, leaves them ‘engulfed’ (CSP, 190). Fidelity is always situated and always has a structure. It organizes a ‘legitimacy of inclusion’ (EE, 263); that is, out of given situations, it builds others that are marked by the event. It is what Badiou calls an ‘ordination’ of the event in time (EE, 257). Yet fidelity severs the truth of a love from the world. In Enough, repetition functions as ordination. It has two forms: on the one hand, there are the repetitive rituals that are particular to the love in question and structure it: We advanced side by side hand in hand. One pair of gloves was enough. The free or outer hands hung bare. He did not like to feel against his skin the skin of another. Mucous membrane is a different matter. Yet he sometimes took off his glove. Then I had to take off mine. We would cover in this way a hundred yards or so linked by our bare extremities. Seldom more. That was enough for him. (CSP, 187)

On the other hand, there are the strategies of recapitulation and restatement within the text itself. These become complicated, not least in Beckett’s translation of his own text: a whole paragraph in Assez that repeats much of an earlier one is cut out in Enough, for instance, whilst other repetitions in the French are not exactly repeated in the English version. This pattern of variation within repetition establishes the progress of the truth of the love in question as a matter of play within law. Understood from ‘the inside’, the progress of a truth is indeed a form of play, since it is an ‘infinite procedure’ with no foreordained limits (EE, 261). Badiou describes this as an ‘immobile

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migration’. But the ‘migration’ is partly a migration of love from itself, an ‘internal delocalization’ (PM, 174). In Enough, love is ordination and migration together. For Badiou, the radical autonomy of love is encapsulated in ‘the famous ‘‘Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout’’ ’ (EE, 261). Beckett’s speaker puts the point more quirkily but more vividly: ‘What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes. For them he had a fondness’ (CSP, 192). But here again, love is irreducibly ambivalent. The circumstances in which it must function are regulated, not least with regard to the representation of love. That is why the speaker rather unenthusiastically insists on the need to pay attention to ‘art and craft’ (CSP, 186). Badiou argues that there is always an institutional aspect to fidelity. This is particularly clear in the case of love. Thus Beckett’s lovers seek refuge in recognizable formulae: ‘We took flight in arithmetic. What mental calculations bent double hand in hand! Whole ternary numbers . . . we raised to the third power sometimes’ (CSP, 188). Enough is therefore the narrative of a love understood as the progress of a truth. But it recounts the progress in question after that progress has run its course. The speaker makes this clear from the third paragraph: ‘One day he told me to leave him . . . I made off without looking back’ (CSP, 186–7). Enough seems to be principally concerned with the structure and strict limits of a truth in its completeness. The truth of love has a particular finitude. On the one hand, its duration is limited and, on the other, it is confined to the couple. Yet if the truth of love is limited in a way that the other truths are not, it is also indicative as they are not. Its limits and its importance are closely related. If, truths are rare, exceptional, love is the most mundane of them. In its Beckettian manifestation, love is certainly quite mundane. Winnie and Willie, Nagg and Nell, Vladimir and Estragon will scarcely pass muster as modern Eloisas and Abelards. Yet if the truth of love is more mundane than the other truths, in a sense, it is also paradigmatic of them. I mean this as rigorously and unsentimentally as Beckett and Badiou. The point is emphatically not, for example, that the truth of love breeds fellowfeeling or solidarity, that it spreads irresistibly from the loved one to the many. Rather, however precariously, the truth of love is the avenue out of solipsism and towards the endless possibilities for renewal, ‘the infinite multiplicity of the world’ (CS, 361). The development of Beckett’s art indicates precisely this trajectory, if faintly, and with many fastidious ‘hesitations’. Badiou’s accounts of Beckett are steeped in political metaphor. If Beckett moves from the sprung traps of Texts for Nothing to an investigation of the modalities of

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chance, the event, the encounter, and love, he also moves from a generalized conviction of closure to an examination of the beginnings or the condition of politics. In Plato, as we have seen, the Good puts a halt to what is in principle the infinite recession of the imaginary. In this respect, it is like the Hemmungsprinzip which produces the limit ordinal in Cantor. Pilling and Knowlson’s comments on the title of Enough suggests that it, too, begins by asserting a Hemmungsprinzip. It draws a line under infinite recession; it decides that indeed, as the narrator says, ‘too much at a time is too much’ (CSP, 186). Making that decision ‘gives the pen time to note’ (ibid.). Enough commits itself to ‘the true capacity of beginning contained in the symbol’ which Lacan claims that Plato cannot see (CS, 311). Here love is a truth-sequence. The narrator is the subject of a truth: as she or he says, ‘the end of this long outing was my life. . . . It is then I shall have lived or never’ (CSP, 188–9). The whole point to the way Enough is written is its commitment to rendering both subject and truth as rare singularities. But there can be no wholesale cancellation of the situation that preceded the event. This I think is the point to the uncertainty over the duration of the love affair, above all, in one particular passage from which I have already quoted: I am speaking of our last decade comprised between the two events described. It veils those that went before and must have resembled it like blades of grass. To those engulfed years it is reasonable to impute my education. For I don’t remember having learnt anything in those I remember. (CSP, 190)

In context, the passage makes impossible any exact distinction between the years of love and the years that preceded it (between truth and remainder). Which exactly were the ‘engulfed years’? If we cannot be sure of that, we cannot be sure, either, of whether the education to which the speaker refers took place before love began or, as the text elsewhere tells us, as a result of it.³⁸ Thus love teeters on the edge of the inertia it surmounts. Hence the amalgamation, throughout Enough, of lyrical with ungainly, comical, and even flatly and deliberately tedious passages. ³⁹ ³⁸ ‘All I know comes from him’ (CSP, 187). ³⁹ As in the case of the account of the relationship between the lovers’ ‘communications’ and ‘redepartures’ (CSP, 189).

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THE USE IN GOING UP: THE LOST ONES Like Enough, The Lost Ones is what Lois Oppenheim calls an ‘autoconstitutional’ text;⁴⁰ that is, it does not purport to describe a reality but evokes its own, a reality adjudged to be strictly coterminous with the text. Here however the similarities might seem to end: if Enough is about a truth-procedure, an opening and unfolding movement whose horizons are in principle infinite, in The Lost Ones, the text’s autonomy results in ‘confinement’.⁴¹ In Badiou’s terms, The Lost Ones is even about a state or stasis. A collection of individual figures, each of whom counts for one, is also classified or divided into groups. Inclusion duplicates belonging and metastructure reinforces structure. One might argue that the point of excess or principle of ontological instability in the State is also evident in The Lost Ones, at least in that there exists the promise of a way out of the cylinder.⁴² But the promise is a ‘myth’ (CSP, 207): there is no clear evidence of any possible escape from closure. In this respect, The Lost Ones seems not to fit at all neatly into Badiou’s account of later Beckett. This impression is confirmed if we turn to Lamartine’s poem ‘L’Isolement’, which apparently supplied Beckett with his original French title, Le D´epeupleur.⁴³ The Lost Ones is shaded by it, as Krapp’s Last Tape is shaded by a singularly exquisite passage from Othello.⁴⁴ The occasion of the poem was the death in 1817 of Juliet Charles, whom Lamartine had met in 1816, and with whom he had fallen in love. The poem indicates that her death has made the world seem closed and indifferent to the poet. This provides the logic that leads to the line on which Beckett scholars fasten: what is the ‘religious sound’ of the church bell or the charm of the landscape worth to the poet? Nothing: ‘Un seul eˆtre vous manque, et tout est d´epeupl´e.’⁴⁵ This implies that the cylinder in The Lost Ones is a ‘de-peopled’ world in that its inhabitants are ⁴⁰ Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 168. Cf. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett, 96. ⁴¹ Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 168. ⁴² Cf. my account of Quad in the next chapter, pp. 233–5, 238. ⁴³ See for instance Rubin Rabinovitz, ‘The Self Contained: Beckett’s Fiction in the 1960s’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds.), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama (London: Macmillan, 1987), with a foreword by Melvin J. Friedman, 50–64, p. 52. ⁴⁴ See p. 244 n. 26. ⁴⁵ ‘L’Isolement’, Alphonse de Lamartine, Œuvres po´etiques compl`etes, ed. with notes MariusFranc¸ois Guyard, Pl´eiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 3–4.

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lovers missing their lost beloved. Wanda Bolzano engagingly argues that this cannot be the case: in the cylinder, ‘man and wife are strangers’ (CSP, 213) and more or less indifferent to each other.⁴⁶ Alas, it seems more likely that relations between man and wife are not the ones principally at issue, that the passage from The Last Ones that she cites is fraught with a melancholy irony that Lacan would appreciate.⁴⁷ That Juliet Charles was married when Lamartine met her might seem to bear this out. As the narrator of The Lost Ones baldly declares at the very start, each of the ‘lost bodies’ is ‘searching for its lost one’ (CSP, 202). The classic Western account of love as a search for completion of the self is Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, and it is hard to ignore it here.⁴⁸ According to Aristophanes, paradoxically, the ‘lost one’ is also a lost half. It formed half of a single person who was subsequently divided. Love is ‘the pursuit of wholeness’ and is driven by the desire for a lost unity, the lost one.⁴⁹ Aristophanes tells us, however, that unity will be regained ‘if we conduct ourselves with true reverence toward the gods’.⁵⁰ Needless to say, Beckett has no more truck with this idea than Badiou. To echo James Hansford for a second time, the lost one is lost indeed.⁵¹ Badiou’s reading of The Lost Ones runs right against the grain of both critical orthodoxy and, at first sight, the text itself. He argues that The Lost Ones is about the singularization of the subject through the encounter with an Other. The anonymous figures in the cylinder are searching for ways of becoming subjects. They are ‘ ‘‘de-peopled’’ ’ in being ceaselessly urged out of an ‘anonymous’ state or stasis by a sense of possibility (SB, 22). As Antoni Libera puts matters, theirs is ‘a search for a radical way of enabling one to stop being oneself’.⁵² In the first half of The Lost Ones, Beckett carefully distinguishes ⁴⁶ See Wanda Bolzano, ‘Searching for Beckett’s Real Worlds in The Lost Ones’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 11/1 (Spring 2001), 15–37, p. 21. ⁴⁷ The satisfaction of a desire, of course, is not a question of attaining what is deemed to be its object, since, as Beckett and Lacan both understand, there is always another (unavowable) desire within desire. ⁴⁸ Bolzano also notes this, ‘Searching’, 20–2. ⁴⁹ Symposium 193a, p. 29. For Aristophanes’ speech, see 189a–193e. Interestingly, the speech is surely the origin of the ‘arsy-versy’ figures that Beckett noted in Dante. See 190e, p. 26. Cf. CDW, 191. ⁵⁰ Symposium 193d, p. 30. ⁵¹ Bolzano comments interestingly on the different emphases in the two texts, but her account of The Lost Ones as a ‘rewriting’ of the Symposium and a critique of the ‘mendacity’ of Platonic idealism seems to me to be hopelessly reductive, though very much in line with contemporary anti-Platonism. ⁵² Antoni Libera, ‘The Lost Ones: A Myth of Human History and Destiny’, in Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier, (eds.) Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 145–56, p. 155.

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between four categories of searcher, according to the degree to which they persist in (or do not give up on) their desire: the searchers, those who pause in their search, the sedentary, and the vanquished. Badiou suggests that there is one particular point in the text which crystallizes its meaning. Indeed, it crystallizes the paradoxical insistence repeatedly evident in Beckett’s later work. Very rarely, it may happen that one of the vanquished, those who appear definitively to have abandoned the search, re-enters the arena. A searcher may retire from the search, may definitively give up on his desire, and yet all the possibilities continue to exist; which means that the abnegation of desire may after all turn out to be miraculously reversible. This encapsulates Beckett’s conception of liberty. I think it is also the fourth sense of the title Enough: faintly, behind the three dominant meanings and tones that I specified earlier, we can also hear the narrator as an ex-searcher or ex-subject who might, just possibly, say that she or he has had enough of definitive loss, and return to the arena again. Badiou puts the point simply: it is a cardinal Beckettian principle that there is no eternal damnation.⁵³ The world of The Lost Ones is purgatorial rather than infernal. We might add that this impression is of course enhanced by the recollections of Belacqua and Canto IV of the Purgatorio.⁵⁴ The moment in Canto IV that is most significant for The Lost Ones would surely be Belacqua’s rhetorical question to Dante: ‘Andar in s`u che porta?’: ‘What’s the use in going up?’⁵⁵ This is the question Beckett’s sedentaries also quite literally ask, and that his vanquished appear already to have answered for themselves. Though he is probably unaware of it, Badiou’s account of a purgatorial art echoes Beckett’s view of Finnegans Wake.⁵⁶ But his concept of purgatory is also loose: Beckett’s point is not that, by purgatorial trial, application, and persistence, the inhabitants of the cylinder will necessarily achieve release. ⁵³ The same conviction threads it way thinly through Enough: on the one hand, the speaker soberly reflects on her life from a position of exile from truth. On the other hand, the exile in question is not or, at least, has not always been assured. ⁵⁴ Bolzano notes the relevance of Belacqua to The Lost Ones, referring in particular to the resemblance between him and ‘the woman vanquished’ (CSP, 221). This is exactly right: cf. Purgatorio, Canto IV, ll. 107–8; Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Italian text, tr. and commentary Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–5), Purgatorio, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 40. Libera points out that, when Beckett writes of the vanquished that they sit in the attitude that ‘wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles’ (CSP, 205), he is clearly thinking of Belacqua. See Antoni Libera, ‘The Lost Ones’, 147. Belacqua actually makes the poet smile for the first time in The Divine Comedy. See Purgatorio, Canto IV, l. 122, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 42. ⁵⁵ Purgatorio, Canto IV, l. 127, vol. i, pt. 1, p. 42. ⁵⁶ DI, 33: ‘In what sense then is Mr Joyce’s work purgatorial? In the absolute absence of the Absolute.’

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It is rather that those who sink into despair or abnegation may conceivably raise their heads again. None the less, the conception of liberty at stake seems drastically straitened, to say the least.⁵⁷ The world of Lamartine’s poem is also a drastically straitened one, but in a different way. Beckett scholars have usually paid little or no attention to the poem as a whole. It is at once a classic and a quite distinctive expression of romantic Sehnsucht. For Lamartine identifies his separation from his beloved (lost to death) with an equally definitive separation from what he calls ‘the ideal good [le bien id´eal]’ beyond the ‘immense universe’ itself (italics mine). The poet no longer has anything to ask of the universe. But the realm beyond it, in which the ‘true sun’ lights up other skies, is out of reach. Hence a second logic to the ‘de-peopling’ of Lamartine’s world: the Earth itself is now dead to him, and he has nothing in common with it. In Krapp’s phrase, and like the world of Endgame, it ‘might be uninhabited’ (CDW, 221). Beckett very clearly had the whole of ‘L’Isolement’ in mind when writing The Lost Ones: Lamartine’s unassuageable yearning for ‘the ideal good which every soul desires’ is precisely echoed in Beckett’s reference to ‘the ideal preying on [the lost ones] one and all’ (CSP, 207). Both writers construct a division between a desolate, closed world and an ‘ideal’ exteriority which is seemingly inaccessible but none the less all that matters. This exteriority ‘de-peoples’ the closed world by instilling in its inhabitants a desire for freedom from it. Lamartine’s Good is inaccessible, but the poet can at least take the desire for it for granted. The Good of The Lost Ones, however, is the Good only of the final irrepressibility of desire for the Good. Desire itself must be affirmed. This is all that Beckett will commit himself to. If the Good in Enough is rare, in The Lost Ones, it has only a starkly shrunken form. Or it would have, if this were all there were to The Lost Ones. But in fact, the conclusion of the first half of it is not just an affirmation of desire. For Beckett’s searchers are not in principle inexorably doomed to their enclosure. Badiou sees this, but oddly fails to emphasize it. Desire cannot finally and absolutely die, and it cannot die because possibility never finally and absolutely dies. This is my crassly reductive version of a quite extraordinary statement, a sentence that is far more complex than any other in The Lost Ones (or Badiou’s account of it). The whole of the first half of The Lost Ones leads up to it: ⁵⁷ Beckett makes a similar point about Joyce: ‘Dante’s [Purgatory] is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr Joyce’s is spherical and excludes culmination’ (DI, 33).

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The spent eyes [of the vanquished] may have fits of the old craving just as those who having renounced the ladder suddenly take to it again. So true it is that when in the cylinder what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so and in the least less the all of nothing if this notion is maintained. (CSP, 211, my italics)

This insidiously tricky sentence produces a moment of extreme turbulence in a text made up of what is otherwise smooth prose. To try to unpack it is to end up vanquished (if still tantalized) oneself: if the little that is possible is ‘not so’, is it not little (not as faint as was assumed) or actually not possible? If it is no longer so, is it no longer possible, or no longer impossible, no longer faint, or not faint? What difference does the phrase ‘when in the cylinder’ make, given that it would seem necessarily to imply another possible existence, even if we know nothing of it? The little that is possible might seem to be ‘no longer . . . in the least less the all of nothing’. The logic, here, apparently takes a downswerve: to be ‘less the all of nothing’ is to be the thing itself (9 − 0 = 9). To be no longer this, in the least, is to be its opposite, nothing. Since in Beckett, ‘the least’, like ‘the worst’, is eminently open to being read as a substantive, it would seem that possibility is no longer even that which minimally separates the least from ‘the all of nothing’. Furthermore, if nothing is ‘the all’, does it not encompass possibility itself and reduce possibility to nothing? But the gloom of all this is countered by the upbeat tone of ‘it is merely no longer so’. In any case, the logic is actually ambivalent: it is possible to read ‘in the least less the all of nothing’ as following on from ‘it is’ rather than from ‘no longer’, in which case, possibility does indeed reside ‘in the least’. All of which may be nothing anyway, since the whole depends on the maintenance of a particular ‘notion’. I have not exhausted the possibilities of the sentence. It represents a moment of crazed and splintering aporia in which a trace of possibility tinily flickers, both dies and insists. Here an ethics is inseparable from an agonistics. As Badiou might say, the sentence is indeed about not giving up, and the reasons for not giving up. Yet, at the same time, it ratchets up the complexity of the ethics at stake by several crucial and exquisite notches. It balances an ethics of perseverance on the very brink of its own extinction, and then makes it shiver there. This sentence is surely the eccentric centre of The Lost Ones; it is Badiou’s reading that makes it possible for us to see that. At the same time, however, both Badiou’s reading and my own elaboration of it are finally limited in at least one obvious respect. They simply

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ignore the second half of the text, not to mention the fifteenth section which Beckett belatedly added to it. If we now add the second half to our account of the first, it becomes possible to see just how astonishing a work The Lost Ones is; how far it develops according to a logical structure of the kind dear to Badiou that, at the same time, is weirdly bent and skewed in a way he would not want to see. For the second half of The Lost Ones, like that of Watt (as we saw) and Molloy, marks a declension from the first half.⁵⁸ The first half concentrates on the search, and attitudes to the search. The second half consists of ‘data and evidences’, or what the narrator is tempted to call ‘tedious details’ (CSP, 214). It moves through its topics in an almost wholly orderly sequence: light, the ‘respites’, vision, temperature, the zones, rules governing inter- and intrazonal conduct, effects of climate, sexual behaviour, the surfaces of the cylinder, the problem of orientation, the ‘ethics’ of the cylinder, the inspection of others. The relevant procedure is called ‘analysis’ (CSP, 213–14). Given the orderliness, it might seem odd that Beckett claimed to have abandoned The Lost Ones ‘because of its complexity getting beyond control’.⁵⁹ But the complexity in question is banal: it is the complexity of the actual infinity of a world that both Brater and Hansford rightly describe as beyond culmination, specifically with reference to The Lost Ones. Beckett repeats the phrase ‘so on infinitely’ (CSP, 219, 222) and declares that ‘All has not been told and never shall be’ (CSP, 219). P. J. Murphy asserts that ‘the true quest in The Lost Ones’ is for Being.⁶⁰ If we understand Being as Badiou does, then the reverse is true: The Lost Ones declines into Being. More precisely, the second half of The Lost Ones is about the world of the remainder which Lamartine, too, had been forced to conclude might be all that could ever be available to him. There is only one way in which the narrator can resolve the predicament in which he finds himself: like the narrator at the beginning of Enough, he must assert a Hemmungsprinzip and decree a limit. As we’ll see, the narrator in Worstward Ho does the same, before the concluding sequence begins. The decree requires a displacement of the kind that makes it possible to assert the limit ordinal. It asserts the axiomatic ‘notion’ of an end that, without an axiomatic declaration, is simply ‘unthinkable’ (CSP, 222). ⁵⁸ I take the second half to begin at the end of the paragraph including the sentence I have just quoted, with the words ‘What first impresses . . . ’ (CSP, 213). ⁵⁹ Quoted in Brian Finney, Since ‘How It Is’: A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Later Fiction (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972), 10. ⁶⁰ Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett, 103.

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ABSENCE SUPREME GOOD AND YET: ILL SEEN ILL SAID We saw earlier that Badiou reads one particular passage in Ill Seen Ill Said as concerned with something like a phenomenology of the event. We also saw how important that reading is for his understanding of Beckett as a whole. The passage exemplifies the later Beckett’s ‘nominal poetics’ (SB, 20). This poetics dissociates events from meaning and substitutes naming for interpretation. The event arrives, but what happens is ‘ill seen’, outside the laws of visibility, which cannot capture the event in its isolation and surprise. It is also ‘ill said’, because an established order of signification will not be adequate to it (ibid.). The partial failure of vision and language, however, produces a ‘gleam of hope’ (IS, 55). That hope is of a truth initiated by the event of the ‘slumberous collapsion’ (ibid.), which will break with an existing stasis. But what of the relationship between the passage in question and the rest of Ill Seen Ill Said ? Badiou claims that the ‘poetics of nomination’ is ‘central’ to the work as a whole (CS, 350). This seems to me to be less the case than the title might lead us to assume. The passage about the event is certainly not central, either physically or thematically—the word ‘event’ is not used anywhere else in the text. The non-centrality of the passage seems to be part of the point. The event is rare. It is ‘central’ only to a truth-procedure, and Ill Seen Ill Said is not about one. Yet again, Beckett’s thought is marvellously subtle and nuanced. If The Lost Ones proceeds by ‘bent method’, Ill Seen Ill Said proceeds by a sporadically convulsed logic. It is important not to abstract too far. Beckett’s insistence on poverty of language and vision is easily taken for granted. The risk is that we fail to see just how much the speaker actually does say about the old woman who is really ‘central’ to the text, and with what beauty—delicacy, reticence, obliquity—he says it. Ill Seen Ill Said is a much less fiercely self-reflexive work than the Trilogy, Texts for Nothing, or Worstward Ho. The larger part of it is actually representational, if hardly in a Balzacian manner. We learn of the woman’s age, helplessness, near-paralysis, loathing of life, solitude, imagination, capacity for wonder, slowness, destitution, and desire for death. But at the same time, almost from the start, the drive to represent is also plagued by doubts, problems, self-criticisms, admissions of difficulty, and limitation. Initially, these misgivings remain fleeting. Then, almost fourteen pages into the Calder edition, the text convulses. It is seized by its first major fit of

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despair and self-reproach: ‘Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions . . . ’ (IS, 20). The self-indictment is neither ‘accurate’ nor exactly ironical. That is because its rationale is not aesthetic. The logic at stake is sadder than that. So much is clear from the passage preceding the convulsion: Riveted to some detail in the desert the eye fills with tears. Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings . . . Tears. Last example the flagstone before her door that by dint by dint her little weight has grooved. Tears. (IS, 18)

The self-indictment is caused by guilt. This is not guilt at failure or inadequation. It is guilt at the very project of representing the woman’s desolation, whatever the discretion and finesse with which that project is handled.⁶¹ The cabin serves as a metaphor. It was imposed where it did not belong, there was no prospect of its demolition, ‘and from it as from an evil core . . . the what is the wrong word the evil spread’ (IS, 9).⁶² ‘Ill seeing’ and ‘ill saying’ have a meaning that doesn’t interest Badiou, but that certainly mattered to Beckett. Ill Seen Ill Said is partly concerned with the possible evil of seeing and saying. Representation, grief, repentance: these establish themselves as principal features of Ill Seen Ill Said.⁶³ They fuel a turn towards a strange, final, inexorable double logic summed up in the phrase ‘Absence supreme good and yet’ (IS, 58). The paroxysms continue, irregularly: the ‘filthy eye of flesh’ should close ‘for good’ (IS, 30). The ‘old nausea’ overwhelms the speaker (IS, 38). The text should ‘abort’ as the cabin should have been demolished, and so on (ibid.). Neither delays nor changes in perspective help: ‘The eye has changed. And its drivelling scribe. Absence has changed them. Not enough’ (IS, 51). What does help is lessening, reduction to a minimum: ‘Less. Ah the sweet one word’ (IS, 52). The text must ‘lessen’ as the woman dies. That will be its mode of adequation to its subject, though of course an ironical one, since it can only lessen by adding to itself. None the less, the recognition of the ‘sweetness’ of lessening means that speaker and woman together can thenceforth pursue ‘the way to inexistence’ (IS, 54). ⁶¹ I deal with this aspect of Ill Seen Ill Said, more fully if in slightly different terms, in chapter 5 of Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999), especially at p. 144. ⁶² ‘Evil’ is the ‘wrong word’ in the second instance, but not apparently in the first. ⁶³ In this respect, the Beckett work to which it seems closest is Eh Joe.

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The final erasure of both speaker and world—‘Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta’ (IS, 59)— might therefore seem to be the supreme good. And yet: ‘No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness’ (ibid.). The desirable goal is not the void, but the barest possible minimum. If it is possible to know happiness, it will not be in the void (whatever that might mean), but as seeing and saying yield to the void. The Good resides in two small words: ‘and yet’; that is, it emerges in ‘breath[ing]’ the void without being instantly ‘devoured’ by it (ibid.). The grace of the void is known only from a position on its edge. It is precisely on this threshold that the event takes place. If the event expresses the void within a situation, if it forces a situation to declare its void, then that is what happens in Ill Seen Ill Said. That is how we move from the passage that so interests Badiou to the conclusion. This development is clear from the meditation, two paragraphs after that passage, on what were actually two events, two ‘slumberous collapsions’. These ‘two mysteries’ or ‘mild shocks’ made possible an ‘abeyance of mind’. The consequence was ‘[s]weet foretaste of the joy at journey’s end’ (IS, 56). Beckett’s logic, however, is circular. The event is what generates the conditionality of ‘absence supreme good and yet’. But it is because of that conditionality that the event itself is possible. The event underwrites the final affirmation of the ‘place on the threshold’, and vice versa. The Good in Ill Seen Ill Said, then, is a matter of the ‘meremost minimum’ (WH, 9). So too, by the same token, is the event. In Ill Seen Ill Said, the event is notably minimal. It is an assertion of ‘modest beginnings’ appearing from the void. As such, it is a source of ‘hope’ (IS, 55). Crucially, the passage about the event transforms the whole logic of ‘ill seeing’ and ‘ill saying’. Since saying may say ill (evil), what is said must be ill (poorly) said. Evil was in question as long as representation or adequation was in question. But in the passage about the event, the speaker turns away from representing a prior existence to naming a fortuitous emergence. In effect, he concerns himself with naming as the first frail step in a truth-procedure. ‘Ill seeing’ and ‘ill saying’ now reflect, not the problematics of representation as a backward look, but the difficulty of bearing witness to ‘modest beginnings’. Yet the ‘modest beginnings’ of a truth-procedure also entail a kind of backward look, if only to themselves and their conditions. It is thus that the event, and the creativity to which it calls, may hope to extend their own otherwise haphazard fortunes. It is thus that, as ‘meremost minimum’, the Good may hope to persist.

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Badiou thinks that Worstward Ho functions as a summary or synopsis of Beckett’s ‘intellectual enterprise’ (PM, 138). It reads as a short philosophical treatise, with the important rider that it conveys the rhythm of Beckett’s thought, rather than presenting it as a configuration. It has several different themes: first, ‘the imperative of saying’ as expressed in the prescription ‘On’ (PM, 140); secondly, Being itself, with which the imperative of saying is chiefly concerned. Being is what ‘there is’ to say (ibid.). But Being has two names: the void, a name which recurs throughout Worstward Ho, and the penumbra, which Beckett calls ‘the dim’ (WH, 23).⁶⁴ This duality is exposed to a familiar irony: the void cannot be thought, said, or named without ceasing to be the void. Void and penumbra are inseparable. The penumbra is therefore the supreme name of Being. The third theme is ‘inscription in being’ (‘l’inscrit dans l’ˆetre’, PM, 141). Inscription defines the relationship between Being and appearance, the penumbra and ‘worlds’. In Worstward Ho, there are three such inscriptions: one, ‘the body’ that the narrator introduces almost at once, and that we are later told is unprovably female (‘Nothing to show a woman’s and yet a woman’s’, WH, 7–8, 34–5); and two and three, the ‘old man and child’ (WH, 13–14). Only the three inscriptions can be ‘worsened’ or ‘ill said’.⁶⁵ It is only they that can be ‘worse said’ than they were before. Importantly, the inscriptions are visible (‘visible’ in the Platonic sense that ‘thought can see’,⁶⁶ which is what visibility means throughout Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho). For as in Ill Seen Ill Said, the questions of seeing and saying go together. The fourth theme is thought: the materialist injunction—‘No mind. Where none. That at least’ (WH, 7)—necessarily fails. There must be thought, but thought reduced to the functions of seeing and saying, to a pair of eyes, and a ‘soft of mind’ that ‘oozes’ words (WH, 33). The important theme for thought is the second one, the question of Being. Three important points follow: first, as we’ve noted, the void is not thinkable in itself. That is why Being has two names (void and penumbra), and not just one. Secondly: a question—how should one think Being?—anticipates a response, and therefore imposes a ⁶⁴ In Cap au pire, Fournier translates ‘dim’ as ‘p´enombre’ throughout. ⁶⁵ The relevant French verbs in Fournier’s translation are ‘empirer’ and ‘rater’, to worsen and to fail. ⁶⁶ See Republic 511a, p. 239.

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direction. It looks ahead to what follows it. This direction is specified from the start as ‘worstward’. Even posed in the most minimal terms, as Beckett poses it, the question of Being will necessarily be an ‘ill said’ version of what has been ‘ill seen’. That is what thought is, ‘ill seen ill said’ (PM, 146). Any response to the question can only worsen what is already ill seen and ill said. Thirdly, Being is not accessible in itself, but only in relation to the contingency of appearance (situations, worlds).⁶⁷ A minimal world, at least, must therefore be specified: hence the woman, man, and child. Appearance is Being ill seen and ill said. Appearance is defined by the possibility of worsening. The worse appearance gets, the more doxa is imperilled and the objectivity of a world endangered. To ‘say well’ is merely to accept the ‘hypothesis of adequation’ (PM, 154), to suppress saying in favour of what is said. This is at once and definitively a suppression of liberty, and especially artistic liberty. By contrast, ‘ill saying’ is the principle of freedom. This leads to what Badiou calls the ‘shameful temptation’ (PM, 155), the belief that the ‘absolute worst’ can be achieved, that it is possible to put an end to language and discourse or expose their sheer nullity. The absolutist dreams of having done with appearances, of identifying with Being itself. This is the mystic temptation, and its supreme representative is Wittgenstein or, at least, the Wittgenstein of the last proposition of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein falls for the lure of a release from humanity, ‘go[ing] for good’ (WH, 8). But the irony of Worstward Ho precisely repudiates the Wittgensteinian good. As Connor says, Worstward Ho ‘retreats from the suggestion that its aim is to suggest nothingness’.⁶⁸ Beckett’s logic is very clear: ‘Same thing. Same nothing. Same all but nothing’ (WH, 37). The very repetition of the ‘same thing’ introduces a small difference which makes nothing a little more than nothing. The variation from each sentence to the next contradicts the point of the insistence on nothing. We are back to the irony I noted at the beginning of Murphy. There is always the possibility of difference, or what Beckett calls the ‘unnullable least’ (WH, 32). We return here to the final logic of Ill Seen Ill Said, ‘Absence supreme good and yet’. In effect, it amounts to a Beckettian defection from the drive that produces Wittgensteinian mysticism. At the same time, the ‘unnullable least’ of Worstward Ho appears as a faint, ironical, but ineradicable Beckettian residue of the Platonic Good. ⁶⁷ Confusingly, in his essay on Worstward Ho, Badiou refers to both appearance and existence. I have sought to avoid the confusion. ⁶⁸ Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 85.

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Hence the sheer labour enjoined by the imperative of saying: Beckett insists that there is no escape from worsening. Furthermore, worsening is not only ‘inventive’. In its inventiveness, it affirms the ‘radical autonomization of the prescription of saying’ (PM, 158, 163), the sovereignty of saying over appearance. In order to do this, it must subtract. But it can only subtract by adding. This requires ‘taking heart’.⁶⁹ What nourishes and sustains the effort? Evidently not a teleological structure, the promise of a final satisfaction or a final silence. Badiou comes up with a startling answer: it is the ‘aura of adequation’ that keeps Beckett going. Words ‘have a tendency to sound true’ (PM, 163): The words too whosesoever. What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young alas and take heart. (WH, 20–1)

This aura of adequation is the paradoxical consequence of Beckett’s break with adequation itself. His struggle is fuelled by a commitment to language, but language used a` rebours, against the grain. Beckett sets words to work to ‘worsen appearances’ (PM, 167). But what the unstinting activity of worsening also reveals is that there is ‘a sort of phantom of adequation’ which irreducibly ‘haunts’ language (PM, 164). This is the absurd logic of a crucial Beckettian torsion: the work of worsening ironically releases a phantom of adequation which gives one the heart for more worsening. The torsion repeatedly demonstrates that Being rebels ‘against the logic of the worst’ (PM, 165). Paradoxically, to say ‘worstward ho’ is precisely to decree that one will never arrive at the worst. This, I think, is the logic of the ‘joy’ referred to in Worstward Ho:⁷⁰ No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still. Just enough still to joy. Joy! Just enough still to joy that only they. Only! (WH, 29)

The possibility of this moment of joy is intrinsic to Beckettian failure and impotence. For it is at this moment that, paradoxically, Worstward Ho most emphatically rejects the Wittgensteinian good: to ‘fail’ is never definitively ⁶⁹ I prefer Beckett’s original English word to courage, the word Badiou derives from Fournier’s French translation. ⁷⁰ The argument pursued below, however, is mine rather than Badiou’s. Attentive readers of his essay will be aware that I have largely skipped over sub-sections l–p. These seem to me to be incidental to the main thrust of his reading of Worstward Ho, and largely given over to the more sterile side of his Platonism, the interest in Platonic categories like the five ‘primordial genres’ (PM, 170) and the ‘classic doctrine of the passions’ (PM, 179). This part of the discussion reduces Worstward Ho to a set of rather wooden abstractions and weakens what is otherwise an innovative and very suggestive essay.

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to fail, but always to ‘try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again’ (WH, 8). The worst would be silence, for it would indicate a pragmatic resignation to the logic of appearance, to a given situation or world. By contrast, a commitment to the work of worsening shows that the infinite multiplicity of Being can never be reduced to the terms of a given situation. There is always reason to continue with the labour of pitting oneself against doxa. The reason to continue only fully emerges, however, at the end: Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. (WH, 46)

This, says Badiou, is ‘an event in the strict sense’. It is radically discontinuous with an established state of things, as is clear from the emphasis on its suddenness (PM, 182). The three key concerns of Worstward Ho thus far have been Being, appearance, and thought. The event arrives precisely as a supplement to them. Its arrival is consciously modelled on that of the Constellation at the end of Un coup de d´es, to which it is ‘absolutely parallel’ (PM, 183). As Mallarm´e prepares us for the event of the Constellation with the figure of the drowning master, so Beckett prepares us for the event in Worstward Ho by telling us that the work of worsening has otherwise reached its ‘last state’ (WH, 46).⁷¹ This ‘last state’ is rendered by the maxim ‘Worse in vain’ (ibid.). The work of worsening can only ever lead to the same paradox: ‘All gnawing to be naught. Never to be naught’ (ibid.). Worsening means nothing new: ‘Same stoop for all. Same vasts apart’ (ibid.). As at the beginning of Murphy, it is precisely at the point at which Beckett appears to decree that there is no possibility of anything new emerging that Worstward Ho resists the idea. The very production of a ‘stable figure of being’ makes possible ‘a grace without concept’ (PM, 184). It does so by ‘distancing [the ‘‘last state’’] to a limit position’ (‘Sudden all far’, WH, 46). The effect is of ‘an absolute recoil in the interior of language; as if everything that had been said, because it could be said in its last state, was immediately set at an infinitesimal distance from the imperative of language’ (PM, 183). There is a ‘recoil in language’ because, as an infinite network of possibilities, language is at odds with the very completeness of the description of the ‘last state’ that it has been called on to supply. The work of worsening reaches its end point, ⁷¹ A more complete account would need to register the second aspect of the ‘preparation’ in question, the account of the woman in the ‘old graveyard’ (WH, 45). Cf. PM, 185–6.

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the point of radical alterity which is the Good. The Good is subtracted from a state of being. Even as Worstward Ho reaches a seemingly definitive conclusion, it also acknowledges the imperative of ‘saying beyond’ that conclusion. This profound point in apagogic reason is also the point of the closing irony: Nohow naught. Nohow On. Said nohow on. (WH, 47)

Cunningham finds Badiou’s reading of Worstward Ho too ‘purely conceptual’, and therefore unpersuasive.⁷² This kind of distrust of the clarity of a philosophical reading of Beckett is by now almost conventional.⁷³ Critics have said a great deal about indeterminacy, convolution, even formlessness and messiness in Beckett’s work, about a Beckett concerned to ‘accommodate the chaos’.⁷⁴ By contrast, it seems to me to be worth stressing just how obviously and meticulously if twistedly methodical his art often is and his ways of working often were. Badiou’s stage-by-stage analysis of Worstward Ho reflects the philosopher’s concern with art as a kind of thought. But the analysis also corresponds to a logic in Beckett’s text and to its strange preoccupations. Yet Cunningham is also right: Badiou can prove deaf to crucial ‘ambivalences’ in Beckett’s texts,⁷⁵ to the very ‘hesitations and second thoughts’ he knows to be there. This is particularly the case with Worstward Ho, a text originally in English, but which Badiou worked on in a French translation for which Beckett was not responsible. But again: Badiou notes paradoxes, instances of apagogic reasoning, and absurd logical torsions in Worstward Ho on which Cunningham himself does not remark. He is capable of registering what Connor calls ‘the oscillation of assertion and retraction’ that characterizes Worstward Ho, if after his own fashion.⁷⁶ What Badiou really cannot see at all, I’d suggest, in Beckett as in Mallarm´e, is the possibility of simultaneous hesitation. I mean a spontaneous qualification, reversal, or negation within the sentence, a withdrawal from a proposition or assertion at the very moment of its being put forward. ⁷² Cunningham, ‘Farts’, 46. ⁷³ See for instance Simon Critchley, Lecture 3, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 141–4. ⁷⁴ See for example Raymond Federman, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970); David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971); and Judith Dearlove, Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982). ⁷⁵ Cunningham, ‘Farts’, 45. ⁷⁶ Connor, Theory and Cultural Value, 83.

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Here again, Badiou is too inclined to associate Beckettian thought, even art itself with linearity or consecutiveness. Once we inspect it more closely, for example, the ‘logic of joy’ in Worstward Ho looks distinctly fragile. Is the effect of the single word sentence ‘Joy!’ in the passage I quoted earlier only intensifying (‘Yes, I insist, joy is possible’; ‘Yes indeed, there is a joy to be derived from such limited material’; or even ‘What a joy it is that there is enough mind and enough language to make joy still possible’)? The tone may be wondering (‘How extraordinary that the thought of joy should have appeared in this context’). It might even be sardonic, incredulous, as though pouring scorn on the preceding note of exultation (‘You call that joy, with only the ‘‘remains of mind’’ to experience it?’). The suggestion of doubt is enhanced by the archaic use of ‘joy’ as a verb, which sounds (and is surely supposed to sound) like striving for effect.⁷⁷ Joy appears for a moment to haunt the text as an insubstantial remnant of an older world. This does not come across in Fournier’s translation, which offers only the blander ‘r´ejouir’ (‘Juste assez pour se r´ejouir. R´ejouir!’, CA, 38). In a way, nothing better illustrates my central thesis than the effects of the ambiguity in question. The point I have just made about ‘joy’ can also be made about various stages in the logic of Worstward Ho. It would not be hard to show that there is in fact a certain will to renunciation in it. This will seem grossly inconsistent, on my part. Am I saying, after all, that there is a tendency in favour of the Wittgensteinian good, in Worstward Ho, that it is not merely ironized, as Badiou would have it? The answer is yes, but that the perversity isn’t mine. Indeed, this was already the case with the fifteenth section of The Lost Ones, which finally ‘maintained’ the ‘notion’ (in other words, toyed with the idea) that ‘the best’ would be silence, complete exhaustion of the searchers and the search (CSP, 223). It is even possible to read the final ‘sudden all far’ in Worstward Ho, not as marking an event, but as itself a renunciation, a prelude to ‘going for good’. Certainly, if the final event in Worstward Ho half-identifies with the appearance of the Mallarm´ean Constellation, it also half-parodies it. To say all this is not to decry Badiou’s reading of Worstward Ho. It is rather to try to specify the exact point at which the philosopher’s account of art as thought falls short. It does so insofar as it fails sufficiently to ‘de-suture’ philosophy and art, and thus conflates the thought that is art with ⁷⁷ The OED’s last recorded such use of ‘joy’ is dated 1885. But the example that is closest to Beckett’s comes more than a hundred and fifty years earlier, in Pope’s Iliad: ‘So joys the lion, if a branching deer | Or mountain-goat, his bulky prize, appear’ (III. 37–8). Here, too, the verb has no object, direct, indirect, or cognate.

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philosophical thought. Badiou cannot see how far Beckett shades or nuances his thought. Indeed, in Badiou’s account, it is difficult to see how nuance could have much of a function in Worstward Ho, other than as ornament. But paradox and subtlety are not incidental to Beckett’s art. They are intrinsic to it, and intrinsic to it as a form of thought. The principle of withdrawal both from and within the proposition means that, as Connor, again, has amply demonstrated, Worstward Ho builds up enormous resistance to its own forward progress.⁷⁸ For all his recognition of struggle and labour in Beckett’s work, Badiou’s description of a coolly methodical philosophical treatise fails to register this. Once again, he refuses even to countenance the possibility that Beckett might be very much concerned with inertia. But Worstward Ho clearly thinks the possibility of the event and its remainder together. It approaches the thought of the event through or from the vantage point of the remainder. In one respect at least, it is surprising that Badiou is not aware of this, since it is peculiarly appropriate to the modern writer as ‘waiting subject’. The trouble is that Badiou has brought Beckett’s work very close to the philosophical terrain from which he is precisely most determined to exclude the thought of the remainder. The structure that Badiou discerns in Worstward Ho is certainly perceptible there. But it is vestigially perceptible, as a set of traces in stubbornly recalcitrant matter. Beckett works towards an exposure of a ‘grace without concept’ (PM, 184), a Good that is not an idea. This Good is beyond ideas, beyond the point at which ideas emerge. But if it is not an idea, it can at least be symbolized, as the contingency of the object is symbolized at the end of Un coup de d´es. In Badiou’s terms, however, the Platonic Good is a principle of prodigality. In Beckett, the Good is niggardly, costive: Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. (WH, 7)

Brienza has drawn attention to the importance in Ill Seen Ill Said of the word ‘strangury’. This designates ‘a condition of the urinary organs in which urine is omitted painfully and drop by drop’. Brienza argues that this is ‘an apt image’ for Ill Seen Ill Said as a whole.⁷⁹ So, too, in Worstward Ho, the Good appears as the excretion of meagre little pellets. The real question of Being is whether ⁷⁸ See Connor, Theory and Cultural Value, 81–9. ⁷⁹ Brienza, Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds, 229.

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there is anything more to be squeezed out of that old chestnut. Beckett’s is an intermittent Good. Indeed, Beckett’s intransigent refusal of ‘mastery’ leaves it poised on the very brink of inertia. But if its terms are chronically impoverished, by the same token, they also make a quite singular demand. For Lacan, as for Beckett and Badiou, the Good is rare and demanding. If Lacan is emphatic about anything, it is that ethics ‘has nothing to do with . . . the service of goods’.⁸⁰ This drastically shrinks the ethical horizon, as is evident enough from his resort to the familiar instance of potlatch. Lacan emphasizes the extreme stringency of what potlatch tells us as even Badiou would not, though Beckett might. One might even wonder whether the rarity of potlatch is not the rarity of the event in Lacan’s version of it. Potlatch is ‘the little stone that was miraculously made to inform us that not everything is caught up in the necessary dialectic of the competition for goods, of the conflict between goods, and of the necessary catastrophe it gives rise to’.⁸¹ But, rare and demanding though it may be, the Good does not issue categorical imperatives. Lacan’s objection to the categorical imperative coincides with his objection to the Platonic Good. The categorical imperative skitters off into infinity. What stops the Kantian ‘Thou shalt’ from taking any form at all; a Sadean imperative, for instance? As with Plato, there would seem to be no end point. The ‘crucial’ end point is desire.⁸² Desire must come to occupy the empty centre of the Kantian structure. In fact, the demand of the Good is simple: do not give up on your desire. Do not relinquish your desire for the good, even given its daunting rarity. Giving up is ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty’.⁸³ As we have seen, this assertion is the source of Badiou’s concept of fidelity and his ethics of perseverance. But desire itself is split, irreducibly ambivalent. For Lacan, it is located both in the signifying chain and in ‘that which follows beneath it . . . what we are as well as what we are not’.⁸⁴ This means that the ethical subject must pay a price for not giving up on it. The point is crucial to Lacan, as it is to Badiou and Beckett: the price is jouissance. Jouissance excludes the thought of intermittency. It asserts the principle of plenitude, a complete or completable world, a world possessed in and as fullness. Beckett and Badiou are as prepared to give up on jouissance as is Lacan’s ethical subject. To continue with one’s desire is to inhabit an intermittent world, a world in which the subject appears but rarely, and only to disappear. In Moran’s words, the ethical subject must bear with ⁸⁰ Lacan, Seminar VII, 313. ⁸¹ Ibid. 234–5. ⁸³ Ibid. 319. ⁸⁴ Ibid. 321.

⁸² Ibid. 316.

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the consequences of having an ‘[u]nfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea’ (TR, 106). Badiou’s principal concern is with desire as a trajectory founded on an event. The later Beckett, by contrast, is concerned with a minimal insistence of desire. Desire insists, however minimally, not as the consequence of an event, but because an event is always possible. For Lacan as for Badiou, desire proclaims the singularity of the subject. Desire ‘keeps coming back, keeps returning’, but as what situates the subject of analysis ‘once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business’.⁸⁵ This track is an ethical matter. For Lacan, however, it is not the event but ‘the signifying cut’ that constitutes the desiring subject. The cut grants the subject ‘the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him’. This is supremely the case with Antigone.⁸⁶ There are thus significant differences between Badiou’s, Beckett’s, and Lacan’s ethics. But the differences are finally less important than what joins them. For Badiou, Beckett, and Lacan are all vitally concerned with a modern problematics of the Good from which, at the moment, we may imagine we have fled, but with which we certainly have not finished. ⁸⁵ Lacan, Seminar VII, 319. ⁸⁶ See Lacan’s great account of Sophocles’s Antigone, ibid. 241–87. The quotation is from p. 282.

7 The Sparkle Hid in Ashes: Beckett’s Plays THE PRECIOUS MARGARET If, for Lacan, potlatch is the little miraculous stone in the desert of the competition for goods, by a significant coincidence, as early as 1932, Beckett was resorting to a very similar image to articulate his aesthetic position. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Belacqua reflects on the value, ‘in the domain of words, of the little sparkle hid in ashes’: The uniform, horizontal writing, flowing without accidence, of the man with style, never gives you the margarita. But the writing of, say, Racine or Malherbe, perpendicular, diamant´e, is pitted, is it not, and sprigged with sparkles; the flints and pebbles are there, no end of humble tags and commonplaces. They have no style, they write without style, do they not, they give you the phrase, the sparkle, the precious margaret.¹

This ‘sprigging’ is another figure for the undetermined condition associated, ´ enementialit´e is the glint not with the event itself, but with ´ev´enementialit´e. Ev´ of an instability in Being that is the threshold of the event. Beckett’s ‘sparkles’ resemble what we saw Val´ery calling the ‘imperceptible moments’ in Un coup de d´es, those fractions of a second in which the possibility of an idea flickers and fades.² The rigour with which Beckett thinks this threshold is perhaps what Adorno says critics like Luk´acs detest in Beckett’s work because ‘they themselves have betrayed’ it. ³ To sprig a work with sparkles is to produce, explore, mimic the cracks in the homogeneity or, in Beckett’s terms, the ‘uniformity’ of a situation.⁴ ¹ Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat, 1992), 47–8. Reprinted in DI, 47. ² Paul Val´ery, Fragments sur Mallarm´e (Paris: Ronald Davis, 1924), 19. ³ Theodor Adorno, ‘Towards an Understanding of Endgame’, in Ruth Gale Chevigny (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Endgame’ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 82–114, p. 84. ⁴ To conflate production and exploration or given and manufactured objects may seem odd. But ‘sprig’ does the same. A sprig is a spray, twig, or shoot; also, specifically, an offshoot or minor

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In Chapter 5, I glossed this in the terms of Mallarm´ean symbolism as the resistance of the Siren to the rock, of the principle of ´ev´enementialit´e to inert objectivity. At the end of my discussion of Un coup de d´es, I suggested that Mallarm´e finally suspends poetry between Siren and rock; that is, he balances it between the existence of inert objectivity on the one hand and its lack of necessity on the other. The aesthetic that Beckett puts forward in the passage I have just quoted is similar in emphasis. The tags and commonplaces must be there, but as the ashes in which the sparkle is hidden and from which it cannot be separated.⁵ In their own fashion, both Murphy and Watt are attempts to sprig prose with sparkles, the first in the manner of the modernist highbrow, the second in the manner of the scholar clown. But it is only with the Trilogy that both the paradox of Siren and rock and the passage from Dream of Fair to Middling Women come to seem precisely appropriate. Humble tags and commonplaces are strewn throughout the Trilogy, but also repeatedly turn out to be ‘pitted’. Think for example of Molloy referring to his confusion ‘deep down’, then adding that ‘deep down is my dwelling, oh not deepest down, somewhere between the mud and the scum’ (TR, 14). From the Trilogy onwards, the Beckettian murk glitters with such effects. Beckett’s later work functions according to the principle of intermittency. Badiou effectively grasps this when he describes it as structured in terms of ‘´eclaircies’ and resistances to them (SB, 17). In this chapter, I shall look at Beckett’s treatment of the principle of intermittency as a question of the relation between event and remainder or ´ev´enementialit´e and objectivity; not in relation to Beckett’s later prose style, however, but to his plays, where I think the formula is extremely suggestive. I shan’t focus on a limited selection of plays, but rather survey the corpus. This will probably seem a bit irregular. But detailed readings of single Beckett plays can induce a tiny feeling of disproportion. The slight and fragile works themselves seem to sag and disappear beneath the weighty elaborations loaded on to them. Beckett himself insisted that there was very little there to elaborate. He famously asserted that he was not interested in meaning. The last words spoken in the Complete Dramatic Works are ‘Make sense who may. | I switch off’ (CDW, 476). What the plays might seem to say or mean is not as important as what they are and do. I shall development of a plant; but also an ornament in the form of a spray, especially one that is ‘diamant´e’, studded with diamonds. Beckett clearly has this third sense at least partly in mind. His own imagery combines nature and artifice, seams of rock and the creation of ornaments. ⁵ Cf. Christopher Ricks on Beckett’s use of clich´e, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 62–85, 87–8.

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therefore try to illuminate them, not by isolating and concentrating on particular plays, but by placing as many plays as possible in specific relations to each other, as carefully and delicately as possible. What emerges is a structure of thought that is subject to limits designated with extreme rigour, yet everywhere opened up to astonishing complication and nuance. It is important, again, to stress the word thought. Contrary to critical discourses that more or less covertly humanize the plays, Badiou everywhere insists on the crucial, undeniable, and irreducible element of abstraction in them. It is because they never ignore that element that theoretical discourses have seemed to offer the most plausible descriptions of the dramatic work. Here Badiou and my chapter coincide with those discourses. In effect, then, I shall try to read the plays as belonging together in the way the Trilogy does, according to a similar principle of extraordinarily dispersed and supple coherence. I said earlier that Badiou cannot see the extent to which Beckett nuances the thought at stake in his work. The emphasis should fall on extent: to be quite exact, Badiou is aware that there is nuance in later Beckett, but it doesn’t really interest him. Because he is a systematic philosopher, and Beckett occupies a particular place in relation to his system, he is content merely to note the fact of nuance, rather than following its winding trails. He asserts, for example, that, in Enough, the figure of the Two opens up to nuance, along with beauty, colour, the ‘fluxion’ of the sensible world (SB, 27). But he says nothing about what Beckettian nuance might specifically be. Furthermore, as far as the plays are concerned, he shows strikingly little interest even in the question of their treatment of the event.⁶ This is the more curious in that drama might seem to be the ideal form of art for thinking it. There are several reasons for this: the importance of crisis in drama, the fact that things actually happen on stage, that they happen differently from performance to performance, that they do not always happen as planned.⁷ Alternatively, drama can ironize its own preoccupation with crisis, presenting a state of affairs, for example, in which ‘Nothing happens . . . It’s awful’ (CDW, 41). But Badiou makes little of this, at least, in his work on Beckett. He rather asserts that, with the turn to theatre, what becomes explicit in Beckett’s work ⁶ This might seem the more remarkable, given the space opened up for a political reading of Beckett by Badiou’s work on the theatre, specifically on theatre audiences as historical collectives. See RT, 11 and passim. ⁷ In Rhapsodie pour le th´eaˆ tre, Badiou shows himself to be conscious of this, if not with reference to Beckett. See for instance pp. 21, 37, 69 (on ‘the aleatory theatrical event’), 94.

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is his later concern with ‘the couple, the Two, the voice of the other, and finally love’ (BK, 47). The event appears chiefly in the form of the encounter. What matters most in the encounter is that it produces the Two, which ‘does not exist’ before it (BK, 56). It produces or induces the duality of the sexes, rather than the other way round. This duality is then repeatedly tested and reasserted, re-experienced in the ‘entre-Deux’, that which exists between the Two (BK, 58). The ethical insistence of theatre is that no difference is natural. In particular, according to Rhapsodie pour le th´eaˆtre, theatre articulates the substantial emptiness of the notion of sexual difference.⁸ We might think of the ‘entre-Deux’ as the very medium of drama. Badiou has insisted on the importance of love in Beckett’s plays.⁹ The trajectory founded by the encounter marks out the progress of love. As the couple is the basis of most of the plays, so ‘love is the subject of most of them’ (BK, 72–3). They function as an ‘exhibition of the limitless resources of the couple’ (BK, 73). Beckett the dramatist is preoccupied with his characters’ obstinate perseverance in their desire. It is in Badiou’s discussion of the plays that the phrase which gives him the title of his book on Beckett—‘l’increvable d´esir’—appears (BK, 75). Certainly, ‘the power of the encounter’ in Beckett is that of an event, as is clear from the fact that it is more than sentimental or physical (BK, 55). But Badiou has little more to say about it as specifically a chance occurrence than that. He does not provide an account of either its structure or its conditions. He argues that the plays repeat the main Beckettian themes ‘without exception’: the penumbra of Being, the limits of established language, the torture of the cogito, and so on (BK, 69–70). These include the event. Badiou dwells on it, however, only in three cases. Endgame is the last work in which Beckett looks at the question of identifying the event with the possibility of meaning, as he did in Watt. ‘What’s happening?’, asks Hamm. ‘We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?’ (CDW, 107–8).¹⁰ In Waiting for Godot, by contrast, Beckett explores the event in terms of two conceptions of time. The Pozzo principle is that of pure repetition, a dead time in which life is forever identical to itself, a pure repetition. By contrast, Vladimir believes in the possibility of the break that begins history and the constitution of meaning, a belief which the play itself refuses to surrender. The third instance is Krapp’s Last Tape, which I’ll leave till later. ⁸ See RT, 86–7. ⁹ In conversation with the author. ¹⁰ See SB, 20. Strictly speaking, the moment turns a certain irony on Watt’s preoccupation which Badiou misses.

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The trouble with Badiou’s reading of the plays is that it is more consistent with his philosophy than with the plays themselves. It necessarily implies that the plays tend to be set in a world on the further side of events. There seems to me to be only a limited indication for this. If, as we’ll see, love is certainly important in Beckett’s drama, it hardly has ‘limitless resources’. For the more part, it is very tightly circumscribed and its situation extremely problematic. The most common form of perseverance at stake in Beckett’s theatre is not most commonly that of the subject of a truth, but of a waiting subject. But in any case, to stress love and perseverance alone is to restrict the field of enquiry too narrowly. Most of Beckett’s plays are concerned with events in general, the possibility or the condition of events, and their power to transform a given situation. Alternatively, they are concerned with a world specifically marked out as untouched by events. It is the event itself that is Beckett’s great dramatic theme. That the point is not immediately self-evident is precisely a reflection of how close Beckett is to Badiou in his conception specifically of the rarity of the event. Further than that, however, it also reflects Beckett’s willingness to think what remains apart from events and their consequences, to meditate on the event—and waiting for the event—from the perspective of the remainder. The seeming paralysis or closure of so many of Beckett’s worlds does not contradict my argument. It is rather an indication of the supreme difficulty of Beckett’s thought of the event. REMAINS ONSTAGE In one particular work, Beckett actually provides a kind of theoretical description of the remainder: Course 1: AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA Course 2: BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB Course 3: CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC Course 4: DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD . . . 1st series (as above): 1, 13, 134, 1342, 342, 42 2nd series: 2, 21, 214, 2143, 143, 43 3rd series: 3, 32, 321, 3214, 214, 14 4th series: 4, 43, 432, 4321, 321, 21 (CDW, 451)

These are the directions for the movements in Quad. The movements are foreordained and immutable. Their pattern is apparently entirely predictable, the process, in principle, endlessly repeatable. Seeing Quad is a remarkable

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experience. But so too is reading it. For the directions are draconian. They insist on lockdown: everything has already been stipulated, all possibilities specified from the start. The mantra becomes hypnotic: the area is ‘given . . . Four possible solos all given. Six possible duos all given . . . Four possible trios all given . . . All possible light combinations given . . . All possible percussion combinations given . . . All possible costume combinations given’ (CDW, 451–2). Like others, Badiou distrusts Beckett’s determination to keep an iron grip on interpretations of his plays.¹¹ But the grip in itself is often crucial to the plays themselves. This is notably the case with Quad, where it functions in grim mimicry of the theoretical hypothesis that the world must be as it is. In that respect, the play is an abstract, mechano-balletic version of Waiting for Godot, which establishes the same hypothesis in its very first line: ‘Nothing to be done’ (CDW, 11).¹² As Beckett commented in the notebook for the Schiller-Theater production of Godot in 1975, ‘From outset no help’.¹³ Yet even Quad allows for a minimal sense of possibility. In this respect, it is classic Beckett, even, perhaps, his most paradigmatic work. Here apagogic reason makes proof of its point possible through the most strenuous endeavour to disprove it. It is worth noting that there are two quads in Quad : the main square and an inner one, marked E in the second diagram in the directions (CDW, 453), towards which the figures converge and from which they diverge. The directions tell us that E must be ‘supposed a danger zone’ (ibid.). This is presumably the case because it is the point at which the figures may become entangled, graze each other, or collide, where there may be a mishap, where the structure may wobble or collapse, the process go wrong. It is crucial, of course, that no event be specified or ‘given’ in the text, that unpredictability not be made predictable. The accident is not bound to happen. It may never happen. But if it were to happen, it would happen unforeseeably and unrepeatably. Quad closes down its space in order, at its very centre, to open up another, hypothetical space, the space of the event. This space, however, is only faintly indicated. Furthermore, in a performance in the theatre, even if no accident occurred, the ‘danger’ in question would none the less be real, if unlikely. But Quad is a television play. This makes its account of ¹¹ RT, 73–4. He is particularly concerned about Beckett’s authorizations of Blin’s productions in France. ¹² Beckett objected strenuously to an attempt to alter the line for the Irish premiere. See The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, general ed. James Knowlson, i: Waiting for Godot, ed. with introd. and notes Dougald MacMillan and James Knowlson (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 91. ¹³ See Theatrical Notebooks, iv: The Shorter Plays, ed. with an introd. and notes S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber and Faber and Grove Press, 1999), 93.

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the event more purely theoretical. In principle, the event is possible. Even on television, a medium extremely well fortified against chance and politics alike, Quad cannot avoid saying this: within the quadrangles (quarter, block, prison yard) there is always square E, or the danger zone. Beckett was undoubtedly aware of this when he made square E the central space of a work to be seen specifically on a little screen, within four walls. In practice, however—in any imaginable, historical set of circumstances—given the nature of the medium, an actual, concrete event would seem to be impossible. The event exists only as a theoretical nuance. As we shall see, nuance repeatedly turns out to be the hinge in Beckett’s plays on which the relation between event and remainder is articulated. It may sometimes have seemed as though I have defined the concept of the remainder chiefly in terms of what it is not. The remainder is what exists outside the domain of the event, truth, the subject, fidelity. How can we characterize it, other than negatively? Clearly with difficulty: that is the point. For Badiou, the remainder is so closely associated with pure negativity that he scarcely thinks it at all as such. It is effectively of no account. But to put Badiou and Beckett together is to be drawn back irresistibly to the question of the remainder, for so much in Beckett’s work serves as a figure for it. Beckett’s plays take us as close as possible to an empirical definition of the remainder. This will sound odd, given the very unempirical character of the plays. The key word is ‘close’: since empirical thought itself belongs to the world of the remainder, an empiricism of the remainder itself can only be an approximation, and will always involve a degree of metaphor or abstraction. Crucially, Beckett’s plays are not representations or statements of fact, in the sense, at least, that they tell us something like ‘this is the world, and it is absurd’. However much critics keep on insisting on the humanity of Happy Days, for example, it is a play that decisively announces its distance from humanity in the sheerly bizarre character of Winnie and Willie and their circumstances. The plays are hypothetical constructions, self-evidently, in their lack of verisimilitude. If the concept of the event is one of their cardinal points of reference—the concept of the event, note, and not the event itself—the other is figures of the remainder. If these are hard to convert into the terms of our knowledge, that is because the plays write those terms off as sufficiently negligible for precisions to be unnecessary. The remainder appears in Beckett’s plays as a series of approximations or abstractions. It also has a number of different aspects. The terms for these should by now be familiar. On the one hand, there is the actual infinity of

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Being, flat multiplicity unsupplemented by the event. Thus in Embers, Henry remarks that ‘I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever’ (CDW, 254). The paradox is that the ‘things’ in question must in one sense have finished, whether Henry finished them or not. In actual infinity, unending recession takes place in relation to a finite frame. As so often in Beckett, a limit seems to be simultaneously indicated and set at naught. What exceeds the limit coexists with and does not erase it, as in Winnie’s wry ‘World without end Amen’ (CDW, 138), Fox’s evocation of a world ‘all ends and farewell . . . till I fare again’ (CDW, 279), or Clov’s ‘impossible heap’, particularly if one reads Beckett’s explanation of it.¹⁴ But as Henry insists, there is ‘no good’ in such a world (CDW, 256). For the ironical consequence of an actual infinity of difference is indifference, an absence or failure of differentiation. Because everything counts, nothing does, everything returns to a degree zero of significance. We hear this assertion repeatedly in Beckett’s plays, Lucky’s famous speech being the most obvious example. When, in Words and Music, Words establishes a world of actual infinity—‘all of these movements and who can number them’—its corollary is the construction of an abstract machine. This machine rattles on hopelessly until arbitrarily interrupted or halted by Croak or Music: Sloth is of all the passions the most powerful passion and indeed no passion is more powerful than the passion of sloth, this is the mode in which the mind is most affected and indeed—[Burst of tuning. Loud, imploring.] Please! [Tuning dies away. As before.] The mode in which the mind is most affected and indeed in no mode is the mind more affected than in this, by passion we are to understand a movement of the soul pursuing or fleeing real or imagined pleasure or pain pleasure or pain . . . (CDW, 287).

The discourse is flagrantly at odds with its subject. The passion in question can apparently be arbitrarily named. That sloth is the first passion referred to only adds another turn of the screw. At its most extreme, the indifferent world of the endless proliferation of differences is also radically indeterminate: ‘When I set out’, says A in Rough for Theatre I, ‘I don’t know, and when I get here I don’t know, and while I am here I don’t know, whether it is day or night’ (CDW, 228). It is also a flat and featureless world, in which a ‘slight improvement’ in Krapp’s ‘bowel condition’ has the same place as his ‘farewell to . . . love’ (CDW, 217). ¹⁴ CDW, 93; and see Theatrical Notebooks ii: Endgame, ed. with introd. and notes S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 47.

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Beckett’s plays repeatedly place Being in the ‘noir-gris’ or penumbra, that is, as indistinct from the void, or on its edge. This reflects the conviction of the Speaker in A Piece of Monologue that there is ‘no such thing as none’ (CDW, 425–6). The Speaker insistently retracts the blank and categorical assertion that there is ‘nothing there’ (CDW, 426). Hence the fact that the void in the play is specified as ‘grey’ (CDW, 427). There are plenty of equivalents or near-equivalents in other plays: the ‘faint light’ of Breath (CDW, 371), the ‘subdued’ light in Rockabye (CDW, 433), the ‘evening light’ of Nacht und Tr¨aume (CDW, 465). In Rough for Theatre I, B gives the motif a little more amplitude: ‘It seems to me sometimes the earth must have got stuck, one sunless day, in the heart of winter, in the grey of evening’ (CDW, 232). When he directed his plays himself, Beckett often spoke ‘about gray, a gray colour’ that he wanted to dominate the stage.¹⁵ Badiou himself notes that, in Footfalls, May speaks of ‘the right light . . . Grey rather than white, a pale shade of grey’ (CDW, 402). But May links this light not to Being but to what she calls ‘semblance’ (ibid.). ‘Semblance’ is what Badiou refers to as appearance: Being is associated with the penumbra because it cannot be exhibited in itself, though it can be indicated. We know Being only locally, in particular situations. Beckett’s plays think Being and appearance as twin aspects of the remainder. We should recall, here, that appearance imposes the notion of a singular logic on the intractable multiplicity of Being, and that the realm of appearance and not that of Being is the stable realm. The logic of appearance is even the logic of the ‘obscene permanence of the State’ (EE, 127). According to the logic of appearance that produces the State, a metastructure duplicates a given structure. In doing so, it presents an infinite and inconsistent multiplicity as an orderly and consistent if fictive assemblage. Beckett the dramatist is concerned with the remainder as appearance in a wide range of places and in a variety of different ways. But two plays in particular exemplify his treatment of the theme: Catastrophe, not least, because of the circumstances in which it was composed,¹⁶ and What Where. Catastrophe certainly presents a State. It is concerned with the mastery of a situation, the imposition of a singular logic. This is the Director’s logic. Crucially, however, it is not hermeneutic. There is no text there for the Director to interpret. The logic is one of specification, the assignment of a world, the capture ¹⁵ Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 183. ¹⁶ The imprisonment in Oct. 1979 of V´aclav Havel for subversion. See DF, 677–81 for details.

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or organization of multiple Being. Hence the Director’s explosion of wrath when his Assistant suggests the introduction of an inconsistent detail: ‘Where do you think we are? In Patagonia?’ (CDW, 460). The Assistant has clearly not understood the principles of homogeneity and coherence of the world at stake in the Director’s orders. Catastrophe presents the remainder as appearance, the logic that gives a particular world its compact, uniform relations. What makes the Director such a dismal figure is not so much his authoritarianism or his pomposity as his assumption that it is only the ‘complacent solidities’ that matter (DI, 82). The stability of a particular logic is of sole importance. There is no need even to gesture beyond the horizons of a given situation. At the same time, whilst Catastrophe is certainly about a logic of appearance, it does not think that logic solely or even principally in one set of concrete terms. It does not present the State as a specifically political entity: this is what seems so baffling about it, considered as a response to Havel’s plight. It belongs to a group of plays that includes Words and Music and Rough for Radio II, of which it is in some respects a later and more polished version. These plays present the theme of appearance in a kind of variable allegory in which concrete reference repeatedly verges on abstraction. The implications of the allegory may therefore by turns be political, aesthetic, erotic, and so on. The logic of appearance is presented, not just in a particular manifestation, but in itself, as a ‘regulated play’ of multiple Being and its ‘variable differentiation’ (LM 1, 39). The indeterminacy of reference means that politics cannot be separated from ontology. This may seem hardly to add up to a principle of liberty. But it none the less establishes a kind of thought in Catastrophe that is pointedly distinct from the Director’s habit of coercive exactitude. For a nuanced indication of the possibility of liberty, we must wait to the very end of the play, to which I shall shortly come back. Quad works in a similar way to Catastrophe. The mesmerizing, addictive rhythms of the play articulate the closed logic of appearance. Once again, they do so abstractly. Any concrete reference is indeterminate: the figure of the quad is mathematical, but also theatrical. It calls the school quadrangle to mind, but also a variety of kinds of institutional space. Yet there is always the tiniest possibility that quadrated organization may break down.¹⁷ Beckett’s most chilling evocation of the remainder as appearance comes in What ¹⁷ Interestingly, of the seven definitions of ‘quadrate’ listed in the OED, one refers to consistency and two to conformity.

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Where. Whilst other Beckett plays chart the triumph of a particular logic of appearance over the infinity of Being—notably Act Without Words I —the account provided by What Where is peculiarly stark, and the logic at stake peculiarly ferocious. Beckett presents appearance as an ordered assemblage of discrete but near-identical units, as is reflected in the near-identity of the names (Bam, Bem, Bim, Bom). The abstraction and indeterminacy of Catastrophe and Quad are taken to an extreme degree of minimality. No work of Beckett’s comes closer to imagining the permanence of the State as not only obscene but total. Significantly, he gave his last fourteen lines for the theatre to the authoritarian Voice, under a particular rubric: ‘Time passes. | In the end I appear. | Reappear’ (CDW, 476). It is hard to believe that he did not recognize the implication of this. It is in Endgame that Beckett most cohesively thinks the remainder as Being and appearance together. This is directly related to what is most puzzling in the play, the coexistence within it of two distinct kinds of thought. One of these functions according to certain limits, the other exceeds them. Endgame both asserts and denies a specific logic of appearance. Those who read Endgame as a Cold War play evoking a post-apocalyptic or post-nuclear condition had at least some reason to do so.¹⁸ If one can hardly claim that the play indicates exactly when it is supposed to be set, Hamm and Clov none the less repeatedly insist on their historical specificity, or what Hamm calls their ‘now’ (CDW, 114). In this ‘now’ there are no tides or Turkish delight, bicycles or rational beings. There is ‘no more nature’ (CDW, 97) and little remaining life. Humanity is about to die out, which means that God might possibly be born.¹⁹ Yet, equally, Hamm and Clov also suggest that, as Hamm says himself, ‘all is . . . [a]bsolute’ (CDW, 93), that the world doesn’t change at all, that there is no need for new ways of thinking about it, that it is always describable in general terms. Here the dead ‘go fast’ (CDW, 125), there’s no cure for being ‘on earth’ (ibid.), and unhappiness is ‘the most comical thing in the world’ (CDW, 101). What underlies this second understanding of the situation is actual infinity or ‘infinite emptiness’ (CDW, 109), the banality of limitless difference. From this vantage point, a day is ‘like any other day’ (CDW, 114) and the time is always ‘the same as usual’ (CDW, 94). This is the world of the non-event, in which it is impossible that one should experience even ‘an ¹⁸ See for instance Adorno, ‘Understanding’, 85–6. Interestingly, Beckett seems rather to have conceived of the scenario in terms of the First World War. See Theatrical Notebooks, ii. 43. ¹⁹ That, I take it, is the point to Clov’s reply to Hann’s declaration that God doesn’t exist: ‘Not yet’ (CDW, 119).

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instant of happiness’ (CDW, 123). There is no imperative to action, which means that activity and passivity amount to the same thing: Clov can love order, call it his ‘dream’, and be intent on it, and yet, immediately afterwards, abandon all thought of it (CDW, 120). In the world of the remainder, there is no subjectification. What passes for subjectivity is itself subject to three conditions. I shall call these dispersal, equivalence, and inconsistency. The third of these is not hard to spot. In All That Fall, for example, Maddy Rooney is a picture of furious inertia, ‘not half alive’, ‘a great big slop thick with grit and dust and flies’, and yet ‘never tranquil, seething out of my dirty old pelt, out of my skull’ (CDW, 174, 176, 177). However, the play that most helps us to understand such non sequiturs is That Time. It is very much a play about the condition of the remainder. The principle of dispersal, historicism, or the division into ‘times’ (‘that time . . . that time . . . that time’) ironically reverses into the assertion of a single time in which there is ‘never any change . . . nothing ever changed’ (CDW, 394). For nothing founds or grounds the division of time. Once it begins, there is logically no stopping point, no reason to think that it cannot continue ad infinitum. The only possible terminus ad quem would have to be decreed on the basis of an event. But in the world of That Time, nothing happens to interrupt the proliferation of times and induce the precious knowledge of ‘what one values is, what one’s value is’ (DI, 69). Here if anywhere, Beckett is concerned with ‘the task of reconstituting the infinite psychic text’, to resort again to Moorjani’s phrase.²⁰ The event subsists only as an ironical echo: ‘turning-point that was a great word with you before they dried up altogether always having turning-points and never’ (CDW, 390). Hence the separation of ‘that time’ from ‘another time’ also produces their confusion, because ‘that time’ may just be ‘any old time’. This is what I mean by equivalence: the ‘times’ have no more distinctness than the units in a mathematical set. This is so much the case that, for Donald McWhinnie’s Royal Court production of Footfalls in 1976, the Beckett so often reluctant to countenance changes to his work in production could none the less envisage what ‘appears to be a total rewrite of the pattern of the paragraphs’ without seeming loss or change in effect.²¹ According to Klaus Herm, Beckett insisted on the neutrality of That Time, the fact that all the ‘thoughts’ in it were ‘at the same level’.²² A centrifugal dispersal of times gets ²⁰ Angela Moorjani, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1982), 150. ²¹ See Theatrical Notebooks, iv. 361. ²² See Kalb, Beckett in Performance, 202.

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swallowed back up in the black hole of the one time which is any time at all: ‘was that another time all that another time was there ever any other time but that time’ (CDW, 395). Not surprisingly, these words immediately precede the play’s last great vision of collapse into dust. That Time articulates a remarkable intuition as to modern time and its consequences. That it is an intuition rather than a hypothesis is confirmed in the title itself, which grasps the extraordinary resonance of a humble, commonplace, modern English and Irish usage. This is how we have come to know time, as having the rich, abundant diversity and dull monotony of number. In the absence (it would seem) of any possibility of an event, That Time becomes one of Beckett’s great evocations of the pathos of intermittency. Endgame evokes the same pathos in a rather different mode and tone. Here, too, the melancholy absence of the event is clearly indicated and, with it, an absence of subjectivity. ‘I was never there’, says Hamm, of ‘this . . . this . . . thing’ that passes for a world (CDW, 114, 128). When he asks Clov whether he believes in the life to come, Clov replies that ‘Mine was always that’ (CDW, 116). What is extraordinary about Endgame is that, if Hamm and Clov present themselves as suffering the end of history, they also think of it as never really having begun. In this sense, the world of the play is ‘prehistoric’, as Benjamin thought Kafka’s was.²³ As Hamm says, ‘time was never and time is over’ (CDW, 133). This sheds a different light on the ending of What Where. ‘Make sense who may’ is ambiguous. The expression of despair at the possibility of finding meaning in the given world is also an abstract encouragement addressed to an indefinite future, if possibly with a Cretan smirk.²⁴ Like history in the universe of Endgame, sense in the universe of What Where has yet to begin. NUANCING THE EVENT The beginning of history is a theme in Endgame on two specific occasions: the panic over the flea, where it is treated with riotously ironical wit, and the appearance of the small boy, where the irony is less assured. (Should he be slaughtered in despair at what he will later breed, or not? Does he even exist?) ²³ Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, in Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins 1979), 111–40, p. 115. ²⁴ James L. Calderwood nicely notes that Waiting for Godot tells us that ‘Meaning is not yet’, but ‘with the smirk of a Cretan’: the statement can only be right by being wrong, since it must have meaning itself. See Calderwood, ‘Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot’, in Steven Connor (ed.), ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Endgame’ (London: Macmillan, 1992), 29–43.

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Neither incident has much impact on the world of the play. None the less, I want to emphasize the difference in nuance between the two. This may sound rather like emphasizing the difference between one of Malevich’s white crosses and its white background. But Beckett’s theatre is full of such finespun distinctions. In Endgame, the issue is differently shaded negations of the idea of the event. But many other such nuances are perceptible in Beckett’s plays. They become more evident as Beckett’s career as a dramatist progresses. The rest of this chapter will largely be about them. In fact, I want to try briefly to classify Beckett’s variously nuanced treatments of the event. The classification of nuance looks like a Procrustean if not absurd endeavour. Certainly, the classifications will be unrefined: the system will self-evidently be crasser than what it seeks to systematize. But nuance in Beckett is not an aesthetic impulse or nicety. It is itself a kind of thought. That makes it important to establish relations between Beckettian nuances. However, though I use the word ‘event’ repeatedly below, in Beckett, the dramatic event seldom if ever properly exists. The primary concern in Beckett’s plays is with the principle of ontological instability or ´ev´enementialit´e, and the theoretical limit it sets to inertia. The relevant concept of the subject is not the subject of an event. It is the subject who ‘knows how to wait for the thing to happen’, as Beckett described MacGreevy (DI, 74). Beckett the dramatist does not think the event in relation to a truth or truths. He thinks the possibility of the event from the side of its relation to the remainder. In this respect, his art remains sedulously, painstakingly liminal. What follows, then, is a provisional list of eleven categories. Quite a lot of the plays belong to more than one category. I don’t always indicate that in what follows. First, there is the most numerous group, what I would call the plays of the remainder. In these plays above all, the pathos of intermittency is dominant. That Time will serve as the paradigm. Other examples would be All That Fall, Act Without Words I and II, Embers, Play, Eh Joe, Breath, Ghost Trio, and What Where. Secondly, and very closely related to the first group, there are plays in which there is an abrupt break with an established pattern, but of a kind that functions as a kind of black parody of the event. The effect is one of brutal negativity. Beckett sometimes deliberately used single words or phrases to break with the established mood or tone of a play, or at least of a passage or scene. So much is clear from his production notes.²⁵ The paradigm of my ²⁵ See the Theatrical Notebooks, passim. Beckett thought for example of the word ‘bedpan’ in Footfalls as singular and exceptional. See Theatrical Notebooks, iv. 283.

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second category is Rockabye, where the words ‘fuck life’ abruptly explode into the play’s hypnotic rhythms (CDW, 442). Thirdly, there are the plays about a fruitless endeavour to transform a situation. The very futility of this endeavour, the impotence of will and purpose—the condition of being ‘changed’ but ‘not enough’ (CDW, 298)— indicate the importance of the alea as supplement. The plays in question, however, cannot produce it. The obvious example is Cascando. Fourthly, there are plays which give a minimal indication that a break with a given situation may be possible. We’ve seen this in Quad. Since A Piece of Monologue is concerned with a speaker who is poised on the edge of an ‘unaccountable’ admission of love (CDW , 429), it fits in here. Fifthly, there are the plays concerned with ´ev´enementialit´e as a flicker of possibility in Being. The instances of it, however, are likely to be sparse, slight, partly ironized, or comically trivialized. Endgame offers one example of this class (the flea, the boy). Waiting for Godot provides another: the suddenness and apparent randomness of the much-commented changes between the two acts do at least fissure the situation, rather than confirming the order of things or suggesting that something is merely taking its course. In the sixth category, there are plays which tell of an event and its consequences, but do so retrospectively or from an exterior position. This is the case in Ohio Impromptu. In the seventh category, the treatment of the event is aporetic, as in Footfalls. In the eighth, there are plays that testify to an event as having happened or dramatize its consequences, notably Not I. . . . but the clouds . . . also partly belongs here. In the ninth class, there are those rare plays that include an event, like Happy Days and Nacht und Tr¨aume. Catastrophe also belongs to this class. When the Protagonist finally raises his head, he abruptly sides with the Assistant’s ‘Patagonian’ suggestion, at the expense of the Director who has just stamped on it. The Protagonist disrupts a hegemonic logic, which is why the audience can no longer applaud. Finally, Badiou’s account of Krapp’s Last Tape suggests an eleventh category, in which the possibility of truth is preserved in a moment of beauty. Badiou focuses on Krapp listening to his younger self’s account of the puntscene (CDW, 220–1, 223). Badiou reads the sequence quite unsentimentally, as developing a line of thought. Beckett finds no salvation in memory. Yet Krapp’s nostalgia is none the less important. For it bears witness to ‘the immanent power of the Other’ in the self. This in turn bears witness to ‘the other life of which we are all bearers’ (‘dont tout un chacun est porteur’, BK, 64–5). Krapp himself rails against or scoffs at the Krapps of the past.

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None the less, what must finally gnaw at him is a trace of the subjectivity that was never his.²⁶ The play is pitiless: in the end, it sends Krapp back to ‘the classic doublet of void and silence’ (BK, 65). Yet, by a paradoxical logic that we have seen at work in Beckett’s prose, a destructive practice throws value clear of its own corrosive workings. Badiou sums this up as a victory for apagogic reason: ‘L’autre vie rayonne sous l’insulte’ (‘the other life radiates under insult’, BK, 65). This is possibly his finest and most penetrating sentence on Beckett. Not surprisingly, Beckett’s plays are much concerned with the ‘waiting subject’, or what the voice in . . . but the clouds . . . beautifully calls a ‘begging of the mind’ (CDW, 420). The examples of this category are immediately obvious: Godot, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . . itself. The waiting subject produces some of Beckett’s key phrases: ‘all eyes | . . . for another | like herself’ (Rockabye, CDW, 435); ‘relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity’ (Ohio Impromptu, CDW, 445); ‘[w]aiting on the rip word’ (A Piece of Monologue, CDW, 429). Beckett treats the theme in different modes, sometimes within a single dramatic work. Play constitutes a remarkable example of this; it is one of the most significant instances of Beckett’s dramatic thought. The shift from the first to the second part (Narrative to Meditation)²⁷ is precisely a shift towards an attitude of waiting for the event. The man in the play provides us with the relevant logic: ‘It will come. Must come. There is no future in this’ (CDW, 313). This might seem to be an ironical non sequitur. In fact, it marks a moment of very precise significance. Here both man and play exchange dead time for a recognition that what matters is properly historical time, time marked by a founding caesura, the time of truth.²⁸ My list of classes was long enough to seem fairly exhaustive. In fact, it was a set of rough approximations. If it says quite a lot, it also says very little. What it misses is nuance. For in a large number of plays, if the question of the event is evident, it is so in an ambivalent, spectral, incomplete, oddly angled, or strangely twisted presentation. This is clear enough in Happy Days, ²⁶ Cf the disparity between Krapp’s use of ‘chrysolite’ and its context in Othello: ‘If heaven would make me such another world, | Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, | I’d not have sold her for it’ (. ii. 145–7). Beckett was clearly acutely aware of the point: he wrote the lines out as part of the production notes. See Theatrical Notebooks, iii: Krapp’s Last Tape, ed. with introd. and notes James Knowlson (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 30. ²⁷ I derive these terms from Katharine Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 58. ²⁸ Brecht understood this, remarking that ‘nothing material depends’ on Beckettian waiting. See Kalb, Beckett in Performance, 183. The Marxist playwright could hardly have approved, though he did consider producing Godot.

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Catastrophe, and Not I. Or Footfalls: Footfalls might initially seem to be a play about the remainder. The gridded regularity of May’s movements reminds us of Quad. The world of Footfalls is that of actual infinity. ‘Will you never have done?’, says the Voice, to May. ‘Will you never have done . . . revolving it all?’ (CDW, 400). What fractures this structure is the reference in the closing story to the ‘strange thing . . . observed’ by Mrs Winter at Evensong (CDW, 403). Of course, Footfalls hardly underwrites this reference. The relation between the ‘strange thing’ and the rest of the play is thin, indeterminate, several times removed. It is narrated not dramatized. Are Mrs Winter and Amy an analogy for the Voice and May, or the Voice’s displacement of her own and May’s experience (as might seem to be suggested by the May/Amy play)? Did anything in fact happen at Evensong, in the story? If so, what? The question remains the more open in that Amy was apparently not there to say the Amen that Mrs Winter heard. It would be mistaken to put much emphasis on the church setting. Footfalls is not a play teetering on the edge of religious revelation. Beckett encouraged Alan Schneider to list ‘over a hundred suggestions as to who or what Godot might be’.²⁹ God was just one of them. In Footfalls, the conception of the event is abstract, a question of and for thought. As Beckett said of Godot, the play ‘strives at all costs to avoid definition’.³⁰ In the end, it leaves us with two questions: was there an event, and, if so, did a subject emerge in an act of consent or ratification (which is, after all, what Amen means)? In Footfalls, both event and subjectification are merely conjectural or ‘spectral’. According to Katharine Worth, when Beckett directed Billie Whitelaw in the play, he told her to ‘make it ghostly’.³¹ Furthermore, even in conjecture, event and subjectification are disconnected. They do not belong together. In Footfalls, the thought of the event insists in a trace of extreme faintness. There is nothing from or with which and no power to express the event. There is none the less an obligation to at least explore the possibility of expressing it. The man in . . . but the clouds . . . is obviously a ‘waiting subject’. So much is clear from the extraordinary precision of the ‘begging of the mind’ that Beckett attributes to him (CDW, 420). Of course, the most common result of begging is ‘case nought’: ‘nothing doing’, as Nagg more crustily puts matters (CDW, 119, 421). This, the axiom of rarity, is everywhere stamped on Beckett’s plays. It is at its most explicit in . . . but the clouds . . . Indeed, the play ²⁹ Theatrical Notebooks, i. 87. ³⁰ Ibid. ³¹ See Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre, 106.

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expresses it as a relation between numbers: in case nought, ‘in the proportion say of nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, or nine hundred and ninetyeight to two . . . I begged in vain, deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased, and busied myself with something else.’ In such circumstances, one might as well turn to ‘cube roots, for example’ (CDW, 421). Fascinatingly, when Beckett himself directed the play, with what, if we ignore the rigour of a characteristic torsion in his thought, might superficially look like perversity, he seems to have wanted to push it further in the direction of Quad. According to Herm, he was solely concerned with the problem of ‘how to make all the steps the same. . . . The rest didn’t interest him.’ ³² A bald statement captures little of the subtlety of . . . but the clouds . . . . If the play is founded on the axiom of rarity, the axiom does not exactly dominate it. For case nought is the fourth case, the last to be stated. There are three others: an appearance and, ‘in the same breath’, disappearance of the woman begged for (CDW, 420); a lingering apparition; and an apparition that speaks, inaudibly. The axiom of rarity is only belatedly established. Value comes before inexorable logic. Rare or not, the aleatory occurrence of the event is given priority over what remains beyond it or in its wake. It is given priority in two senses: it literally comes first in the play; and it has an ethical priority, it must be stated as first condition. The trouble is, of course, that inexorable logic is not just an afterthought. It exerts its own form of closure. True, it can never erase the existence of Quad ’s danger zone or what, at his most ruefully sardonic, Beckett refers to as ‘the indispensable door’ (in the directions to Come and Go, CDW, 408). But the logic of closure can almost persuade a hesitant mind that cube roots or even ‘nothing, that ’ are more ‘rewarding’ than begging in vain (CDW, 421). Yet it is precisely when the logic of closure seems closest to smothering the logic of the event—and the second is a logic; Beckett is as sure of that as Badiou—that the play changes mode. Up to this point, it has been subject to a characteristic disjunction or displacement. As in Footfalls, Ohio Impromptu, and elsewhere, so, too, in . . . but the clouds . . . , with an irony that Beckett clearly savours, the event has been narrated, and therefore held at a distance. It has been deprived precisely of the material immediacy that, as opposed to literature, theatre and (to a lesser extent) radio and television would seem to offer. But it is precisely when the man in . . . but the clouds . . . has specified the axiom of rarity and the logic of closure or unlikelihood, precisely when ³² See Kalb, Beckett in Performance, 205. Cf. also Theatrical Notebooks, iii. 283.

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he has issued forth yet again ‘to walk the roads’ (CDW, 422), that the words the woman has been speaking are finally heard. Of course, it is possible to argue that this final event, too, is shot through with irony: the voice is finally the man’s own, and not the woman’s. The audience hears the voice, but the man may not. That depends on how the final two dissolves to him are interpreted and produced. (The fact that the voice is his own does not seem to me to alter this point. The play indicates no necessary and essential correlation between M and V). But the promise implicit in the axiom of rarity is none the less weakened, since the suggestion is that there is no necessary coincidence between an event and a subject capable of responding to it. It is tempting to ask, too, what exactly four phrases amount to as an event: . . . but the clouds of the sky . . . when the horizon fades . . . or a bird’s sleepy cry . . . among the deepening shades . . . (CDW, 422)

The rejoinder to that is that they appear to amount to a great deal, for M; and the rejoinder to that, in turn, is that, again, it is not clear that the play’s sole dramatic event actually involves M. It may happen for the audience alone, in which case my question is askable after all. Similarly, one might argue that the event is a Yeatsian moment of what Worth calls ‘magical calm’ in which the ‘pains of life’ come to seem negligible, as it is in ‘The Tower’, from which Beckett takes the lines.³³ But Yeats is also saying that the pains of life recede in importance with closeness to death. This renders the poet’s tone ambivalent, particularly in the reference to ‘the deepening shades’. Beckett emphasizes the melancholy by making ‘deepening shades’ the last words in the play, after which there is only ‘Dark’. Thus the ‘magical’ moment turns out to be very close to the moment of death itself. Or does it? The lines have been levered from the poem and deposited in a play which (unlike the poem) contains no obvious reference to death. This might actually seem to reduce the effect of melancholy by making it less specific than it was in ‘The Tower’; assuming, that is, that an unspecific melancholy is less melancholy than a specific one. I have by no means exhausted the logical finesse of . . . but the clouds . . . . My own attempt at nice modulation is just a feeble mimicry of Beckett’s. The complications and shadings proliferate, as they repeatedly do in his drama. Here minimalism paradoxically opens up or at least gestures towards the beginning of a new maximalism, as represented by Leibniz’s bounded but ³³ See Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre, 111. I am grateful to Vicki Mahaffey for first pointing the echo of ‘The Tower’ out to me.

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unending world of infinitesimals.³⁴ Throughout his work, Beckett shows a concern with infinitesimal degrees of difference. This concern is pervasive in the plays. The darkness specified at the beginning of Play is ‘almost complete’ (CDW, 307). The dreamer in Nacht und Tr¨aume is ‘just visible’ (CDW, 465). The Listener and Reader in Ohio Impromptu are ‘as alike in appearance as possible’ (CDW, 445). Beckett repeatedly insists on almost-imperceptibility: the switches between the ‘moments’ of the ‘one voice A B C’ in That Time are ‘faintly perceptible’ (CDW, 387). The speaker in A Piece of Monologue is ‘barely visible’ and the light at the end of it ‘unutterably faint’ (CDW, 425, 429). This love of the slight or insensible gradation is everywhere apparent in Beckett’s treatment of the event. But gradation is less crucial to Beckett’s practice of nuance than the kind of convolution surrounding the event that we have seen in Footfalls and . . . but the clouds . . . . Beckett’s dramatic thought of the event is always irreducibly complicated, to say the least. I want finally to show this with reference to Not I, partly in comparison to Ohio Impromptu. The title of Ohio Impromptu has an interesting bearing on my theme. There has been some comment on it. Anna McMullan and Pierre Astier, for example, have emphasized the theatrical tradition of the impromptu as ‘a play about creation and the artistic practice of its author’.³⁵ But this makes a strange and serious play sound arty and self-involved. There are several unusual aspects to the title; first, uniquely in Beckett, it includes a place name. Secondly, the place meant nothing to him. (Beckett always expressed a lack of interest in America, courteous and friendly though he was to individual Americans.) Thirdly, with characteristic obliquity and cunning, he makes a play referring to this place uncommonly evocative of a city that is not named in the play but was of obvious personal significance to him, Paris. Given Beckett’s notorious scepticism about academic culture, this may very well be a piece of deliberate teasing. Ohio is in the title because of the Symposium on Beckett’s work for which Stan Gontarski invited Beckett to write, which was held at Ohio State University. Beckett responds to these expanded but formal and institutional circumstances by producing a beautifully toned but severely confined and private ³⁴ See pp. 29–30. ³⁵ Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (New York: Routledge, 1993), 113. Cf. Pierre Astier, ‘Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu: A View from the Swans’, Modern Drama, 25/3 (1982), 331–48, p. 332.

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work. As he goes outwards, he turns sharply inwards, towards recognizable features of his own experience.³⁶ Ohio meant little or nothing to Beckett, apart from the invitation. The name in the title is a random element. It underlines the chance occurrence. So, too, does ‘impromptu’, insofar as an impromptu is composed or uttered extempore, without preparation or premeditation, on the spur of the moment, without (or as a break with) previous thought. This does not mean that it is formless. Quite the reverse: Disraeli writes, for example, of ‘the well-arranged air of the impromptu’.³⁷ A good impromptu is finely wrought. In that respect, McMullan is right: an impromptu is a virtuoso performance. But Beckett ironizes the concept both of the impromptu and of its virtuosity. His impromptu is neither produced off the cuff nor a triumph of artifice. If it is set in a recognizable personal landscape, it is also melancholic and elegiac. The extravagant brio usually associated with an impromptu is precisely what is markedly lacking in Beckett’s brooding play, obsessed as it is with solitude, the past, and grief. Yet again, then, we find Beckett compulsively building a work on paradox or contradiction. If an impromptu is an act of spontaneous creation that pays no attention to a prior text or context, that is precisely not the case in Ohio Impromptu, where the ‘sad tale’ is read out aloud to a Listener (CDW, 448). In Ohio Impromptu, the past is inexorable. This comprehensively determines its mood. But the irony does not stop here: the significant impromptu-theme is not that of the impromptu in the strict sense. The sparkle in the ashes of the play—admittedly held at a distance by the fact that it is narrated—is in fact its ‘Paris Impromptu’, the unprompted or ‘unheralded’ appearance of the comforter (CDW, 447). Beckett ironizes one kind of unpreparedness and surprise. But he also promotes another, that of the event and a corresponding act of fidelity to it. The play pits a melancholic logic of inescapable retrospection against the logic of the pure break implied in the notion of the impromptu per se. But the implication is also that it is in relation to the first of these two logics that the event becomes possible. The event in question is crucial, since it answers to the protagonist’s needs: ‘Nothing he had ever done alone could ever be undone. By him alone’ (CDW, 446). Badiou knows that ³⁶ See DF, 664–5 for an account of the circumstances of the play’s composition and its use of personal material. ³⁷ Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred or the New Crusade, introd. Philip Guadalla (London: Peter Davies, 1927), 111.

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there is no pristine event. The event must needs enter into composition with the situation into which it breaks. Ohio Impromptu gives that knowledge an additional twist. Here the event takes place, not at will, nor with scintillating ease, but in relation to a sober recognition of the power of the situation at hand. In a sense, the idea of the impromptu performance is actually more central to Not I than it is to Ohio Impromptu, at least insofar as Not I consists of an unpremeditated flow of language. Not I hinges on an event: . . . drifting around . . . when suddenly . . . gradually . . . all went out . . . all that early April morning light . . . and she found herself in the . . . what? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she! (CDW, 376–7)

The event spells a break with a situation: ‘[she] found herself in the dark . . . . . . . . . she did not know . . . what position she was in’ (CDW, 377). It disputes an established knowledge or frame of reference, particularly Mouth’s belief in a ‘merciful . . . [Brief laugh.] . . . God . . . [Good laugh]’ (CDW, 377). It shocks Mouth into speech or, better, ‘ill saying’: ‘suddenly she realized . . . . . . . . . words were coming . . . . . . . . . mad stuff . . . half the vowels wrong . . . no one could follow’ (CDW, 379, 382). The progress of Mouth’s truth is a combination of perseverance and erratic wandering in a groundless world, of the kind that Badiou identifies with subjectification: ‘keep on . . . not knowing what . . . . . . . . . what she was trying . . . what to try . . . no matter . . . keep on’ (CDW, 383). The event produces the subject by scission. Subjectification is turned towards both the event and the situation. This is implicit in the very paradox of the title. As Mary Bryden suggests, Not I ‘signals a text reclaimed in advance by the voicer (but also in a sense independent of its voicer)’.³⁸ The assertion ‘Not I’ implies an I that makes it, and therefore a residue of the I in what it is not. Bryden calls this paradox ‘evocation-by-cancellation’.³⁹ It is intrinsic to subjectification. There are other ways, too, in which Mouth is re-implicated in the situation from which the event appears to have freed her. Ironically, she does indeed ‘hit on it in the end’; that is, she finds a means of dealing with her new confusion. But the end of the play also involves a backward turn (‘then back’). Once more, Mouth asserts that ‘God is love . . . tender mercies’ (CDW, 383). Whether the tone is serious or sardonic is less important than the fact that the ³⁸ Mary Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (London: Macmillan, 1993), 131. ³⁹ Ibid. 134.

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theme itself persists. The result is irony at the expense of subjectification. Furthermore, subjectification also throws Mouth into a hectic rush of language that has none of the discipline Badiou associates with the subject, to which the ‘well-arranged’ order of an artful impromptu is actually closer. Mouth may claim that being thrown into a new world has not brought her ‘suffering’ (CDW, 377). But the consequences of the event clearly include distress and incoherence. Bryden rightly says that to see Mouth as a victim would be ‘at variance with the sheer power and punch of this text’.⁴⁰ It is only according to the principle of plenitude that Mouth’s ‘tears’ (CDW, 380) or her jumble necessarily suggest victimhood or, more generally, woefulness. But to say that is not to rid Not I of its manifold irony. This becomes particularly clear if we compare the ‘begging of the mind’ in . . . but the clouds . . . with Mouth’s ‘begging in the brain’ (CDW, 382). The second reverses the first. The man in . . . but the clouds . . . begs for an event. Mouth begs for the consequences of an event to stop. Not I can even be partly read as a cautionary tale about the psychic effects of a transformative experience. In any case, what exactly is Mouth’s truth? It is quite obviously not scientific or artistic. But it is equally not a truth of love (‘no love of any kind’, says Mouth, CDW, 376). It can be described as a political truth only if we loosen the meaning of ‘politics’ to a far greater extent than Badiou would find acceptable. Not I provides a more abstract account of subjectification than Badiou’s, in the sense that subjectification does not occur within a specified ‘domain’. But it also provides a more concrete account (since it examines subjectification from the point of view of the subject herself). Similar difficulties emerge with a number of Beckett’s other plays. If Godot were to arrive, exactly what kind of truth would ensue? What truth is at issue in Act Without Words I ? If there is an event of ‘communion’ at the end of Come and Go, as Worth thinks, exactly what truth is at issue?⁴¹ Again and again, the effort to specify ‘Beckettian truths’ in Badiou’s terms turns out to be problematic. Badiou is not wrong to place his emphasis on love. The event of love is manifestly at stake in Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . . , A Piece of Monologue, Ohio Impromptu, and Nacht und Tr¨aume. Catastrophe and What Where are clearly about the political event. So, too (with a little stretching), is Quad, even (with a lot of stretching) Endgame. But other plays—Embers, Cascando, Footfalls—can be subsumed under neither rubric. Beckett alternately pushes his treatment of the event and the remainder towards the concrete ⁴⁰ Ibid. 133.

⁴¹ Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre, 62.

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world of a specific domain, and pulls that treatment back into abstraction. If Godot provides his most classic version of the theme, that is surely because of the degree to which the play allegorizes it. Here, again, we come back to Beckett’s art as always and irreducibly constituting a form of thought. This thought seems to me to hinge on a particular logic. It is summed up at the end of a neglected moment in one of Beckett’s more neglected works. I referred to it earlier. ‘Don’t cry miss’, says the Animator in Rough for Radio II, odiously, to the Stenographer, ‘dry your pretty eyes and smile at me. Tomorrow, who knows, we shall be free’ (CDW, 284). The irony is double: the play has given us no reason to believe that any sparkle of freedom is hid in this particular pile of ashes, and the Animator is the character whose freedom would least concern us. The archness, here, is paradigmatic of Beckett the dramatist, and his treatment of value, which is why I have come back to the quotation. It is evidence of Beckett’s pervasive desire to set barriers between the audience and any significant conception of freedom, to multiply the distances and awkward angles that separate the two. Beckett famously said that ‘the key word in my plays is ‘‘perhaps’’ ’.⁴² No doubt, at some level, he was indicating a disposition towards agnosticism or negative capability. But he was certainly not just aiming yet another smack at the whipping boy that every good postmodern citizen loves to hate, binary opposition. The remark touches on a much finer, more obscure and exquisite point than that. I have used the inadequate word ‘nuance’ to try to capture it. If we expressed it as desire, the word ‘velleity’ would be preferable. But it is the function of nuance that really matters, what Beckett makes nuance do. I’d suggest that in his plays and throughout his work, the construction of nuance is a work of the threshold. The whole debate around Beckett seems to me to have been far too heavily coloured by the question of ‘pessimism’: how ‘pessimistic’ is he, and how far can he be rescued from the charge? This miscasts the issue from the start. Beckett’s principal concern is not with any supposed degrees of optimism or pessimism but with material that is, above all, acutely, intensely, and intrinsically problematic. This is why I take Badiou’s emphasis on thought, work, and perseverance so seriously. More than any other critical account that I have read, Badiou’s gets the measure of Beckett’s work as actual, unremitting labour. If Beckett’s work inhabits a threshold, it is the threshold of the idea of the answer. Beckett points in the reverse direction to ‘the go-getters . . . solution clapped ⁴² Interview with Tom Driver (Columbia University Forum, Summer 1961), in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 220.

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on problem like a snuffer on a candle’ (DI, 92). He resembles the mathematician he refers to in his letter to Axel Kaun ‘for whom the solution of the problem is of entirely secondary interest, indeed to whom must the death of his figures appear quite dreadful’ (DI, 172–3). Along with Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stevens, Lacan, Adorno, Wittgenstein, and Derrida—others, of course—Beckett is one of the great creators of modern problematics and its demands. What is striking is how rapidly since its creation that problematics has begun to fade. The question for us is whether we want to try to sustain it into a blithely postmodern culture that is more and more concerned with expedition, a simplification of crucial problems which is supposed to reduce them to manageable terms. Management is the mot juste; we might recall Badiou’s assertion that, in the modern State, power has come to manifest itself above all as management. The gamble the culture is taking may very well not pay off. To imagine that we have reached the manageable end of problematics, however, is to refuse to entertain the logic of Lacan’s ‘necessary catastrophe’. My conclusion will address the issue at stake as a philosophical, political, aesthetic, and cultural issue, focusing specifically on the problem of intermittency.

Conclusion: The Pathos of Intermittency THE ENDS OF JOUISSANCE What I take to be the most significant recent French philosophy has been engaged in a sustained reformulation of modern aesthetics, modern politics, the form of modern experience itself. This reformulation has precisely involved the question of intermittency. I want to end by placing both Badiou and Beckett’s work in a broader contemporary philosophical context, in order to get the most ambitious and clearest possible view of the issues at stake in this book. I shall then go back to my general case as a whole, restate it, and reinterpret it in the light of the new context. Finally, I shall seek to place Beckett as exactly as possible in relation to a spectrum of ways of thinking and writing intermittency. First, however, I want to come back to Lacan, and a certain way of thinking jouissance in Seminar VII (which is nothing if not about the paradoxes of jouissance). In this context, I am not concerned with the more familiar Lacanian senses of the term. I am not concerned with sexual jouissance. Nor am I exactly concerned with the impossible object of a blocked desire, with jouissance as the fulfilment from which the subject is (necessarily) debarred. I want rather to stress what Lacan says about the actual availability of the impossible object under certain conditions, psychic or historical. Lacan is very clear about the availability of jouissance. Wealth in particular has always made jouissance ‘perfectly accessible and accepted’. Wealth even enjoys a ‘security of jouissance’.¹ Here jouissance is the assumption of plenitude which Badiou rebuked in Beckett criticism. It is an apparently limitless satisfaction of need. Religious faith is one of Lacan’s figures for it. American psychoanalysis is another, ¹ Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. with notes Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), 200.

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with its conviction that, by lifting inhibitions, it can provide unlimited access ‘to the goods of this world’.² A third such figure is ‘the Sadean phantasm’.³ Sade is paradigmatic of the ironical structure of jouissance. The phantasm is even exemplary twice over. Given the aggression that jouissance always contains, ‘the frightening core of the destrudo’, Sade must stuff his phantasm with treatises and rationalizations. Of course, these ‘social valorizations of his extravagant system’ turn out to be irreducibly contradictory.⁴ What inexorably takes place in the economy of jouissance made accessible is that law and transgression merge or become exchangeable. The logic which joins them is none the less broken at its root. Jouissance in this sense is intrinsic to cultures. After all, as Lacan points out, in Antigone, Creon’s logic is that of the promotion of the general good. What might a culture of jouissance look like? How exactly might such a culture function? Its features are describable according to the double logic of the Sadean phantasm, the mystification of the destrudo or what Lacan calls a specifically modern ‘practice’ of ‘ambiguity’.⁵ Imagine an obscenely wealthy and spendthrift society functioning on the basis of a founding barbarism, the cruelty and injustice of its relation to other cultures, yet ‘crevant de bonne conscience’,⁶ proud of its ‘humanitarian’ feelings and concerns. Imagine it flourishing at the cost of the steady depletion of other life-forms (including human ones), yet insisting that it is becoming more ‘ethical’. Imagine a vastly materialist culture, in which economic growth is an ungainsayable first principle, none the less incapable of pursuing the consequences of its own materialism all the way down and increasingly seeking re-enchantment, a conviction of its own ‘spirituality’. Imagine a culture more and more dominated by normative forms of education and entertainment but none the less eager to assert the richness of its ‘intellectual’ and ‘artistic’ life. Imagine it claiming to extend and disseminate knowledge as never before, whilst seeking to constrain the thought of that knowledge within already established and even positivistic horizons; or celebrating its democratic ‘openness’, its sophisticated networks of communication, whilst developing ever more efficient methods of watching and listening in on people. This culture would be dangerously close to total self-complicity (Beckett’s term, in Murphy). It would be a culture in which jouissance had become an imperative, a culture obsessed (but also obscurely tormented) by a dream of ² Ibid. 219. ⁵ Ibid. 180.

³ Ibid. 261. ⁴ Ibid. 194, 201. ⁶ See Proust, DR, 103.

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plenitude, the illusion of being able to square the circle and have it all. Its will to completion would be the reverse of the ‘waiting subject’s’ will. In Lacan’s terms, and equally Badiou’s, it would be a culture that, in its very attachment to its driving illusion, and its refusal to conceive of its own motivating energies as even problematic, let alone demonic, had become the victim of what Lacan would call its misrecognitions, and understood alarmingly little of its reasons and ends.⁷ Whatever the ironies of less turning out to be more in Beckett, he certainly had no truck with fantasies of plenitude. We’ve already seen plenty of evidence of this. When David Warrilow told him that reincarnation might be a plausible idea, he retorted ‘I hope you’re wrong.’⁸ From the start, he and his characters put up the most intransigent resistance to jouissance. In Adorno’s great phrase, ‘Beckett’s d´egoˆut does not permit itself to be coerced.’⁹ The resistance lies partly in a counter-tone (or tones, since the point holds for Beckett both comic and grave). Think of Clov, at once bracingly and witheringly sardonic: They said to me, That’s love, yes yes, not a doubt. . . . They said to me, That’s friendship, yes yes, no question, you’ve found it. They said to me, Here’s the place, raise your head and look at all that beauty. That order! They said to me, Come now, you’re not a brute beast, think upon things and you’ll see how all becomes clear. And simple! They said to me, What skilled attention they get, all these dying of their wounds. (CDW, 131–2)¹⁰

For all our bafflement, the sheer power of the phrasing at such moments, the sheer need to say exactly that, continues to draw us to the ineliminable Beckettian heresy. One explanation, I think, as to why there is such continuing interest in Beckett and his work today is not that he is exactly paradigmatic of anything in our world but rather the obverse: like Walter Benjamin, he is one of its great, implacable spectres. Throughout this book I have characterized Badiou and Beckett’s world as one of intermittency. Intermittency haunts the culture of jouissance. Step ⁷ For a relevant and important account of the politics of contemporary jouissance, see Slavoj ˇ zek, ‘The Politics of Jouissance’, lacanian ink, 24–5 (Winter–Spring 2005), 126–35. Ziˇ ⁸ Quoted in Katharine Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 63. ⁹ Theodor Adorno, ‘Towards an Understanding of Endgame’, in Ruth Gale Chevigny (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Endgame’ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 82–114, p. 84. ¹⁰ Beckett said the passage was about the ‘five dispensers of life’s consolation’, love, friendship, nature, science, and mercy. Theatrical Notebooks, ii: Endgame, ed. with introd. and notes S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 68.

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beyond that culture’s imposing fortifications,¹¹ and it is visible everywhere. Indeed, intermittency is not only the negative of jouissance but its repressed other, its shadowy corollary. As the corrosive effects of free market economics have increasingly made themselves felt in France, so, as in Britain, a new category of casualized labour has emerged, including migrant workers and the ‘sans-papiers’, which, unlike the ‘Fordist’ generations, has no experience of guaranteed or stable, full-time work. The experience of this new class is precisely one of intermittency. Advanced capital breeds and intensifies the experience of intermittency as the irrevocable underside of the myth of plenitude. One of Badiou’s great achievements is a radical transformation of the horizons of thought which allows us to think the world from the vantage point of intermittency. He owes this partly to Beckett: as Badiou’s world is that of the non-stakeholders, those who belong but are not included, so, too, in a certain sense, is Beckett’s. MODERNIT Y AND THE EVENT However, intermittency can also be thought historically. Badiou’s work contains the seeds of a theory of the beginnings of modernity. Modernity begins with the French Revolution, the first great historical experience of the void underlying established structures, and therefore of the possibility of the tabula rasa and radical transformation. As we have seen, modern politics subsequently emerges as a succession of rare, intermittent, and finite political sequences. The aesthetic domain catches up with the political domain with the first great modern writer, Mallarm´e. With the emergence of Cantor, the scientific domain catches up, too, and psychoanalysis bears witness to the emergence of modern love. But this theory is sketchy, because Badiou has no great interest in developing it, and there are difficulties with it, not least the question of where some of Badiou’s favourite subjects would fit in (Galileo? Eloisa and Abelard? Paul?). It is Franc¸oise Proust who thinks the relationship between intermittency and the onset of modernity most cogently and effectively. The event defines modernity. It is what makes the modern modern. Modernity is distinguished ¹¹ In ‘L’Inadmissible’, Jacques Ranci`ere exactly captures the spirit of the privileged enclave by way of an analogy with an Imperial Rome growing ever more efficient at banishing both the thought and the reality of those denied access to its wealth and splendour. See AU, 128–47, especially at pp. 136–7. It is by no means insignificant for the analogy that the Rome of ‘L’Inadmissible’ has properly incorporated its own plebeians.

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by its conviction of the possibility of pure, aleatory, originary historical beginnings, by interruptions of existing series and decisive inaugurations of new ones. For Proust as for Badiou, the French Revolution is the great historical announcement of modernity. But modernity properly begins with Kant.¹² This may seem like a surprising idea, and Proust’s reading of Kant is undeniably sui generis. She is well aware, for example, that her case does not exactly coincide with much of what Kant actually wrote on the subject of freedom. But she suggests that an obvious gap is left in Kant’s thought by the absence of any Critique of Political Reason.¹³ In a sense, she seeks to make good this lack, particularly in arguing that the later, political texts written after the French Revolution, most notably ‘Towards a Perpetual Peace’, and parts of the later ‘critical’ work, especially the Analytic of the Sublime, bring to light a developing strand in Kant’s thought that runs from the concept of transcendental freedom in the first Critique through a certain way of thinking reason as practice in the second.¹⁴ Kant saw the Lumi`eres as expressing ‘the chance of history beginning at last’ (PO, 62). He is the first modern philosopher because he is the first philosopher to think the possibility of pure, absolute, originary historical beginnings. Kant’s philosophy ‘opens up a time we call modern’ (KA, 9). This time has by no means been and, indeed, could not conceivably be exhausted. Proust makes explicit what is implicit in Badiou: once discovered as such, modern time is permanently available to us. It is always possible to redeem modern time from the history of its ‘aborted starts’ and ‘still-born opportunities’, however difficult the task may seem to be (KA, 35). But modernity also marks the end of the age of heroic and monumental new beginnings, beginnings that anticipate jouissance, a historical completion or plenitude. With modernity, we arrive at an understanding or an experience of beginnings as bearing no relation to ¹² Elsewhere, I hope to factor Wordsworth in as the third instance. ¹³ See PP, 33–4. ¹⁴ For relevant accounts of the French Revolution, see Kant, ‘R´eflexions’, in Th´eorie et pratique, D’un pr´etendu droit de mentir par humanit´e, La Fin de toutes choses et autres textes, introd., tr., notes, bibliography, and chronology Franc¸oise Proust (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 127–74, pp. 141–2; and The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. and introd. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 2.6, pp. 153–6. For the concept of transcendental freedom, see Critique of Pure Reason, tr. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 484–90, 535–7. For a connection between this concept and the Idea of reason in the third Critique, see Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), no. 91, pp. 331–6. For Proust’s account of practical reason as an experimental production of the real that discovers its principles with each specific new case, see for example ‘Introduction’, Th´eorie et pratique, 5–40, pp. 5–8. The Analytic of the Sublime does not develop a conception of a historical sublime along with the sublime in nature. For Proust’s argument for extrapolating from the one to the other, see PO, 41–2.

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any overarching historical narrative. Beginnings appear fitfully, ‘par ‘‘intermittences’’ ’ (DT, 12), as historical striations, like meteors in a night sky, or ‘comme en pointill´e’, as stipplings of history (PO, 41). Historical time is not given as a whole. ‘Il ne cherche aucun accomplissement’: it neither anticipates nor seeks any historical fulfilment (KA, 12–13). The only possible completions of time are punctual and fugitive. There is and there will be no end of history. Nor will history reveal itself in any awesome totality.¹⁵ The ‘solar view of history’, which sought to think or view history whole, from above, is definitively in ruins (KA, 81). The mind can no longer apprehend a historical design. The modern question is not ‘Are we moving with or in the direction of history?’ It is not ‘At what specific and intelligible moment of history do we find ourselves?’ It is rather, ‘How may we let ourselves be affected by the haphazard character of history and the seeds of new beginnings’? Like Badiou, Proust also offers us a theory of subjectification, if less explicitly and methodically than he does. As we saw in Chapter 4, this theory hinges on the discovery of modern sensibility. The discovery of modern sensibility is inseparable from the discovery of modern time. Proust asserts that ‘the only criterion’ for judging the aleatory emergence of properly historical time ‘is affect and the reflection of affect in the actor or witness’ (KA, 17). The pure forms of the mind that register the unsynthesizable time of historical events themselves precede any synthesis and constitute sensibility. It is as sensibility that the subject of an event is passive to a power outside the time of natural causality. In the process of subjectification, the shock of the blow that affects us comes first. This shock originates in passivity. No knowledge can anticipate the shock of the event, because it is experienced passively, as an affection. The shock of the event ‘disarms’ or ‘seizes’ the mind, breaking up its established formations and producing an affective tumult (‘un battement de sentiments’, KA, 156). Inauguration—the beginning of a new series—is possible, not because a subject or subjects cause it to happen, but because something happens to cause a subject. It requires an essential receptivity. In this sense, modernity is not produced by modern subjects. It is not a matter of subjective action. The new series also deconstitutes the object, which is a function of knowledge, not of sensibility. The subject emerging in the wake of an event guards the point at which the event was experienced. But the experience of the event that is retained has no objective status. For the event ¹⁵ History is ‘non-unifiable’ as is nature: this is the logic of the third Critique. See ‘Introduction’, Th´eorie et pratique, 10.

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expires as it arrives, is no more than the trace that it leaves. The experience of the event is of a minimal, affected subjectivity; minimal, because the subject is emptied of what it had formerly been, and exists only as the possibility of something new. However, this is not at all to disempower the subject: as in Badiou, quite the reverse. Since his or her condition is historical freedom, the subject must prescribe for him- or herself. What follows is, again, ‘the reflection of affect in the actor or witness’. The actor or witness must become the legislator of his or her own actions. This is the whole tenor of Proust’s reading of the second Critique: the practitioner of reason is a legislator of action. Practical reason is not an application of rules to circumstances, but what Kant describes as ‘a faculty of producing objects corresponding to representations or determining itself to effect such objects’.¹⁶ It is experimental and takes risks. It discovers and rediscovers itself with each new case.¹⁷ The subject thus emerges as what Proust calls bravura. It actively and spontaneously decrees its own laws and accepts the consequences. Subjectivity requires a declaration, and the declaration is ‘a sort of performative’.¹⁸ To declare a thought is at once to practise it. Kant discovers this ‘performative liberty’ as he discovers a new ‘sensibility to time’ (PO, 40). In making its declaration, the subject becomes an example; that is, an Exempel not a Beispiel, not a particular example of a pre-existing generality or concept, but an example to be followed, a call to others. The law is thus, follow it. There is a crucial founding injunction which runs from one event and its subjects to others and relates them. As in Badiou, it makes of their persistence the power that alone constitutes true history. The injunction is founded on the lesson of the Lumi`eres: ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!’¹⁹ It is the imperative form of transcendental freedom, and expresses ‘the aptitude to begin a new state of things’ by oneself.²⁰ The imperative is: experiment freely with an ethical life. Begin an ethical world. Or, says Proust, in Nietzschean terms, ‘make present ¹⁶ Critique of Practical Reason, tr. and ed. Mary Gregor, introd. Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12. ¹⁷ Judgement is a form of this practice, inventing the singular rule or imperative for each new case to which it is applied. See ‘Introduction’, Th´eorie et pratique, 14. ¹⁸ Ibid. 16. Cf. PO, 39. ¹⁹ Kant, ‘Qu’est que les lumi`eres?’, in Vers la paix perp´etuelle, Que signifier s’orienter dans la pens´ee, Qu’est ce que les lumi`eres? et autres textes, introd., notes, bibliography, and chronology Franc¸oise Proust, tr. Jean-Franc¸ois Poitier and Franc¸oise Proust (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 43–51, p. 43. ²⁰ Proust, ‘Introduction’, Th´eorie et pratique, 14.

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life livable and resist the unlivable life’ (DR, 105). There are plenty of possible variations on this injunction: fiat justitia, pereat mundus; or, to meddle with one of Benjamin’s quotations from Kafka, ‘Believe in progress, even though it has yet to begin’;²¹ or, to return to the low-key terms of What Where, ‘Make sense who may’ (CDW, 476). Proustian ethics does not solely consist in bravura. If the consequence of a given event is a new ‘series’ which radically breaks with established ones, each series requires that its subjects be what Proust calls ‘casuists’. They must engage in a minute, patient, and judicious investigation of the possible conditions of the series. This is necessarily the case, because the contents of the series are not predetermined. ‘Casuistry’, and the ‘judiciousness’ that must accompany it, are not about discovering what already exists. Hence the relevance of the term casuistry itself: the theological casuist resolves cases of conscience in doubtful questions of conduct and duty where there is no prior guide. Proustian ethics is both legislatory and methodical. Legislation and method together function as a regulation and a discipline of sensibility. Proust’s ethics obviously bears certain rather close resemblances to Badiou’s. Badiou himself recognizes this: Proust understands history in terms of events, the rare and scattered or discontinuous ‘sublime experiences of liberty’. Badiou also recognizes that, like his own and Mallarm´e’s, hers is a ‘nocturnal’ as opposed to a ‘solar’ theory of history, though one that is also ‘´etoil´ee’ (‘bestarred’, ‘star-studded’).²² He also sees that, for Proust, events form sequences. They serve as starting points for, beacons and encouragements to other events, as the French Revolution served to the Russian one. For Proust, such sequences are the only ones that can be deemed to be properly historical. Here again, Badiou notes an aspect of her thought which seems strikingly close to his own. Proust rightly identifies subjectification chiefly with resisting the intolerability of the given world (for her and Badiou, a first principle of philosophy, as for Beckett, too, it is surely a first principle of the intellectual life). Yet none the less, again, if it is not hard to conflate Badiou and Proust, it is also not hard to drive wedges between them. Some are too obvious to need much mention. Proust has little or no interest in mathematics and, from the perspective of Badiou’s mathematical ontology, falls victim to the continuing ²¹ The original quotation is: ‘To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, in Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins 1979), 111–40, p. 130. ²² ‘Sur le livre de Franc¸oise Proust: Le Ton de l’histoire’, Les Temps modernes, 565–6 (Aug.–Sept. 1993), 238–48, p. 240.

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legacy of romanticism that he argues it is imperative that we surmount. In his first essay on her work, he argues that she ignores both the specificity and the banality of Being as actual infinity. Proust works with a vaguer conception of infinity, thus not only romanticizing but even implicitly Christianizing the event. Above all, however, for Badiou, there is the problem of passivity. For Proust, subjectification starts out from an affective ‘point of departure’. It proceeds to establish a ‘protocol’, a strategic displacement of the rules of the game.²³ This is Proustian casuistry. But Badiou argues that the deliberation, decision, and resolute action involved in subjective protocol are the very principles of historical rupture itself. There is, as it were, no gap between event and protocol. It is only the protocol that demonstrates that the event has taken place at all. The subject does not exist, not even as pure passivity, before the protocol begins. Proust tries to think Being in terms of a constitutive duplicity; to think Being and what runs counter to being together; that is, to think Being as symbiotically linked to the event and the ‘resistance’ to which it leads.²⁴ This means thinking subjectification as taking place when the will to resist affects a passive entity. Badiou argues, however, that this conception of the ‘duplicity’ of Being cannot sufficiently account for the sequential progress of truths. I dealt with the inconsistencies in and limitations to Badiou’s case against Proust in Chapter 4. Here, I want finally to ask why he should be so determined to hold her at bay. Why is he so concerned not to let sensibility, receptivity, and passivity have any place in his philosophical system? There is clearly a desire to hold Kant at a distance; after all, part of the contemporary predicament, for Badiou, is what he takes to be the ‘immense ‘‘return to Kant’’ ’ (ES, 8). More remotely, but as importantly, there is the desire to hold Heidegger and the passivity of Heideggerian ‘listening’ at a distance. It is hard not to feel that there is also a desire to hold ‘the feminine’ at a distance, too, all the more so, since the Proust essays are not the only place where Badiou more or less explicitly equates a certain thought of ‘the feminine’ with passivity. But there is also a degree to which Badiou inherits what I would call a traditional left pathophobia. This was partly a fear of pathos as sapping and imperilling the virile momentum of the forward march. I would suggest that the left ²³ ‘Depuis longtemps, depuis si peu de temps’, Rue Descartes, 33 (Oct. 2001), 101–4, p. 102. ²⁴ He is thinking of the Foucauldian premiss that underlies the whole of Proust’s De la r´esistance, that power is infinite but breeds resistance ‘as its inseparable companion’. DR, 9. Cf. Proust’s account of Kant’s conception of ‘perpetual peace’ as both disputatious and ‘armed’. See ‘Introduction’, Vers la paix perp´etuelle, 5–38, pp. 31–3.

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was traditionally wary of pathos or melancholy because they so easily seemed like testimony to the remainder, the residue that falls outside the capture of negativity by dialectics. Some of the greatest modern writers insistently maintain the right to attention of the residue of dialectics, indeed, the imperative of factoring it into thought. I shall return to this point in a little while. The extraordinary eloquence of pathos in Mandelstam is a massive rebuke to left pathophobia as it became truly pathological, with Stalin. Though Badiou himself would no doubt not agree, his great modern writers offer a massive rebuke to the callow positivities of a very great deal of the critical and radical thought of the recent past, its misplaced confidence, the smoothness and ease with which it assumed it could so readily and swiftly grasp the one or the whole, or both. This, I think, is the real meaning of the Beckettian ‘slow going’ that critics from Hardy to Connor have so well emphasized.²⁵ Adorno was quite right to pit Beckett specifically against Luk´acs. Like Badiou, Beckett everywhere turns away from the absurd and empty certainties of Luk´acs’s kind of ‘science’, as the narrator of The End turns away from ‘the orator’: Do you hear me, you crucified bastard! he cried. Then I went away, although it was still light. . . . He must have been a religious fanatic, I could find no other explanation. Perhaps he was an escaped lunatic. He had a nice face, a little on the red side. (CSP, 94–5)

It would be mistaken to read this passage as a whole as some (unusually crude) piece of largely anti-Marxist satire. The narrator does not exactly resist the orator or subvert his discourse. In effect, he asserts that the terms of the orator’s knowledge have no meaning at all. They certainly have no purchase on him. The pathos of the remainder lies in the gap that opens up between the irrelevance of knowledge on the one hand and the absence of truth on the other. It may be quite important, then, not to help Badiou seal himself off from Proust’s thought, but rather to enlarge and deepen the fissures in his work which reading Proust can help us see. These fissures are perhaps most marked in the case of Badiou’s account of modern literature. Again and again, his accounts of the subjectivity and the ethics of the great modern writers turn out not exactly to conform to his more abstract accounts of the process of ²⁵ Barbara Hardy, ‘The Dubious Consolations in Beckett’s Fiction: Art, Love and Nature’, in Katharine Worth (ed.), Beckett the Shape Changer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 105–38, p. 115; and Steven Connor, ‘Slow Going’, Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000), 153–65.

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subjectification. As a subject of the event of the Commune, for example, Mallarm´e declares his ethical fidelity in an activity that, as Badiou repeatedly stresses, is also profoundly patient, a patient attention to the conditions of the possibility of the event. Mandelstam, Celan: Badiou’s great modern writers repeatedly turn out, precisely because they are committed to an ethical subjectivity of waiting, to be also great melancholics. Like Mallarm´e, Beckett is a writer who works his ethical way, tentatively, contradictorily, fitfully, arduously, at great length, and by a variety of different and differently nuanced means, towards a rigorously limited conviction of the possibility of the event. Like Mandelstam and Celan, in his writing of the threshold and the ‘subjectivity of waiting’ that it implies, he appears to have learnt what Proust tells us is a Spinozan lesson, the necessary interdependence of the active and passive principles in truly creative work.²⁶ In Beckett as in the poets, melancholy, passivity, and an unstinting, vigorous, disciplined, and meticulous activity are finally inseparable. Badiou has far too large a mind and range of sympathies not to know this. What he does not want to do is fully to theorize it or stretch his ethics fully to include it. At this point, Proust provides what is, at the very least, an important supplement to Badiou’s thought, particularly with Beckett in mind. Thus far, I may have made her thought sound suspiciously uplifting in tone. In fact, something like the reverse is partly the case. For if Kant is one of Proust’s lodestars, the other is Benjamin. To some extent, she balances the one against the other. Indeed, one might almost say that, with Benjamin, she duplicates her own thought all over again, but also re-inflects it, casting it in a radically different mode and tone. Certainly, without placing her reading of Benjamin alongside her reading of Kant, we can only have a limited grasp of her understanding of modernity. For, in a sense, Proust tries to think modernity from beginning to end: if it is Kant who defines modernity, it is Benjamin who tells us what little of it there might be left for us. If we are to remain faithful to the Kantian understanding of modernity, it must be, not by way of completing the trajectory projected by any new beginning, but by repeating what Proust calls ‘the power of initiality’ itself (KA, 35). Kant is the first modern thinker because he thinks modernity as inauguration. Inauguration is the consequence of an event. Events don’t have to happen and, ²⁶ DR, 20. I assume she is referring in particular to the conclusion of part IV of the Ethics. See Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and tr. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 286. Cf. also proposition 38, p. 255.

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for the most part, don’t happen. Modernity doesn’t happen much either: it is ‘ ‘‘s´equentielle et rare’’ ’, says Proust, specifically with reference to politics.²⁷ In this respect, however, by implication at least, ‘initiality’ must be counterposed to a formidable power of inertia. Once again according to the inexorable logic of intermittency, it would seem to be inertia that commonly prevails and is the rule. Not only must events in their intermittency leave a historical remainder. By implication, since events are rare, the remainder comprises and must comprise the larger part of historical experience. The fate of passivity, of the Kantian (or Proustian) ur-faculty of sensibility in the absence of events, is surely clear. Proust herself occasionally emphasizes what she calls the ‘virtue of waiting’ (‘vertu d’attente’, DR, 183). But her concept of sensibility also offers us a fresh perspective on what waiting subjects might be whilst waiting. They are subjected to what, in my terms, is the pathos of modern intermittency. It is precisely the pathos of intermittency as the relation between event and remainder that, for Proust, Benjamin so powerfully grasps. In this respect, the two of them are closer to Beckett than Badiou. Proust’s work on Benjamin offers a powerful account of the logic of the pathos of intermittency. To clarify this, however, we have to go through Proust’s concept of the doubleness or underside of modern time.²⁸ In Proust’s account of it, the doubleness of time is itself double; that is, it has a Kantian and a Benjaminian inflection. In its Kantian inflection, historical time actually exists as a crossing or interlacing of two times. On the one hand, there is the determined temporality of natural causality, synthesized time, whose features are linearity, succession, concatenation. On the other hand, unpredictably—and causelessly, however a causality may be retrospectively constructed—the new will always enter the world of determined time. It will always break the serial chain. This is because of what, in Kantian terms, again, is unsynthesizable time, pure, diverse ‘time before synthesis’. In this second time, a conversion or a revolution or the emergence of an unattended form is always possible. As we’ve seen, pure time is only available to the pure forms of the mind, forms which themselves precede any synthesis. These forms are a priori. In Proust’s accounts of Benjamin, by contrast, the two times are rather the time of the eternal return and messianic time, the time of the event. Paradoxically enough, the time of the eternal return is not only a modern discovery ²⁷ DR, 175 n. 42. Proust is quoting Sylvain Lazarus. ²⁸ ‘Doubleness’ is my term. Proust uses ‘doublure’, which principally means ‘lining’ (of a coat) or ‘understudy’.

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but the dominant time of modernity.²⁹ Modern time is constituted in the eternal return of the coup or shock. Automatically, unmasterably, the new eternally returns as the same. This is not principally the consequence of modern inventions, transformations, technologies, and so forth. It is rather because modernity has at length deprived us of the possibility of thinking ‘a beyondtime’ (‘un au-del`a du temps’, DT, 14), whether theological, Hegelian, or other. It cannot furnish history with any horizon of ultimate sense, in the way, for example, that the progressive totalization of the dialectic did. Events therefore cease to provide foundations or serve as the origins of ‘durable institutions’ (DT, 8). They appear as pure, discrete beginnings that are themselves their own end. Furthermore, they proceed and proliferate with a mad speed. This is what Proust repeatedly calls the infernal time of modern eternity, mechanical reproduction. It is the time of what for Nietzsche was the unliveable life, a time that disgusts and disheartens. It is destructive: it produces the modern ‘loss of experience’ referred to in the well-known passage in Benjamin’s The Storyteller.³⁰ But surely not: this time is surely the time of the event and truth that has been at stake in the whole of my book, and to which we’ve seen that Proust herself subscribes. The paradox, however, is precisely the point: Proust is vitally concerned as Badiou is not with what she takes to be the deep irony of modern time. In her work on Kant, Proust makes it quite clear that the two aspects of modern time are interinvolved, that again, as with the event and the remainder, the one is the underside of the other. In the experience of the sublime, for example, unsynthesizable time does not cancel out synthetic time but is ‘apprehended at [its] heart’ (PO, 45). So, too, in Benjamin, infernal time is vain, empty, inert, the time of the void and ennui. But it is also an intoxicating time (a paradox that Baudelaire exactly understood). Because it lacks all foundations, it also secretes within it the time of chances and events.³¹ Reproduction is the risk the event runs, but also its opportunity. For the time of the eternal return is also a time saved from being smothered in any other eternity.³² Within the logic of infernal time, what is called the past is dead (because preserved, conserved, an object of knowledge or memory). The future is equally inert (because anticipated as a repetition of what is already present). But the ²⁹ For this emphasis, see for instance Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, Selected Writings, iv: 1938–40 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 161–99, passim. ³⁰ Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, 83–109, pp. 83–4. ³¹ See DT, 15 for the full argument. ³² See ibid., 14.

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logic of messianic time is a logic of time ‘in arabesques’.³³ Time loops forward and back: the past is alive because immemorial, virtually present, close at hand. The future is also alive, because a living present has vivified its promises and possibilities. Thus the present is untimely, not contemporary with itself. The time of the event is a time that is irretrievably fractured and disunited, or better, out of joint, a time in which only local unities are possible.³⁴ For Benjamin, these local unities are the ‘exceptional virtualities’ of history. They are events of ‘counter-time’ (‘contretemps’). ‘Explosions of justice’, writes Proust, ‘always come in counter-time’ (HC, 9). What is an ‘explosion of justice’? Somewhat confusingly, Proust describes it as a second event. Einmal ist keinmal:³⁵ the first event is only properly known in and as a second one. The second event bears a close resemblance to what for Badiou is the decision of the subject. It is constituted in an intervention or interpretation that blasts the first event free of oblivion.³⁶ The second event revives or sustains the first in the teeth of the official history that has smothered it; thus, for example, in the case of Benjamin himself and his work on the Trauerspiele of the baroque era. The first event remains as a ghost that still claims justice in the present time. The second event actually snatches the first one free of the progressive time that had obliterated it and holds it at bay. So, too, the second isolates the first event from the great welter of modern shocks which otherwise threaten to engulf it in the inertia of infernal time. But the eternal return continues madly to pile up disaster, disaster on disaster. It is only rarely, in counter-time, that events are salvaged from the wreckage. This indeed is what the Trauerspiele themselves tell us, with their vision of an inert world that is none the less haunted by ‘the breath or phantom of another life’ (HC, 60–1). The relevance of Proust and Proust’s Benjamin to Beckett should be evident exactly here. Benjamin’s account of the Angel of History exactly conveys the unremitting logic of modernity as a logic of event and remainder. That, I think, is why we are so mesmerized by it. In Benjamin’s grasp of it, as in Beckett’s, the logic of modernity is inextricable from pathos. The Angel of History is ‘irresistibly propelled’ by the storm of progress, as the paradigm of a modern passivity carried melancholically beyond the limits of its own ³³ For Proust’s fullest account of this idea, see HC, 26–33. ³⁴ See DT, 9. ³⁵ For this argument, see Benjamin, Thesis XVI, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, 255–66, p. 264. Cf. HC, 46 and n. 14. ³⁶ A full account of this complex and important idea is beyond the scope of this study. But see for instance HC, 46–9.

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resources.³⁷ The event itself is always only ‘the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe’.³⁸ This is the status it assumes in Beckett’s work. Beckett himself put the point very baldly: ‘The only chance of renovation is to open your eyes and see the mess.’³⁹ His world resembles that of the German Trauerspiele. In Benjamin’s account of them, the Trauerspiele are buried deep in creaturely existence. They are ‘taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition’.⁴⁰ But the redemption known to the Trauerspiele resides precisely in this hopeless destiny. In baroque, the disconsolate chronicle of the world is not set in opposition to eternity. It is opposed to the glancing moment, the ‘opening in the passage of time’ at which is glimpsed the faint possibility of the restoration of paradise.⁴¹ Though ‘restoration’ would not be the word, from Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho to . . . but the clouds . . . and Ohio Impromptu, we have seen a thought of something like that glancing moment in Beckett’s work. ACT UAL E CLIPSE It might seem, then, that thinking Beckett together with Benjamin might conceivably tell us more than connecting him with Badiou. Yet this is not the case: Badiou’s mathematical logic has a force and precision lacking in messianic logic. More importantly, it is precise with reference to Beckett where messianic logic is not. It not only seems much more faithful to the mathematical and quasi-mathematical features of Beckett’s work. It gives those features an ontological point appropriate to the ontological concerns about which Beckett was repeatedly explicit. It provides a plausible account of Beckett’s (quite unBenjaminian) evacuation of history from his world. Most of all, Badiou relates Beckett to a conception of the event that is quite distinct from Benjamin and Proust’s messianic one. It has none of the theological residue perceptible in theirs, not least in the concept of messianism itself. Badiou thinks a rigorous logic of the event. By contrast, the logic of ‘time in arabesques’ seems disconcertingly numinous. What ensures the kind of temporal short-circuit, the shocking contact of past, present, and future that produces counter-time? ³⁷ See Thesis IX, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 259–60; and HC, 34–5. ³⁸ Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 185. ³⁹ Tom F. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, Columbia University Forum, 4/3 (Summer 1961), 21–5. ⁴⁰ Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 81. ⁴¹ Ibid. 135. Cf. also p. 92.

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Benjamin’s concept of counter-time owes a substantial debt to the concept of involuntary memory in the work of the other Proust, Marcel. Is counter-time actually conceivable as anything other than the subjectivism that it remains in the Recherche? In one sense, Badiou’s theory of the event accounts for it. It roots it in a meticulously elaborated, secular ontology. It tells us why it has to happen. By contrast, in Benjamin and Proust, the event arrives as a miracle on Earth. Like Badiou’s, Beckett’s conception of the event is resiliently, stubbornly, acutely secular. Here, he shares Badiou’s rigour, where Benjamin and Proust do not. But if Benjamin and Proust lack Badiou’s rigour, in one crucial respect, they are more convincing than him. For what Badiou himself lacks, what he everywhere refuses, and what distinguishes him from Beckett as much as Benjamin and Proust, is the thought, not only of anything resembling what Benjamin calls catastrophe, but of the logic that, according to his own scheme of things, must bind event and catastrophe together. This logic becomes still clearer if we turn to the work of Jacques Ranci`ere. For if Proust provides an important supplement to Badiou, Ranci`ere supplies an important supplement to both. Very occasionally, Proust furnishes historical instances of inert time and the unliveable life: the Germany of 1843 that is the context for Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the France of Louis Bonaparte after 1851 addressed in the Eighteenth Brumaire, the Germany of 1870 that is the context for Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, Europe in the 1990s (and no doubt beyond).⁴² But her interests are usually not of this kind. It is in Ranci`ere that the pathos of intermittency is most concretely evoked, particularly as a feature of political life. I have given quite a thorough account of Ranci`ere as a philosopher of intermittency elsewhere,⁴³ and shan’t repeat much of it here. The significant point is this: in certain important respects, Beckett’s sense of intermittency is more like Ranci`ere’s than Badiou’s. But Beckett makes a set of aesthetic choices which also ensure that the reverse is true. Though Ranci`ere does not use the term, he produces a concept of what we might call the political remainder. It is exemplified in the era of what he calls the ‘actual eclipse’ of politics: Politics in its specificity is rare. It is always local and occasional. Its actual eclipse is quite real, and there exists no political science capable of defining its future, any more ⁴² Proust died in 1998. ⁴³ See ‘The Unfinished Song: Intermittency and Melancholy in Ranci`ere’, Paragraph, 28/1 (Mar. 2005), 61–76.

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than a political ethics exists that can make the existence of politics solely an object of will. (ME, 188)

Ranci`ere goes on to add that ‘the manner in which a new politics might break the current round of happy consensus and humanity denied [in other words, the culture of jouissance] is, at the present time, neither predictable nor decidable’ (ibid.). It is partly against this ‘round of consensus’ that the pathos of intermittency emerges. For contemporary happiness is predicated on not only a vast indifference but, in Beckettian terms, a blank refusal to take a good look. Here Beckettian patience would have its purpose, too, for to anticipate a ‘new politics’ that might fracture the current impasse is, as always, to depend on a rare event. ‘Politics in its specificity’ is not already given, everywhere accessible, available at once. It cannot be described before it appears. It happens, here and there, or from time to time. It cannot be forecast, and no logic of hindsight can account for its taking place. Ranci`ere does not expressly make the principle of intermittency central to his thought, as Badiou does. But then, unlike Badiou, he has no interest in producing a philosophical system. He is a historical materialist, and a good deal of his more precise historical research involves the exploration of (revolutionary, emancipatory, utopian) politics precisely as a ‘local and occasional’ event. This is even a logical consequence of a materialist concern with ‘politics in its specificity’. If politics is intermittent, however, the logical corollary of that, though Ranci`ere is reluctant to admit it, is melancholy. Ranci`ere’s work exudes melancholy. This melancholy is properly unsentimental. Like Beckett’s melancholy, it is sober, but not to be confused with pessimism, nor in principle defeatist. It is intimately related to the pathos of intermittency. If there is such a thing as the real eclipse of politics, if politics is rare, the inexorable conclusion must be that the failure, death, or absence of politics is commonplace. Indeed, given Ranci`ere’s immersion in material history, he can hardly avoid exposing an intrinsically melancholy dimension to intermittency. Badiou may grasp the meaning of the times in which ‘a present is lacking’; it is Ranci`ere who is intimate with their tone or feel. Ranci`ere’s Le Maître ignorant, for example, not only assumes the rarity of politics, but explores a specific instance of the logic of its demise. Joseph Jacotot launches the truth of intellectual emancipation on the world: all men and women are equal in intelligence. They can learn in the light of their own equal reason, and have no need of the explicatory power of the master. For learning is not a question of ability as such, but of a power of the will that is

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founded on the conviction of being equal: ‘there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacities’ (MI, 48). A system of signification (in Badiou’s terms, doxa) initially exists that is also a structure of exclusion. It has led to ‘abrutissement’, stultification. In the first instance, the doctrine of emancipation needs simply to be proclaimed. Jacotot dedicates himself to doing this. The truth of his seeming folly spreads rapidly, and gathers a host of adherents, rather as St Paul’s does. What interferes with the trajectory of Jacotot’s truth is the ideology of progress. According to this ideology, too, the old hierarchical conception of intelligence must be overthrown; the cretinization of ordinary people must end. But, for the progressives, the road to freedom is instruction not emancipation. For if the intelligence of the working man or woman is merely set on its own way by another intelligence that declares them to be equal, it cannot be trusted. The progressives assume that the ordinary mind must be guided, lest it err. In the end, they covertly reinstall the very principle against which they first set themselves, the ranking of intelligence. ‘Abrutissement’ continues. As it does so, Jacotot’s dream confronts the ‘mystery’ of inertia,⁴⁴ and looks utopian if not absurd. In the preface to La Nuit des prol´etaires, Ranci`ere asserts that the book identifies with a commitment to the impossible. Le Maître ignorant articulates the same commitment, but with growing irony and pathos. The litany of progressive ‘gains’ grows more and more heavy and insistent. As, in their fear of liberty, Jacotot’s apes increasingly mimic his emancipatory logic, so he himself accepts that ‘ ‘‘in fact, it is impossible that equality should persist for long’’ ’.⁴⁵ But the most poignant analogies are to be found in Ranci`ere’s work in the ‘archives of the working-class dream’, notably in La Nuit des prol´etaires. La Nuit des prol´etaires is very much concerned with the rarity of politics. It is about the emergence of political subjectivities (chiefly Saint-Simonian, but also Fourierist, communist, and other) in the wake of a major if abortive political event, les trois glorieuses, the three-day July Revolution of 1830 that led to the end of the Bourbon dynasty, the fleeting promise of the return of the Republic, and the prompt installation of Louis-Philippe as constitutional monarch. In this respect, Ranci`ere’s subjects ‘march under the sign of interruption’, of ‘an event’ which has ‘suspended the course of things’ (CV, 152). ‘True politics’ is therefore more or less over with the start of Ranci`ere’s book. Furthermore, the ⁴⁴ MI, 154. The logic of inertia is discussed in detail in chapter IV. ⁴⁵ MI, 148. Ranci`ere is quoting from Jacotot’s Langue maternelle (Paris, 1836), 109.

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very condition of the working-class commitment to the impossible is that it be fitful, and the subjectivities at stake scattered and sporadic. Ranci`ere chooses to focus on the specificity of ‘a few dozen or hundred labourers’ who decided ‘that they would not longer tolerate the intolerable’. These men and women made a difference in that they ‘made themselves ‘‘different’’ ’ (NP, 7, 9). However, Ranci`ere’s methodology increasingly produces a secondary and incipiently melancholic logic as its necessary consequence. First, the presentation of political subjectivity as scattered and sporadic effectively sets it in relief, picking it out from a background that remains obscure. Ranci`ere firmly and explicitly denies that his title has a metaphorical dimension. The ‘night’ in question is the nocturnal time of intellectual as opposed to manual work; after 1830, a few workers who were committed to the impossible refused to see evenings dedicated to thought as solely a bourgeois preserve. Yet, for all Ranci`ere’s disavowals, this implies another darkness in which the proletariat on the whole remains massively buried. The darkness of the many is never far from the book, because it is precisely what Ranci`ere’s rare subjects must struggle with. Here intermittency has a double aspect: radical subjectivity is rare or occasional, not only in relation to the larger life of the subject, but also to the surrounding historical context. Secondly, Ranci`ere’s specification of his subjects itself has a melancholic dimension. For he refuses to endow their choices with any historical and material rationale other than the sheer need to revolt. Thirdly and more pointedly, the very intellectual acuteness of the subjects that Ranci`ere is so concerned to register has itself a certain pathos. For it makes them all the more perceptive about the oppressiveness of what surrounds them, and all the more fluent in conveying it. The illumination provided by Ranci`ere’s subjects is therefore necessarily double. The book is always close to tilting in the direction of historical pathos: a sense of ‘the leprosy of ‘‘how to stay alive’’ ’, the erosion of being by nothingness, the limits of that relationship of dependence that makes up ‘ ‘‘a life begged from God minute by minute’’ ’ (NP, 83). Lastly: if, throughout his book, Ranci`ere repeatedly demonstrates the quality of his subjects’ political awareness, that very quality leads them, as logically it should, intermittently to bear witness to the truth of intermittency itself. Thus, for example, the failure of the July Revolution prompts seamstress Julie Fanfernot to ask ‘ ‘‘why it is that the brilliant image of those brief instants appears to be merely a fleeting vision in the dark labyrinth where we have come to stray?’’ ’ (NP, 39). But then, in the end, as Ranci`ere repeatedly suggests, in La Nuit des prol´etaires but elsewhere,

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too, in its aleatory, erratic, insecure character, intermittency is the very truth of proletarian life. Beckett’s world might be thought of as an allegory of Jacotot’s, but an allegory cast in the negative; that is, Beckett appears to know from the start what, in Ranci`ere’s narrative, Jacotot must learn from experience. Up to a point, too, one might associate Ranci`ere’s working-class subjects with a number of Beckett’s characters, from Malone to Winnie to the Protagonist in Catastrophe. But self-evidently, once set alongside Ranci`ere’s workers, the abstraction of Beckett’s characters becomes the more pointed (not least in the fact that they almost never work). The comparison with Ranci`ere allows us to see how far Beckett, unlike Badiou, pays attention to a world without events, truths, and subjects. But it also allows us to see how right Badiou is to read Beckett’s work as articulating a thought. Ranci`ere’s thought of intermittency is inseparable from empirical and historical worlds. It is nothing if not embodied. By contrast, Badiou insists on the power of abstraction, which resists any specific embodiment (any logic of appearance). For his part, Beckett obstinately struggles to maintain a faith in the power of abstraction in a world apparently surrendered to the logic of embodiment. ANOTHER FIELD OF THOUGHT At one point in Logiques des mondes, Badiou contrasts his own understanding of the foundation of logic with Hegel’s. Where the ‘dialectical odyssey’ proceeds on the assumption that ‘ ‘‘there is only the Whole’’ ’, as we have abundantly seen, Badiou himself asserts the reverse: there is no whole (LM 1, p. 36). For Hegel, appearance gives a determinate form to essence. For Badiou, Being is inconsistent and has no essence. Appearance is a ‘regulated play’ [‘un jeu regl´e’] of multiple Being and its ‘variable differentiation’ (LM 1, p. 39). So, too, as the momentary flaring of a ‘vanishing cause’, the event is the ‘exact contrary of the Hegelian Whole’ (LM 1, p. 38). Unlike Hegel and Marx, we can no longer ‘entrust ourselves to Being’. What makes existence as it is is only ‘the contingent logic of a world that nothing raises to a higher level [rien ne rel`eve]’.⁴⁶ It is important to recognize just how far Badiou has travelled, by this point. If the Maoist and dialectical materialist of the 1970s effectively radicalized ˆ ´ ⁴⁶ ‘L’Etre, l’´ev´enement et la militance’ [Badiou interviewed by Nicole-Edith Th´evenin], Futur ant´erieur, 8 (Winter 1991), 13–23, p. 20. ‘Rel`eve’ is the usual French translation of Hegel’s Aufhebung.

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dialectics, and the philosopher of the 1980s and 1990s seemed to be drawing steadily closer to a Sartrean concept of ‘broken dialectic’,⁴⁷ at the beginning of the new century, Badiou snaps the last strands of the Hegelian connection. There is no ‘dialectical odyssey’, and no Aufhebung. There is no ‘philosophy of History’: this, certainly, the sheer singularity of Nazism and the camps compels us to recognize (CO, 74). Badiou is a profound figure partly because what we see developing throughout his work is the narrative of the closing agonistics and the final demise of Hegelianism. He specifically undergoes the late twentieth-century death of the myth that, in diverse forms, for the larger part of two centuries, inspired the thought and actions of countless millions. There is no dialectic at work in the unfolding of history, no indissoluble bond between the progressive operations of the Spirit and matter. There are no objective, dialectical, material laws to man’s struggle to master nature and organize his productive powers. Badiou pursues at least one of the consequences of the end of dialectics with the most inflexible rigour: from now on, we ‘depend on the event’.⁴⁸ The trouble is that there is another consequence of the end of dialectics, as specified in particular by Proust. If there is no sublation, henceforth, negativity proliferates unstoppably, beyond all redemption in the dialectic. The experience of negativity, of the demand of negativity, of responsibility to negativity—all are an irreducible part of the experience of modernity. Proust argues that ‘Hegel hoped to arrest the destructive process in calling it negativity, that is to say, in replacing it in a whole which gave it sense’ (DT, 5). Negativity was caught up in a process of conversion. The truth of negativity was a question of becoming, and therefore intermediate or transitory. By contrast, as is supremely grasped by Benjamin, the regime of modern truth is that of ‘bare destruction’. Indeed, there is an even more insidious logic in play. For destruction was always part of the dialectic itself. In Hegel, the positive principle itself is doomed to an endless work of destruction precisely in order to sustain itself. The paradise of sense is infernally condemned to produce nonsense in order to make sense. It would seem as though, chillingly, the culture of plenitude must forever strip the world bare. Negativity turns out to be a diabolical necessity. Various modern writers have been variously concerned with the frailty, the imminent or actual death of dialectics. The modern writer anticipates the end ⁴⁷ ‘Le (Re)commencement du mat´erialisme dialectique’, Critique, 240 (1967), 23/240: 438–67, p. 445. ˆ ⁴⁸ ‘L’Etre, l’´ev´enement et la militance’, 20.

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of dialectics or labours in its wake. He or she broods on or savours the latent ironies of dialectics, but also explores the opportunities made available by its collapse. Above all, he or she treats the end of dialectics as acutely problematic. Kafka provides one obvious instance of this: ‘To perform the negative’, he wrote, ‘is what is still required of us, the positive is already ours.’⁴⁹ Benjamin’s ‘dialectics at a standstill’ provides a second.⁵⁰ Proust’s great example is Bataille. In Hegel, negativity is always caught up in and thus subordinate to the positive principle, and is therefore never really negativity at all. Bataille seeks to escape the Hegelian trap by treating negativity in itself, via the themes of death, transgression, and perversion. Bataille explores the possibility of a pure negativity, a ‘useless’ or idle negativity (‘ ‘‘sans emploi’’, d´esœuvr´ee’, HC, 31). In order to do this, however, he must close off all possibility of a philosophy of history. He tries to think negativity by pushing the present to its limits, beyond all relation to the past. But he therefore foregoes the possibility of ‘articulating a new present’ (ibid.). Beckett is thoroughly late twentieth-century in that, like Bataille, he is everywhere concerned with useless negativity. He gives us Badiou’s flat, unsublated world, a world subjected to a logic that is at once inexorable and contingent. He is self-evidently disinclined to articulate a new present. At the same time, like Benjamin and Kafka, he does not write off possibility, as logically he cannot do. He rather seeks arduously and radically to rethink possibility, to think it anew, as Benjamin’s ‘tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe’, as nuance, trace, a question of the threshold. As such, I have effectively turned him into a major figure for what Agamben has recently declared to be a new field of thought.⁵¹ In order to explain this, I need to take a brief detour through Agamben’s account of contemporary politics. The reason for this will very soon be clear. In the third chapter of Homo Sacer, Agamben raises the question of the relationship between constituted power and constituting power. In principle, at least, the distinction between the two is clear. Constituted power exists ‘ ‘‘only in the State’’ ’. It is ‘ ‘‘inseparable from an established constitutional order . . . Constituting power, on the other hand, is situated outside the State; it owes nothing to the State, it exists without it, it is the spring whose current no use can ever exhaust’’.’ Ours is an epoch apparently less and less able to think in terms of constituting ⁴⁹ ‘Das Negative zu tun is uns noch auferlegt; das Positiv ist uns schon gegeben.’ Hochszeitvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere prosa aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1953), 42. ⁵⁰ For ‘dialectics at a standstill’, see Proust, HC, 30–1; and Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, passim. ⁵¹ ‘A new and coherent ontology of potentiality.’ See HS, 44. Given the context in which I use Agamben here, I try to save his idea from the usual banal connotations of ‘the new’.

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power, progressively more inclined to reduce it merely ‘to the power of revision foreseen in the constitution’.⁵² This is not to say, however, that the relationship between constituting and constituted power is unproblematic. The reverse: that may be partly why we have given up on it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben deals with constituted power chiefly as sovereign power. In its decisive modern instance—that is, for Agamben, the form it takes ‘in the age of biopolitics’—sovereign power comes to decide on questions of ‘bare life’. It is concerned above all with ‘the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant’ (HS, 142). The paradigm of this is evidently the camps. Agamben, of course, has no truck with the trivial conception of the camps as representing a historical disaster from which a more ‘ethical’ and humanitarian society is currently recovering. To the contrary: Auschwitz remains the ‘hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living’, of ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ (HS, 12, 175). In particular, contemporary politics may ceaselessly aspire to include those who have been previously excluded, this being its particular conception of progress. But such a conception runs aground on the imperative of jouissance, and ends up merely producing new forms of exclusion. Notably, the sovereign power invested in ‘the democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded’. It ‘also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life’ (HS, 180). To think a constituting power that transcends this form of sovereign power is to think the latter’s limits, even its inadequacy, its impotence as power. But in what sense, if any, does constituting power ‘transcend’ sovereign power? For Agamben, this is the key issue: is constituting power not always known only as and in the forms of sovereign power that it constitutes? Don’t those forms ceaselessly convert its dynamism, or what for Benjamin is its law-creating violence, into inertia, or law-preserving violence?⁵³ Is constituting power not always bound up in and inseparable from the forms of sovereign power? Negri argues the reverse: as ‘the act of choice, the punctual determination that opens a horizon, the radical enacting of something that did not exist before’, constituting power makes possible the creative act ‘that cannot lose its characteristics ⁵² HS, 39–40. Agamben is quoting from G. Burdeau, Trait´e de science politique, vol. iv (Paris: Librairie G´en´erale du Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1984), 173. ⁵³ For Benjamin’s distinction, see ‘Critique of Violence’, Selected Writings, i: 1913–26, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 236–52, passim.

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in creating’.⁵⁴ But alas, says Agamben, nothing in Negri’s argument guarantees the alterity of constituting power to sovereign power. Nothing decisively separates the free praxis that is constituting power from the fiat of the sovereign decree, be it that of monarch or State, the Leninist or Nazi party, the decree of the ‘general will’ of the French Revolution or the decisions on lives more or less worth living made by the ‘advanced democracies’.⁵⁵ At this point, political questions coincide with philosophical and aesthetic ones, and the context I have been developing for understanding Badiou and Beckett together finally assumes its firmest shape. For Agamben goes on to argue that, if Negri’s thought runs aground on an aporia, it also indicates the necessary leap beyond it. If the struggle to distinguish constituting power from constituted power seems to arrive at an impasse, the difficulty lies in our conceptions of potentiality and actuality and the relation between the two. But if that is the case, ‘constituting power, conceived in all its radicality, ceases to be a strictly political concept and necessarily presents itself as a category of ontology’ (HS, 44). We are thrust back on to philosophical terrain, precisely the terrain—ontology—that Badiou is so concerned with, and that certain forms of modern art have marked out as their own. We need only think of Stevens, for example—a poet of interest to Badiou—to recognize how far art can become a primary modern vehicle for the exploration of the field of thought towards which Agamben points. Agamben himself repeatedly makes this extension.⁵⁶ Beckett’s art inhabits this field, if in its own distinctive way. Agamben asserts the need, then, for a new theory of potentiality and actuality. This is not the place for a protracted discussion of a trickily intricate thought. I just want briefly to note two of its twists, and the paradox they imply. Agamben takes his bearings from Aristotle’s classic critique of the Megarians in book Theta of the Metaphysics.⁵⁷ The Megarians assert that ‘potentiality exists only in act’ (HS, 44). In this, they resemble many politicians today, who believe that constituting power can be reduced to constituted power. Aristotle ⁵⁴ Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente: Saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Milan: SugarCo, 1992), 31; quoted in HS, 43. ⁵⁵ This is precisely what the West is currently wrestling with in the debates about euthanasia. But there are grimmer examples: the de facto distinction between the relative humanity of Western and African victims of AIDS, for example, or the decision underlying the unrelenting economic logic that is currently destroying the homelands of Arctic peoples and, in due course, will see Bangladesh sink beneath the waves. ⁵⁶ See for instance his accounts of Keats and Celan in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 36–7, p. 112. ⁵⁷ See Aristotle, The Metaphysics, tr. with an introd. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 258–60.

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himself argues differently: any cogent and rigorous thought of potentiality will be bound to think the limits from which potentiality is inseparable. It will be bound to think the relation between potentiality and inertia, pain and deprivation. Thus, as Agamben remarks, ‘potentiality is the contrary of pleasure’.⁵⁸ Indeed, the experience of potentiality is ‘perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible’ (PT, 178). Most of all, a rigorous thought of potentiality will think it in its indissoluble relation to impotence, adynamia. For the paradox of potentiality is that it must also be im-potentiality. It can only be itself in not being able to pass over into actuality. Plainly speaking, potentiality is not either ‘fulfilled’ or ‘unfulfilled’. This is how the culture of jouissance thinks potentiality, as a question of relative plenitude. But to conceive of it in this fashion is to reverse the vector that points from potentiality to actuality. It is to think potentiality from the side of actuality, as though actuality always came first. Potentiality precedes any question of fulfilment, from which it is quite separate. It has a kind of suspended existence: it remains capable of actualization by virtue of not being actualized, by virtue of its impotence. It exists on a threshold. Having credited Aristotle’s conception of potentiality and actuality with genius, however, in a sublime move, Agamben goes on to argue that it at length becomes the very paradigm of sovereign power itself. Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it . . . other than its own ability not to be. (HS, 46)

In Potentialities, he argues that ‘there is truly potentiality’ only where impotentiality ‘does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that potentiality disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality’ (PO, 183). The argument may seem to be distressingly abstract. In fact, Agamben provides abundant examples of what he means in a series of limit-figures, particularly in Idea of Prose: the axolotl, the neomort, the ‘immemorable’, Bartleby, the ‘limbo nature’, St Francis’s ‘sojourn’, the work of Kafka, Celan’s ‘pre-suicidal’ poetics, and, above all, the Muselmann:⁵⁹ these are figures of blocked potentiality surviving and saving ⁵⁸ IP, 71. See also HS, 44–8; ‘The Idea of Study’ and ‘The Idea of Power’ in IP, 63–5, 71–2; and Remnants of Auschwitz, 143 and passim. ⁵⁹ See IP, 65, 68, 82, 95; HS, 184–5; Remnants of Auschwitz, 36–7, 41–86; PT, 243–71.

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itself into actuality. They are, as it were, images of potentiality frozen in place, grasped for what it is in itself. In Agamben’s account of it, potentiality thus takes on what are both drastically shrunken and strangely extended dimensions. He thinks potentiality in relation to forms whose seeming closure is also a petrified openness. Their finality is that of incompletion. Potentiality is grasped as an arrested ‘larval stage’, a stubborn infantilism (IP, 95). The closure in question does not declare the event to be impossible. It rather lends a crystalline sharpness to the singular value of the event. Nothing from within the forms can free them. They await the event, or what, for Agamben, is rather inspiration. No doubt the wait will often be forever, as, self-evidently, in the case of the Muselmann. The event none the less remains as the ‘sehr seltene oder besser gesagt . . . fast niemals vorkommende M¨oglichkeit’ towards which Kafka finally gestures in The Castle. ⁶⁰ BECKET T ’S T HRESHOLD If Beckett can be placed within Agamben’s new field of thought, then so can Badiou. So can writers less central but still important to this project (Mallarm´e, Ranci`ere, Franc¸oise Proust, Benjamin) and others it has touched on (H¨olderlin, Rimbaud, Kafka, Bataille, Celan). It would be possible to put together a contemporary canon on the basis of this field—Morrison, Coetzee, Sebald, Pamuk—and I hope to do so in a different context. Much earlier, I suggested that ‘vestigial modernity’ might be a useful term for characterizing the work of both Badiou and Beckett. The same is true of most if not all of the other writers I have just mentioned. But to think of modernity in terms of vestiges is not just to think of it as the remnants of a once vital project. It is also to think of it according to the relationship between potentiality and actuality which I have called intermittency. The writers I have just listed coincide in at least one respect: they all see the modern event as uncommon and its persistence as fraught with difficulty. Modernity was vestigial from the start and is intrinsically vestigial. This—recalling Clov on love, friendship, beauty, order, reason—is perhaps Beckett’s most powerful admonition. What Proust’s historical ‘striations’, Benjamin’s ‘explosions of justice’, Badiou’s concept of ⁶⁰ ‘A very rare possibility or, better expressed, one which almost never occurs.’ Das Schloß, ed. Malcom Pasley, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982), i. 416.

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the occasional sparks that ignite history, Ranci`ere’s insistence on the recurrent eclipse of modern politics, and Mallarm´e’s ‘fugace oiseau’ all betoken is a modern world of broken lights. Agamben finds himself forced to conceive of the relationship between constituting power and sovereign power in very similar terms. The question with which all the writers I have mentioned implicitly leave us is whether we want to continue with the project of modernity or not. This is, emphatically, a genuine question, not least because the writers themselves make the project of modernity look extremely problematic. It does not develop as a narrative, is informed by no progressive logic, and moves towards no goal. Above all, modernity is intermittent, rare. Nothing compels our culture to be modern. For the more part, it is not. Modernity is something that happens, here and there, every now and again. At this point, precisely, perhaps for the first time, a concept of modernity becomes inseparable from a sober, restricted concept of potentiality in which dynamis and adynamia, power and impotence are properly thought together. The very condition of possibility (not least, historical possibility) is its intimate relation to inertia (not least, historical inertia). The trouble is that this argument does not obviously free the work of the writers in question from the problem that Agamben raises. The event founds truth and value ‘without anything preceding or determining it’ (HS, 46). It functions like a sovereign decree. According to Agamben, to conceive of Being as founding itself sovereignly, or the event as a sovereign decree that founds truth, is problematic insofar as it replicates yet again a thought of ‘Being in force without significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung )’ (HS, 50). The sovereign decree produces a law which functions as a force that ‘does not signify’. For sovereignty entails a relation, and it is not possible to assert what is non-relational, or move out of relation, from within relation. This is a snare which ‘our age cannot master’: All societies and all cultures today (it does not matter whether they are democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive) have entered into a legitimation crisis in which law (we mean by this term the entire text of tradition, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure ‘Nothing of Revelation’. But this is precisely the structure of the sovereign relation, and the nihilism in which we are living is, from this perspective, nothing other than the coming to light of this relation as such. (ibid.)

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It is this that Kafka superlatively grasps, in that he describes a life in which ‘law is all the more pervasive’—and all the more peremptory—‘for its total lack of content’ (HS, 51).⁶¹ Far from being a modernist creator of phantasmagoria, he is the great anatomist of the contemporary predicament. What, then, of the narrow path that Agamben suggests we might begin to take through these difficulties, if with no assurance of where it might lead? What of the thought of impotentiality as carried over into actuality, ‘passing fully into it’? In one way or another, many of the writers I have associated with ‘vestigial modernity’ seem to me to practise this thought, but in an ambivalent or fitful way. The ambivalence I have just referred to is most obvious in Franc¸oise Proust. On the one hand, the sovereign decree is at the centre of her account of Kant, where modernity is the free exercise of sovereignty. Indeed, sovereignty is doubly at stake, in the event, and in subjectivity as Exempel. But there is a problem with the Kantian legacy. Agamben himself is very clear about this. In effect, he turns Proust’s argument inside out. The great strength of Kantian ethics, as supremely in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, is also its weakness: it prescribes the simple form of universal legislation, but leaves the form of the law in force only as an empty principle. Certainly, it is in Kant that the pure form of law appears for the first time in modernity. But for Agamben, it appears problematically, ‘as ‘‘Being in force without significance’’ ’. When Proust writes about Benjamin, however, she sounds much closer to Agamben, himself a Benjamin scholar. Proust understands the irony of modern time as a kind of final incompletion, in Agamben’s sense. Time passes, indeed it passes irreversibly. Yet it also incessantly returns to its point of departure. This incessant return means that the past has never said its last word. It might always conceivably have something different to say. As infernal repetition, modern time also paradoxically secretes the rare and obscure principle of release from repetition. Here the event does indeed become Kafka’s ‘fast niemals vorkommende M¨oglichkeit’. Hence modern melancholy, as Benjamin saw it exemplified in Baudelaire:⁶² it stems from a recognition that the promise of the unique is inseparable from the banality of the unique. The event must be thought in relation to a two-sided figure, messianic potentiality and mundane impotence together. ⁶¹ Orwell grasps it, too. It is now possible to see that this, in fact, is the stark lesson of 1984, not any historically specific and limited critique of totalitarianism. ⁶² See Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 37 and passim.

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Proust does not hammer her accounts of Kant and Benjamin into a single, coherent system. Equally, she does not decide in favour of one or the other. Where Agamben leads us through one thought of modern potentiality only to persuade us of the paramount importance of a second one, Proust leaves us suspended between the two. Of all the accounts of modern intermittency I have mentioned, Proust’s is perhaps the most fluid, the one least inclined to freeze actuality and potentiality into a determinate structure, to keep the relation between the two itself open to possibility. By contrast, Ranci`ere the historical materialist might seem to work with a simple model, according to which a new possibility occasionally breaks into and transforms actuality. In Agamben’s terms, it matters little that Ranci`ere says that the event of politics cannot be willed. It decrees itself into being, moving cleanly and with no remainder from potentiality to actuality. But Ranci`ere offers a different configuration of the relation between possibility and actuality, not in his historical work, but in his aesthetics.⁶³ Art ‘reframes the division of the forms of our experience’.⁶⁴ In doing so, it reframes our experience of potentiality and impotentiality. For its mode of existence is ‘suspensive’.⁶⁵ Art offers a different world inseparable from its promise of ‘a new life for individuals and the community’.⁶⁶ But if ‘the [aesthetic] subject is promised a new world’, it is only by means of ‘[a] figure that he cannot possess in any way’.⁶⁷ He or she is equally denied any knowledge of a means by which that world might be realized. We will never see Raskolnikov’s room or the buttons on Monsieur Grandet’s coat. Flaubert describes Charles Bovary’s casquette with a sedulous, almost maniacal exhaustiveness and precision. Yet for all the novelist’s power, his resources, the ardour and intensity of his labours, his text itself will never transcend the mute expressiveness that it attributes to its object. Ranci`ere both sustains and reverses the Platonic critique of writing at the end of the Phaedrus. Writing is mute, like a painting which always signifies the same thing, incapable of participating in the living world of the logos, of process, exchange, alteration. But it is ‘mute chatter’ (‘une bavardisme muette’). The language of literature is ‘dumb speech’ (‘une parole muette’).⁶⁸ The world ⁶³ For a fuller account of Ranci`ere’s aesthetics, see my ‘The Unfinished Song’, 70–3; and ‘Ranci`ere and the ‘‘Limit’’ of Realism’, in Danuta Fjellestad and Elizabeth Kella (eds.), Realism and its Discontents (Karlskrona: Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2003), 56–69. ⁶⁴ ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, New Left Review, 2nd ser. (Mar.–Apr. 2002), 133–51, p. 133. ⁶⁵ ‘L’Inadmissible’, AU, 128–47, p. 147. ⁶⁶ ‘The Aesthetic Revolution’, 133. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 136. ⁶⁸ See PA, passim.

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of literature is that of ‘insensible sensation’ (‘la sensation insensible’) or the ‘quasi-corporeal’.⁶⁹ Literature in itself remains the very figure of the interim, in that its worlds forever await realization. Their ghostly bodies wait to take on flesh. The novel indicates an apparently embodied world that, in reality, forever awaits embodiment.⁷⁰ In this respect, art appears to thrive on a sense of limit that is incipiently melancholic: ‘it promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy.’⁷¹ The condition of art itself is therefore one of frozen potentiality, potentiality on the edge of actuality, potentiality as impotence. In Ranci`ere’s aesthetics, art in general has the arrested openness of Agamben’s limit-figures. Of course, it is also possible to turn this argument in a different direction. If art is ‘suspensive’, it also stands on the threshold of politics: ‘man is a political animal because he is a literary animal, because he lets himself be deflected from his ‘‘natural’’ destination by the power of words’ (PS, 63). It even functions as a sobering caution to politics. That seems to me to be the lesson of Ranci`ere’s great essay on Althusser and Don Quixote.⁷² I take Badiou and Beckett to be crucial instances of Agamben’s new field of thought. Badiou can be very precisely placed with reference to Agamben. Indeed, Agamben himself does it. The relevant comparison is with Aristotle. If Aristotle cannot escape the thought of sovereign power, neither can Badiou. Agamben says this expressly, at least twice. In Homo Sacer, he suggests that Badiou’s philosophy is in fact a ‘rigorous thought’ of sovereignty itself. For Badiou, the event is ultimately the sovereign exception that dictates the law. It ‘corresponds to the structure of the exception’ (HS, 24). Badiou’s conception of subjectification as taking place in a contingent encounter with truth leaves aside ‘the living being as ‘‘the animal of the human species’’ as a mere support for this encounter’ (PT, 221). Taken together, the two statements reflect Badiou’s proscription of any thought of the remainder. Proscription by sovereign decree is everywhere implicit in Badiou’s axiomatics. It is implicit in his identification of discovery and invention and his two existential assertions. It is perceptible in his concept of subjectification as a self-hypothesis that begins with a declaration. It appears in the idea of prescription, whether as an act of naming, ⁶⁹ See CM, passim. ⁷⁰ For this argument, see PA, chapter 7. See also ‘Le Corps de la lettre: Bible, e´pop´ee, roman’, CH, 87–113. ⁷¹ ‘The Aesthetic Revolution’, 150. ⁷² See CM, 157–78; and ‘The Unfinished Song’, 72–4.

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the imposition of a rule, or a wager cast in the future anterior (existential or mathematical). It appears in the forcing of truths and the absurd declaration produced by apagogic reason. Truths also found themselves, sovereignly. In its intermittency and unpredictability, the Platonic errant cause or ‘point of excess’ liberates potentials from the instability of Being ‘without anything preceding or determining’ them (HS, 46). But the sovereign decree is chiefly evident in Badiou’s insistence on thought as pure affirmation or active force, on its autonomy or self-legislation, the ‘orientation’ of a thought. Above all, it appears in a concept of thought as founded on decisions or judgements as to existence. Axioms are foundational assertions that can ultimately not be legitimized. They function precisely as sovereign decrees. In this respect, they seem uncomfortably close to the very exercise of arbitrary power which Badiou himself condemns in the modern State. This apparently places Badiou in a very different position from Agamben himself. If Agamben wants us to think the passage of impotence into actuality, Badiou vigorously resists it. Of course, in one sense, he can’t avoid thinking potentiality and impotence together. He does so as soon as he declares events and truths to be rare. But otherwise, he largely discards or banishes impotence—supremely, perhaps, in the case of those times ‘in which a present is lacking’—as the mere dross of the world. Yet the pathos of intermittency also haunts the edges of Badiou’s work, as in his accounts of Sartre and Lyotard. He can be acutely sensitive to the melancholy of contemporary democracy. Above all, his concept of the ‘waiting subject’ easily shades into pathos, specifically in the case of the modern writer watching out for the event when it seems forgotten or unavailable. Here if anywhere, Badiou comes close to thinking a subjectivity of the interim, the threshold or d´echet. He is even capable of producing his own equivalents of Agamben’s limit-figures, like the ‘obscure scintillation’ of the ‘enigmatic surface’ in modern poetry from Mallarm´e to Celan. None the less, Badiou tends to represent one end of Agamben’s new field of thought. Beckett might plausibly be thought of as representing another. I am not suggesting that Beckett is better read in the light of Agamben’s philosophy than Badiou’s. Agamben, Ranci`ere, and Proust all shed an important light on a dimension of Beckett’s work that Badiou conspicuously neglects. But none of them offers anything remotely resembling the armoury of relevant and fitting precisions with which Badiou provides us. What Badiou cannot help us understand is the Beckett who very explicitly claimed to be ‘working with

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impotence’.⁷³ Of course, the claim is always shadowed by irony. Beckett’s shrewdest critics, like Connor, have made us precisely aware of the paradoxes surrounding it. Certainly, Beckett aims to call assumptions of potentiality into question, to deal with a zone of being in which less and less would appear to be possible. But impotence also continually tips over into power.⁷⁴ Beckett continually resists this movement, finds it again in the very act of resistance, resists it in finding it, and so on. The ambivalence of the limit-figure is thus pervasive in his work. In Beckett, potentiality is neither finally extinguished nor fulfilled. It preserves itself as potentiality precisely because of this, because it constantly reasserts itself at the point of its extinction. Beckett stands austerely, as a kind of exemplary caution, in his refusal both to shirk the problematic aspect of potentiality and to make any decisive move beyond it. It is this threshold on which Bersani and Dutoit place him when they argue that he is committed to producing ‘formulas for starting again’. ⁷⁵ I have argued for the relevance to Beckett’s work of many of the key terms in Badiou’s philosophy: subtraction, restricted action, actual infinity, the event, subjectification, the logic of appearance, naming, fidelity, apagogic reason, the waiting subject, investigations, inexistents, patience, vigilance, objectivity, undecidables, indiscernibles, and unnameables, ´ev´enementialit´e or the event of the event. It seems to me that they offer a rare, highly particular understanding of Beckett’s extreme brilliance of purpose. Yet there is finally something unsatisfying about Badiou’s own application of them to Beckett. He cannot quite grasp Beckett’s production of limit-figures. Indeed, he cannot grasp the limit-figure itself as a feature of the aesthetic domain. For all his emphasis on ‘de-suturing’ philosophy and art, Badiou himself cannot altogether de-suture them, for to do so would mean taking the risk of opening his own philosophy up to a logic which it cannot accommodate. Thus, as we’ve repeatedly seen, once one applies Badiou’s terms to Beckett, they don’t assume places in the order they assume in Badiou himself. Indeed, they don’t exactly assume places in any order. They take on strange relations, fall victim to strange perspectives, ⁷³ Israel Shenker, interview with Beckett, New York Times, 5 May 1956; quoted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 148. ⁷⁴ See for instance Connor’s reading of Worstward Ho in Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 80–9. ⁷⁵ Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment; Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 19.

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cut across each other in odd ways. For all his admirable and timely emphasis on Beckettian rigour, Badiou does not really get the measure of sheer difficulty in Beckett. He doesn’t understand what I referred to as the Beckettian practice of skewing, a creation of difficult angles so insistent as to seem wilful. It is precisely this practice of skewing that makes a clear, stage-by-stage narrative of Beckett’s career like the one Badiou produces seem overly simple. There are constants in Beckett’s work that are at least as important as its variations. Perhaps the most important one is the creation of the irreducible problem. We see this from the start, in Murphy, where the protagonist devotes himself to a work of subtraction that is immediately and intrinsically problematic since, without a founding event, there can be no clear break. Watt is even more daringly awkward. Here events take place, but in an otherwise inert world. Still more problematically, Watt’s adoption of the hermeneutic attitude towards events bars off the possibility of being changed by them. The novel becomes a story of a failure in subjectification, and arduously unwinds its own project, petering out into a footling and inconsequential notation of endless incidentals where the possibility of a central subject has itself disappeared. As we’ve seen, Beckett repeats this anti-climactic structure in The Lost Ones, which merely ‘tails off into Being’. The great prose works between Watt and How It Is sustain the kind of double-bind in which Beckett leaves Murphy and Watt. But they also give it different forms. The work of this period hinges on a specific thought. On the one hand, the logic of any specific situation or appearance is a contingent localization of the infinite and inconsistent multiplicity of Being, its ‘confusion of inummerable prospects’ (CSP, 49). As such, any given logic is open to question. Hence the narrators in First Love and the Stories are great disputers of appearances. The narrator of First Love, for example, asserts his existence as a banally infinite creature—‘I greatly fear those gentlemen will have as much trouble finding me dead as alive’—precisely in subtracting himself from what he himself calls the State (CSP, 26). The pervasive insistence in the Stories is that logics of appearance are random, haphazard, and contingent: ‘I don’t know why I told this story’, says the narrator of The Expelled, ‘I could just as well have told another’ (CSP, 31). Like Malone, Molloy, the Unnamable, and the speakers in the Texts for Nothing, the narrators of the Stories put up the most tenacious resistance to specific logics. All they say must ‘cancel out’ (CSP, 62). ‘Strictly speaking I wasn’t there’, says the narrator in The End. ‘Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere’ (CSP, 94).

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The infinite multiplicity of Being can be understood in terms of the familiar problem of the limit. As the narrator tells us at the beginning of The Expelled, with reference to counting, limits are not given beforehand. ‘No reason for this to end or go on’, as he says, elsewhere (CSP, 58). The borders of finite frames are always necessarily indistinct, even in the case of the individual life, as the narrator makes clear at the beginning of The Calmative: ‘I don’t know when I died. It always seemed to me that I died old’ (CSP, 61). But actual infinity is not knowable or graspable in itself. If, as the narrator in First Love suggests, ‘it’s always the same sky and never the same sky’, then ‘what words are there for that, none I know, period’ (CSP, 38). Actual infinity is not representable: ‘the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?’ (ibid.). Objects are merely contingent, defined relationally, by logics of appearance. If the narrators of the stories distrust such logics, it is events alone that properly expose their lack of foundation, and no events arrive to disrupt the worlds of the Stories. Yet if these are inert worlds, they are also necessarily highly unstable ones, as the narrator of The Expelled makes clear: In what had just happened to me there was nothing in the least memorable. It was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever. Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost. (CSP, 48)

Events may not take place; yet all that happens is none the less cradle and grave. The principle at stake, of course, is that of ´ev´enementialit´e. It is a principle of paradoxical or minimal freedom which is founded on the assumption that no given world or system of established knowledge has any finally binding power. Beckett’s commitment to aporetics is precisely a commitment to a writing that, in the absence of events, produces and sustains a consciousness of ´ev´enementialit´e. This turns out repeatedly to be as hilarious as it is melancholic: When I deemed that to tip my hat would suffice, I naturally did no more than tip it. But to tip one’s hat is no easy matter either. I subsequently solved this problem, always fundamental in times of adversity, by wearing a kepi and saluting in military fashion, no, that must be wrong, I don’t know, I had my hat at the end. (CSP, 83)

In the 1940s and the 1950s, aporia—the effort to ‘contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, then shit on it’ (CSP, 98)—is the great labour by which Beckett creates his limit-figures and maintains his work of the threshold.

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It isn’t quite right, then, to say, as Badiou does, that, from 1960 onwards, Beckett turns towards the event. He rather turns from certain modalities of the thought of the event to others. His later ‘hesitations and repentances’ have their equivalent in his earlier work. There is a kind of trajectory to Beckett’s development. But it is fittingly minimal, faint. We can’t describe it, as Badiou is inclined to, as hingeing on a grand dialektisches Umschlag. Beckett’s work might rather be thought of as a proliferation of limit-figures that are differently inflected at different points in his career. His later prose works are often more or less tacitly deemed to have demanded less of him than the Trilogy. I have tried to show that, to the contrary, in some ways, the Beckettian treatment of ´ev´enementialit´e takes on even more rigorous, astringent, and demanding proportions after 1960. First, as I have argued, in the later works, Beckett begins to think ´ev´enementialit´e, not just as a principle of minimal freedom, but as the Good which ensures an undetermined plurality of truths and their rare and singular emergences. Secondly, Badiou is not entirely mistaken: what distinguishes the later prose from the Stories or the Trilogy, what makes it specifically concerned with the Good, is that it does not proscribe the possibility of events themselves. The passage about the event in Ill Seen Ill Said would not have been conceivable in the Trilogy. However, if the later Beckett is concerned with the Good, he is concerned with it in quite remarkably ambivalent, precarious, almost smothered, and even intractable forms. He radically skews any approach to it. In the very first of the Fizzles, the protagonist might be thought of as awaiting subjectification. The Fizzles repeatedly insist on the vanity of commonplace modes of temporalization. But equally, the protagonist is described as ‘destitute of history’. He has ‘never breathed the true life-giving air’, or ‘so long ago as to amount to never’. Certainly, the principle of ´ev´enementialit´e is in play in his world. It can be conceived of in terms of ‘maxima’ and ‘minima’, these being the occasions which pass ‘rightly or wrongly for outstanding’, and with which any story is studded. None the less, the significant question is starkly obvious: ‘Where is it then that life awaits him’ (CSP, 226)? The protagonist’s efforts to ‘pierce the gloom’ have met with failure. The narrator then adds: And all may yet grow light, at any moment, first dimly and then—how can one say?—then more and more, till all is flooded with light, the way, the ground, the walls, the vault, without his being one whit the wiser. (CSP, 225, italics mine)

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It would seem that an event is possible, but not that it will be to the good of a subject. ‘Wisdom’, of course, is no more categorical a value for Beckett than for Badiou. But it is hard to ignore the sceptical note. The story seems to entertain the possibility that the penumbra of Being may be radically illuminated, but the importance of such an event is also cast into radical doubt. This strange, difficult, contorted thought is given an additional twist by virtue of being placed so early in the text, which actually closes with the discussion of maxima and minima. Like the structure of Watt or The Lost Ones, the structure of Fizzle 1 is that of a declension, a movement away from a thought of the event, rather than towards it. So, too, Fizzle 3—not surprisingly, the most Mallarm´ean—holds the event at several removes: . . . he merges in the hedge, afar a bird, a moment past he grasps and is fled, it was he had a life, I didn’t have a life, a life not worth having, because of me, it is impossible I should have a mind and I have one. . . . (CSP, 232)

The protagonist may have seized the event in its flight. The narrator holds it at a distance. That distance is repeated in the distance of the event itself (‘afar a bird’). The effect of distance is doubled and redoubled by the tininess of the phrase on the one hand, and the infrequency of its appearances on the other. (It gives the piece its title, but is otherwise tucked away in the thicket of Beckett’s prose and peeps out only once.) The figure, here, is precisely of an arrested or barely apparent potentiality. Indeed, the narrators of the Fizzles repeatedly resort to images of arrested potentiality very like Agamben’s axolotl, most obviously in the declaration that ‘I gave up before birth’ (CSP, 232, 234). The closest we get to an event in Fizzles —not surprisingly, perhaps, given that it is set in ‘a cockchafer year’—is Fizzle 6 : ‘Ah to love at your last and see them at theirs, the last minute loved ones, and be happy, why ah, uncalled for’ (CSP, 238). Yet here, again, as with the key sentence in The Lost Ones, the syntax ensures that the event is hedged round with ambiguities and equivocations. Again, Beckett’s methods insist on indirection, obscurity, the imperative of making matters difficult, problem-creating rather than problem-solving. It is because of this insistence that, whilst the event is the abiding theme of Beckett’s plays, we can be forgiven for not noticing it. For Beckett the dramatist does not grasp a world in which events are rare from the vantage point of the subject of a truth. He conveys a sense of what the common experience of

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that world must be as an experience of the remainder. That is why Waiting for Godot can both be the product of a difficult thought and yet also appeal so intensely to the inmates of San Quentin. Badiou would no doubt identify ˆ et l’´ev´enement with the prisoners’ cause, but it is hard to believe that L’Etre could elicit anything like the same response. The presentation of the event in Beckett’s plays is skewed because Beckett always thinks the awesome inertia of the remainder first. His ironical logic insists that, as supremely in Quad, it is precisely in registering the inertia of the remainder that the irreducibility of the ‘danger zone’ makes itself clear, if only as a theoretical nuance. We might finally put the point like this: for Badiou, the event is difficult insofar as it is rare and has a complex structure. But it is also simple, almost luminously clear, because it and its consequences alone matter or have weight. Event and subject can in a sense be isolated, for they alone have to do with truth. The world around them, and which they fracture, does not. It does not count, and can therefore be bracketed off. But in Beckett, it is the remainder that (massively) has weight and is given priority. Because Beckett thinks the event and its rarity from the vantage point of the remainder, the event appears only in second-order, muted, veiled, distorted, equivocal, or compromised forms These limit-figures prevent any clear separation of potentiality from impotentiality. Here the function of nuance is crucial, what Beckett makes nuance do. In Beckett’s plays and throughout his work, the construction of nuance is a work of the threshold. The discovery of the square root of two is a capital event. The accumulation of plague-stricken corpses in the streets of Athens is not. But Beckett urges us to think them together. To think the world in terms of event and remainder together is to think it in terms of a limit-figure in which its state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, precariously, delicately balanced. Beckett thinks this delicate balance axiomatically. His great difficulty, the source of the great difficulty of his work, is the consequence of his extraordinary scrupulousness: he can never be quite persuaded that the delicate balance might be more than axiomatic. Indeed, he formulates any such persuasion in the severest and most minimal terms. I would suggest that the Beckettian lesson is comprised in the form of his limit-figure. As Beckett very well knew, it is a figure that does not immediately tell us, either that we should presume on salvation, or that we should despair.

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Index Abbott, H. Porter 196 Acheson, James 144, 153 Ackerley, C. J. 27, 33 n, 153 Act Without Words I, 239, 242, 251 Act Without Words II, 242 actuality and potentiality 83; in Agamben 277–84; in Aristotle 277–8; in Beckett 285–90 Adorno, Theodor 58 n, 253; on Beckett 4, 204 n, 229, 239 n, 256, 263 affirmation: Agamben’s critique of 284; Badiou’s methods of 38, 105, 114; Beckett’s art as 124; Beckettian critique of 170; modern art as 162–4; philosophy as 1–2, 18, 40, 80 Agamben, Giorgio 18 n, 27, 58, 63 n, 133, 277–84, 289; and constituted power 275–7; and constituting power 275–7; and contemporary politics 275; critique of Badiou 283–4; and sovereign decree 276–7, 280–1, 283 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ 64 All That Fall 240, 242 alterity: Badiou’s conception of 134, 168, 201, 203–4; postmodernism and 93–4, 97; as self-evident banality 123 Althusser, Louis 20, 24 n, 97, 283 anabasis 100 anti-philosophers 72; see also Lacan; Paul, Saint; Nietzsche; Wittgenstein anti-Platonism, modern 44 n, 80 apagogic reason 63, 87–8, 284; Beckett and 88, 137, 144, 155, 189, 194, 224, 234, 244, 285; closeness to irony of 88 aporetics: Beckett and 120, 155, 187, 191–2, 215, 243, 277, 287; Mallarm´e and 185; Plato and 44, 206 appearances: Badiou’s conception of 173–81, 184, 220, 237, 273; Beckett’s resistance to 187–90, 195, 196, 197, 221–3, 238–9, 243, 285, 286–7 Arendt, Hannah 1 n, 3 Aristotle 10, 42, 51, 65, 201, 283; concept of infinity of 8, 27, 48; and ethics 198; and mathematika 43; see also actuality and potentiality art: distinct from other truths 178–9, 183; and impersonality 162–3; modern 1–2,

66, 110, 120, 263–4; as truth-domain 56, 58, 66–7 Ashbery, John 17 Astier, Pierre 248 atheism 7, 50–2, 72 Auden, W.H. 154 n axiomatization 8, 11, 49 axioms 11, 18, 39, 43, 49, 87, 120, 204 n, 283, 284; Beckett and 124, 133, 149, 152, 188, 216, 245–7, 290; ZF (Zermelo-Fraenkel), 11–12, 47, 65; see also choice; empty set; power set Balzac, Honor´e de 159, 282 Barker, Jason 19 n Barthes, Roland 80 Bataille, Georges 279; resistance to Hegel in 275 Baudelaire, Charles 199 n, 266, 281 Beach, Sylvia 148 Beckett criticism 131–2; and absurdism 117, 120; and deconstruction 120, 124–5; and existentialism 117–18, 120, 124, 130, 187; and humanism 120, 124, 130; and poststructuralism 118, 133; and theory 118–29 becoming: contemporary romance of 20; in Hegel 274; and potential infinity 10 Beethoven, Ludwig van 102 Begam, Richard 118 Being 21, 41–54, 156; as actual infinity 45–8; Badiou’s conception of 8, 27, 41–54, 136, 173–6, 178–82, 262, 273; Beckett’s conception of 38, 124, 128, 155, 156, 190, 197, 205, 216, 220–3, 237–8, 243, 280, 286–7; completed by the Idea 43, 45, 49; Heidegger’s conception of 42–3; Mallarm´e and 185; modern art and 162; play in 40, 75, 204, 229; Sartre’s conception of 22; see also infinity; ontology; penumbra belonging: in set theory 49, 76; and the State 76–9, 211 Benjamin, Walter 42 n, 166, 168 n, 241, 256, 261, 264–8, 279, 282; and continuous catastrophe 268, 275; and the eternal return 266–8; and infernal time 266–8, 281; and the untimely 267, 281;

314

Index

Benjamin, Walter (cont.) see also dialectics; messianism; Proust, Franc¸oise Bensa¨ıd, Daniel 19 Bergson, Henri 118 Berkeley, George 9 Bernays, Paul 11 n Bersani, Leo 126 n, 191, 193 n, 285 Blair, Tony 87 Blanchot, Maurice 183 n Blin, Roger 130 n, 234 n Bolsheviks, the 84, 85 Bolzano, Bernard 7 n Bolzano, Wanda 212 Bond, Edward 3 boosterism: of Capital 164, 255–6; present in Badiou 164; present in Marx 133; present in Marxism 164 Bowie, Malcolm 182–3 Brater, Enoch 32, 33, 36, 216 Breath 237, 242 Brecht, Bertolt 179, 244 Breton, Andr´e 24, 106 Broda, Martine 107 Bryden, Mary 250, 251 Burton, Robert 153–5 . . . but the clouds. . . 243, 244, 245–8, 251, 268 calculation: Badiou’s critique of 32, 34, 35; Beckett’s satire on 32, 34, 35, 146–7 Calmative, The 287 Canguilhem, Georges 81 Cantor, Georg 7 n, 30, 62, 69, 126 n, 210; absolutism of 50, 52; and consistency and inconsistency 45–6; diagonal argument of 53; dismissal of infinitesimals in 29; and modernization of science 257; and the reality of number 28–9; as subject 114 cardinals 11–14; large 11–12 Catastrophe 194, 237–8, 239, 243, 245, 251, 273 catastrophe (math.) 13 category theory 174–6, 179–80; as rival to set theory 175; as supplement to set theory 175 Cavaill`es, Jean 81, 97 Celan, Paul 97, 100, 103–4, 278, 279, 284; as crucial instance of modernity 6, 55, 103, 163, 193; melancholy of 25, 105–7, 264; specific temporality in 106–7 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 102, 283 C´esaire, Aim´e 106 Chamberlain, Neville 145, 170 charism, the 75 Chˆatelet, Gilles 15 n

choice, axiom of 49, 62–3 cinema, Hollywood 178 Clemens, Justin 173 Cl´ement, Bruno 155 cockle-pickers, Chinese, death of (Morecambe Bay, 2004) 182, 194 Coetzee, J.M. 106, 279 Cohen, Paul 7 n, 12, 13, 55, 65–6 Come and Go 246, 251 Commune, Paris 24, 85, 103–4, 113–14, 139, 141, 264 compossibility 55 Congreve, William 65 n Connor, Steven 124–5, 133–4, 138, 221, 224, 225, 263, 284 Conrad, Joseph 143 consolation, Beckett’s dispensers of 256 n constructivism (math.): Badiou’s hostility to 9, 11 n, 65–6; and philosophical constructivism 65; as contemporary cultural dominant 66 continuation: as absurd imperative 195; as philosophical imperative 41; as subjective imperative 72–3, 97 continuum, the 16 continuum hypothesis, the 13, 62 Corneille, Pierre 25–6 Cornell, Drucilla 94 n Cravens, Margaret 148 Critchley, Simon 4, 56, 75, 92, 192 criticism, literary 67 Culik, Hugh 31 n Cunningham, David 199, 224 Dante Aligheri 213 Deamer, John 40 decision, the 284; Beckett and 39, 121, 124, 150, 188, 262; Mallarm´e and 114, 183–5; modern imperative in mathematics 44, 49, 62; Rimbaud and 110; and subjectification 60, 74, 167, 262 deconstruction 41, 51, 58, 80, 129, 133 Dedekind, Julius 7 n, 12, 28, 29 Delany, Paul 147, 149 Deleuze, Gilles 20, 105; Badiou’s differences with 58, 118; conception of the event contrasted with Badiou’s 39, 57, 76; as unitary philosopher 136, 138–9, 203 democracy, contemporary: Badiou’s critique of 82, 86, 87, 91–4, 270, 277; melancholy of 284 Deng, Hsiao-Ping 21 Derrida, Jacques 41, 50 n, 51 n, 58, 111 n, 118, 119, 121, 125, 127, 253 Descartes, Ren´e 6, 9, 51, 59; Beckett’s break with 36, 122, 126, 131, 155; Beckett’s debt to 113, 150, 153, 155, 186

Index desire: Badiou, Lacan and persistence in 98–99, 168, 227–8; in Beckett 130, 213, 214–5, 221, 227–8, 232; Mallarm´e resists 183 de-suturation 101, 116, 285 dialectical materialism 20–22, 23 dialectics: end of 36, 263, 266, 274–5; Marxist 57; ‘at a standstill’ 275 difference, irony of 236 discipline 56, 63, 67, 81 Disraeli, Benjamin 248 Docherty, Thomas 94 n domains (math.) 10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 282 doxa (opinion), the break with: art and 102; Badiou and 79–81, 84, 86, 91, 98; Beckett and 120–1, 133, 138, 143–55, 188–90, 206, 221, 223; Mallarm´e and 112, 185; Plato and 80; Ranci`ere and 271; Rimbaud and 110 Dream of Fair to Middling Women 229 Duchamp, Marcel 17 Dutoit, Ulysse 126 n, 191, 193 n, 285 economism: Beckett and 144–9, 153–4, 155; contemporary 17, 147, 277 n; modernism and 147–9 Eh Joe 242 Eilenberg, Samuel 174 Eisenstein, Sergei 179 Eliot, T.S. 147, 148 Ellis, Reuben J. 31 Embers 236, 242, 252 empiricism 235 empty set, axiom of 47–8 encyclopedia, the 59, 135, 163 End, The 3–4, 263, 286 ‘end of philosophy’, the end of 41 ‘end of representation’, the end of 143 Endgame 2, 36, 214, 232, 236, 239–40, 241–2, 243, 252, 279 Engels, Friedrich 21 Enlightenment project, the 27 Enough (Assez) 15, 26, 38, 200, 205–10, 213 n, 216 equality 70, 83, 86; as rare 271 Erasmus 144 ethics 56, 72, 90–101, 163, 193; agonistics as 215; of artistic practice 107–14, 263–4; Beckett’s 129–33, 170, 200–1, 202–3, 207, 208, 215, 217, 264; of de-suturation 101; humanitarian 255; of melancholy 170; of modesty 96; of naming 95–6; of polemos 97; see also continuation; fidelity; perseverance Euclid 32, 45 n, 62

315

´ev´enementialit´e (play in Being) 40, 75, 76, 113, 132, 138–42, 173, 178; Beckett and 140–2, 173, 191–2, 196–7, 285; and Beckett’s aporetics 287; as Beckett’s primary dramatic concern 233, 242–3; change in Beckett’s treatment of 288; Mallarm´e and 182–6 event 16–17, 60, 63, 64, 95, 98, 99, 104–5, 106, 107, 111–16, 180, 182–6, 283–5; as always localized 56–8, 134, 270; as anterior to language 65–6, 125; Beckett and 39–40, 119, 124, 126–8, 132, 199, 232; Beckett not the subject of 130, 138, 143; Beckett nuances 200, 205–8, 215, 217, 219, 223–4, 231, 233, 238, 241–53, 264, 275, 286–90; Beckett thinks condition of 191, 193–4, 264, 275; Beckett thinks ironically 137–8, 158–61, 165, 171, 172–3, 240, 286; Beckett thinks together with remainder 26–7, 38–40, 86, 226, 229, 233, 241; as beginning of truth 17, 55–6, 71–4, 219; and discipline 56; double 61, 131, 267; as experience 168; as founding historicity 37, 38, 56–7; Franc¸oise Proust’s conception of 166–7, 257–68; impurity of 134–8; logic of 77, 176; as minimal difference 121; modalities of 111, 132, 173; and modern art 17; and modernity 257–68, 279–81; not an object 179; phenomenology of 139, 159–61, 217; Ranci`ere and 271–3; as rare 16–20, 58, 97, 164, 178, 217, 227, 233, 261, 265, 279–81; simulacra of 140; as supplement to Being 54, 68, 127, 223; unnaturalness of 52 Evil 96, 200, 218 excess, point of 77, 79, 204, 211; see also Good Expelled, The 36, 286 fascism 94 Faulkner, William 143, 163 ‘feminine’, the: Badiou and 262 Feuerbach, Ludwig 50 fidelity 141, 206; and artistic truth-procedures 107–8, 110; in Beckett 141, 249, 264, 129–30, 285; ethics of 72–4, 97–100, 227; institutional aspect of 209; in Lacanian analysis 67; to Marx 69–70; work of 135, 208 finitism, classical 8–10 finitude, pathos of 7, 18 First Love 286, 287 Fizzles 288–9 Flaubert, Gustave 282

316

Index

Footfalls 237, 242 n, 243, 245, 246, 248, 252 forcing (math.) 54, 62, 136; Beckett and 151, 155, 284; in non-mathematical domains 66–7; in poetics 66–7; in set theory 65–6 Ford, Mark 28 Forster, E.M. 147 Foucault, Michel 97, 118, 262 n Fourier, Franc¸ois 271 Fournier, Edith 33, 37–8 Fraenkel, Abraham 10, 11 n, 62 Francis, Saint 278 Frege, Gottlob 49 Freud, Sigmund 16, 30, 50, 55 n, 59, 78 n, 100, 253 Freyd, Peter 174 Fronde, the 25 future anterior 284; as anticipation of completed truth 60, 62, 67, 84, 136; Beckett and 160, 193; H¨olderlin and 60–1; and risk 92 Galileo Galilei 42–3, 45, 55 Galois, Evariste 54, 57, 134 generic procedures 59, 66, 136; in Beckett 124 n Genet, Jean 81, 110 Geulincx, Arnold 146–7, 153 Ghost Trio 242, 244, 251 G¨odel, Kurt 31 n, 32, 62 Gontarski, Stan 248 Good, the: in Badiou 203–5, 227–8; in Beckett 199–200, 205, 214, 218–9, 221–2, 226–8, 288; in Lacan 198–9, 204, 205, 227–8; in Plato 201–5, 210, 221, 227; the proper concern of philosophy 95; in Wittgenstein 221–2 Gordon, Lois 145, 154 grand narratives, decline of 84–5, 104–5 Greenwood, Walter 145 Gregory, Lady Augusta 148 Grothendieck, Alexandre 174 Hallett, Michael 13 Hallward, Peter 5, 18 n, 23, 29, 76, 104, 173, 174 Hamilton, Sir William Rowan 7 n Hansford, James 31, 212, 216 Happy Days 26, 235, 236, 243, 244, 251, 273 Hardy, Barbara 263 Havel, V´aclav 237 n, 238 Haydn, Joseph 102, 139 Hegel, Georg 58, 134 n; event in 57; infinity in 6, 13, 16, 49, 51; modern critique of 170, 273–5; rejection of mathematics in 6

Heidegger, Martin: Badiou coincides with 42, 68, 106, 111; Badiou contrasted with 39, 56, 58, 262; Badiou’s critique of 41, 42–4, 52, 68, 101, 106, 118; and Ereignis 20 Heisenberg, Werner 37 Hemmungsprinzip, the: in Beckett 34, 210, 216; in set theory 13 Henning, Sylvie Debevec 169–70 Henric, Jacques 81 Herm, Klaus 240, 246 Herr, Lucien 97 Hilbert, David 28, 52, 126 n Hill, Leslie 119–20, 125, 132, 146 historical materialism 20, 69, 270, 282 history: as always particular 56, 85, 259, 260, 279–80; Badiou’s evacuation of 17–18, 57, 73, 85–6; Beckett’s evacuation of 17, 40, 232, 241, 268, 275, 288; beginnings of 232, 244, 258–9, 260–1; end of ‘solar view’ of 259, 261; founded in events 37, 38, 56–7 Hitler, Adolf 94 Hobbes, Thomas 79 Hobsbawm, Eric 148 H¨olderlin, Friedrich 60–2, 100, 131 n, 279 Holocaust, the 1 n, 94–5, 274, 276, 278–9 How It Is (Comment c’est) 36, 87–8, 89, 131, 286 Howard, J. Alane 33 humanitarianism, contemporary (doctrine of human rights) 92–4 Hunkeler, Thomas 190 Hussein, Saddam 94 Husserl, Edmund 101, 122 Ideas 45, 52, 82, 163, 176, 185, 189, 205 Ill Seen Ill Said (Mal vu mal dit) 126, 139, 140, 159, 160, 200, 268, 288 Imagism 17 impasse, point of 54, 73, 134; in Beckett 126, 130 inaesthetics 102, 113 inclusion: in set theory 76; and the State 77–9, 211 indiscernibles 60–2, 65, 135, 136; in Beckett 193–4, 285; definition of 62n; mathematical 62, 65; in poetry 60–1; in politics 60; rejected by constructivists 65 inertia 22, 163–5, 177, 191, 210, 226, 227, 287, 290; falsehood of 164, 191; mystery of 89, 271 inexistents 181–2 infinitesimals 29, 156, 247–8 infinity, actual 6–18, 45–8, 54, 60, 173, 180, 240, 262; as the banality of difference 97,

Index 188; in Beckett 27, 32–9, 157, 170, 188, 196–7, 210, 223, 236–7, 239, 245, 286–7; and deduction of the finite 56; and modern art 17, 162; and potential infinity 6–16; see also Being; set theory intermittency 19–20, 24, 26, 57–8, 77, 78, 230, 256–7, 282, 290; logic of 78; and modern art 163–4; and modern poetry 104–16, 263–4; and modernity 257–9, 264–8, 279–80; opposite of plenitude 227, 251, 255–7, 258, 278; pathos of 6, 15, 18–19, 22–5, 26–7, 37–40, 75, 76, 97, 104–7, 110–11, 114–16, 153–5, 161–2, 163, 165, 169–71, 192, 213–14, 219, 226–8, 241, 242–51, 266–8, 270–3, 275, 276, 279–80, 281, 282–3, 284, 287; politics and 85–6, 89–90, 269–73; and post-Fordist culture 257; and working-class life 271–3 investigations: in Beckett 150, 159–60, 165; and fidelity 99–100, 135; and knowledge 99–100; Saint Paul and 73; as subjective procedure 22, 64, 73, 99, 130 Iraq War, the 84, 85, 87, 181 irony, Beckett’s 187, 241, 252; and absence of truth 152–5, 190–2, 263; affirmative 172, 221, 285; cautionary 205, 207, 210, 246, 247, 249, 250–1, 285; and struggle 194 Israel 78 n Jacotot, Joseph 270–1, 273 Jambet, Christian 41, 58, 89, 134, 137, 156 James, Henry 147, 152 James, William 149 Jarrow March, the 143 Jaur`es, Jean 97 Joan, Saint 60, 122 jouissance 254–8; Beckett and 256; contemporary culture of 254–7, 270, 274; see also Lacan Joyce, James 17, 102, 137, 147, 148, 213, 214 n, 253 Juliet, Charles 146, 171 justice 87–9, 117, 178; ‘explosions of ’ 267, 279; see also Benjamin; Proust, Franc¸oise Kafka, Franz 17, 241, 253, 261, 275, 278, 279, 280, 281 Kandinsky, Wassily 163 Kant, Immanuel 6, 16, 32, 282; and categorical imperative 97, 227, 281; ‘contemporary return to’, Badiou’s critique of 17 n, 93, 262; and sensibility 166–7, 259–60; as first great modern 167, 258; and historical times 265–6; and

317

inauguration 17 n, 257–8, 264–5; see also sublime Karatani, Kojin 4 Katz, Daniel 128 Kaun, Axel 253 Kouv´elakis, Eustache 56 Krapp’s Last Tape 214, 232, 243–4, 251 Lacan, Jacques 51 n, 121, 212; and the analytical situation 67; challenge to philosophy in 50; critique of Plato in 201–5; ethics of 56, 98, 168, 183, 198–205, 227–8; fidelity to Freud in 100; melancholy of, Badiou’s resistance to 3, 97; and potlatch 227–8, 229; and the Real 50; remainder in 18 n; specific sense of jouissance in 163, 227–8, 255–6 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 58, 111 n, 113 Lamartine, Alphonse de 203, 211, 214, 216 language 59; and priority of the event 65–6, 125 Lardreau, Guy 41, 49 n, 55 n, 58 laughter: in Beckett 27, 36, 155, 161–2, 169, 287 Lautman, Albert 97 Lawrence, D.H. 148 Lawrence, Frieda 148 Lawvere, William 174, 175 Lazarus, Sylvain 84, 92, 96 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 82 left pathophobia 262; critique of 263 Leibniz, Gottfried 9, 20–1, 126 n, 247–8; and mathematics 6; monism of 45 Lenin, Vladimir 85, 88, 89, 96 Lepenies, Wolf 153–4 Levinas, Emmanuel 51, 94 n, 97, 101; and contemporary return to theology 91–3, 201 Lessness (Sans) 15, 33, 36–7, 106 Libera, Antoni 212 limit-figure, the: in Agamben 278–9; in Beckett 285–90 limit ordinal, the 13–14, 48–9 Locatelli, Carla 126–7 Locke, John 9 logic: abstraction as resistance to 273; Badiou’s conception of 173–7, 179–81, 237, 273; Beckett’s treatment of 188, 190, 195, 196, 197, 198, 286, 287; and localization of Being 173–4; of the object 179–81; as science of appearance 173–7; and the State 237

318

Index

Lost Ones, The (Le D´epeupleur) 31, 36, 126, 131, 200, 211–16, 225, 286, 289 love 30, 55, 82, 168, 211–12, 214; in Beckett 124, 126, 205–10, 232, 233, 243, 251; modern 24, 257; and politics 210; as truth 58, 59; truth-procedure of 64–5, 200 Lucretius 1, 128, 176 Luk´acs, Georg 229, 263 Lumi`eres, the 258, 260 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 24, 41, 49 n, 57, 84, 118, 284 Mac Lane, Saunders 174 Macaskill, Brian 32 MacGreevy, Thomas 146, 147, 169 maiuetics, Socratic 202 Malevich, Kasimir 17, 121, 163, 242 Mallarm´e, Stephane 122 n, 223, 225, 229, 261, 284, 289; and the Commune 24, 111, 113–14, 139, 141, 264; definition of the poetic act 66–7, 136; ethics of 114, 264; and the event 13, 111–16, 132, 139–41, 164, 182–6, 192, 193–4, 264; and the future anterior 66–7, 183–6, 192; and hesitation 113, 115, 183–6, 191, 196, 200, 224; inaugurates modern poetics 257; melancholy of 114, 164; patient labour of 108, 112–14, 130, 191; and politics 114, 123 n, 164; and the pure notion 103, 112, 116; relaxations of 130; and the remainder 24, 26, 111, 164; and restricted action 63–4, 85, 123; and undecidability 111–13, 183–6 Malone Dies 273, 286 management (gestion): and the modern State 78; as postmodern fetish 253 Mandelstam, Osip 25, 105, 106, 107, 114, 163, 264 Mansfield, Katherine 163 Mao, Tse-Tung 21, 85, 89, 107, 137, 273 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de 100; investigations in 64–5 ; love as truth-procedure in 64–5 Marx, Karl 78 n, 85, 98, 100, 269; and desacralization 42 n, 50; and dialectics 44 n, 57, 134 n; event of 3, 70, 83, 89; political inventiveness of 83, 84; positivity of 133, 273; and praxis 68; and the subject, 68–9; theory of history of, Badiou critical of 20, 57–8, 69 Marxism 3, 91, 100; Badiou’s complicity with 164; Badiou’s critique of 18, 57–8, 69–70, 82–3, 84, 89–90, 101, 163; Beckett’s satire on 3–4, 263; as the only significant modern politics 89–90; not a science 70

masses, the: Badiou’s judgements on 23 n mathematika (mathematical objects) 43, 156 Maude, Ulrika 195 n Mauroy, Pierre 109 mathematics 7 n, 9; Beckett and 30–2, 146, 189, 209; as collective enterprise 175; and the concrete world 27–9, 156, 163; and the continuum 16; history of 69; as inventive thought 44, 49; as liberation from opinion 80; and logic 174; modern 9, 12, 17, 28, 44, 52, 65, 69, 156, 159, 175, 257; and narrative 131; no concept of the event in 178; number in 11; and philosophy 6–7, 27–8, 42–5, 174; see also Cantor; category theory; ontology; set theory McMullan, Anna 248, 249 McWhinnie, Donald 240 measurement, quantitative 69 melancholy: aesthetic 107, 282–3; and affirmation 114; in Beckett 153–5, 160, 165, 170, 212, 241, 247, 249, 264, 267, 287; contemporary 87; as incompletion 169; and intermittency 25, 85, 97, 103–4, 164, 270, 281; political 85, 103–4, 270; of the State 154 Melville, Herman 143, 278 Messiaen, Olivier 163 messianism 265–9, 281; Badiou critical of 268; weak, 4 Michel, Natacha 81 Milner, Jean-Claude 30 Miloˇsovi´c, Slobodan 94 minimalism 133, 151, 247 Mirimanoff, Dimitry 47 n missaying: in Beckett 127–8, 132, 160–1, 217–19, 220–4, 250; see also nomination Mitt´erand, Franc¸ois 109 model N (new model of set-theoretical universe) 66, 67, 205 modernism 143; and abstraction 187; anti-economism of 147–9; and subtraction 122, 138, 143; and women 148–9 modernity 7, 43, 58; and the death of God 7, 50, 52; defined by events 257–68; and destruction 50, 274; and groundlessness 166; and negativity 274; as rare 280; set theory and 7; and the subject 30, 58, 105–6; and subtraction 122, 138; vestigial 27, 40, 264–5, 279, 281; see also problematics Mohawks: revolt of 181 Molloy 33–6, 38, 120, 123, 190, 216, 230, 286 Moorjani, Angela 33, 240 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 148

Index Morrison, Toni 279 Murphy 3–4, 31, 54, 143–55, 162, 164–5, 169–70, 172, 221, 223, 286 Murphy, P.J. 216 Nacht und Tr¨aume 237, 243, 248, 251 Nancy, Jean-Luc 58 narrative 113, 131–2 nature 52–3 negativity 24, 38, 80, 141, 164, 165, 235; and dialectics 21–2, 263, 274–5; remainder as 235 Negri, Antonio 273 neo-liberalism 21, 86 Nietzsche, Friedrich 50, 95, 96, 97 n, 101, 122 n, 204 n, 260; and affirmation 1 n, 95; reversal of Platonism in 189; as sophist 41; truth as fiction in 68; and the unlivable life 266, 269 Nizan, Paul 97 nomination (new names) 138, 283; Beckett and 119, 124, 126, 127, 133, 160, 208, 285; derived from situations 71, 135, 208; imposed by events 71; and indiscernibles 61–2; limits of 95–6; particular to subjects 59, 71, 135; as poiesis 61–2, 71, 103, 127, 160; required by truths 71, 73; see also missaying Not I 243, 245, 250–1 nouveau roman, the 17 numbers 53, 146, 147; as innumerable 15; irrational, natural, rational, real, definitions of 12 n objectification: terms for process of 179 objects 179–81, 182, 196–7, 230, 285, 287; as described by category theory 175, 180; as deprived of interiority 175; as self-differing 180–1 O’Casey, Sean 35, 196 Ohio Impromptu 243, 244, 246, 248–50, 251, 268 One, the 44–6, 89; Beckett and 205, 212; Cantor and 46; non-existence of 45, 49; Plato and 46; see also Deleuze ontico-ontological difference, the: Badiou’s rethinking of 53 ontology 242, 261; Beckett’s concern with 268; as effectuated 43; and freedom 77; and logic 175–6, 180, 190, 238; mathematics as 42–50; modern art’s concern with 277; as situated 45; see also Being opinion 17, 59, 60, 81, 86. 87, 99, 121, 204 n; as representation without truth 79–80; see also doxa

319

Oppenheim, Lois 211 ordinals 11, 15, 47 Organisation Politique 3, 78, 84, 85 orientations 49, 284 Orwell, George 281 n Pamuk, Orhan 279 paradox, Burali-Forti 11 paradox, Russell’s 11, 50, 53 Parmenides 46, 156 Pascal, Blaise 131 n Pasolini, Pier Paolo 121 pathos: as thought 40, 133, 164–5; see also intermittency Paul, Saint 61, 72–5, 92, 165, 271; as anti-philosopher 72 pens´ee forte 1–4 penumbra: in Beckett 36, 122, 126, 132, 186, 190, 220, 232, 237, 289; Being as 38 Perec, Georges 17 permutation 157 Perse, Saint-John 100 perseverance 41, 72, 74, 98; in Beckett 195–6, 215, 227, 232, 233, 250 Pessoa, Fernando 25, 103 Pesson, Ren´e 16 n phenomenology 123 Picasso, Pablo 152, 163 Piece of Monologue, A 237, 243, 244, 248, 251 Pilling, John 207, 210 Plato 176, 189, 198–205, 227, 282; and art 102; Beckett and 151, 188, 210, 212, 220, 221, 222 n; and break with doxa 80, 121, 160; errant cause in 47, 77, 79; event in 168; and mathematical ideas 9, 43, 45; and mathematics 6, 9, 43, 49; and multiplicity 46, 52; and poetry 42, 44, 163; and recollection 201–3 Play 212, 244, 248 poetry, modern 25, 102–7, 183, 187, 226, 257, 263–4 Poincar´e, Henri 29 n politics 25, 55, 66, 276–7, 283; Badiou’s 3, 19–24, 70, 78, 82, 84, 262–3; Beckett’s 3, 81, 90, 237–8, 263; betrayal of 100–1, 271; as demonstrations 82; distinct from philosophy 82; and the event 81; and inertia 88–9; as invention 83, 101; modern 81–2, 85, 89, 107, 257; parties and the death of 81–2; and prescription 83–4; as rare 84–86, 269–73; and rejection of pathos 107; subject of 82; as thought 24, 81, 82; as truth-procedure 58, 81 Pollard, Stephen 28, 34

320

Index

Pope, Alexander 225 n postmodernism 41, 55 n, 91–4, 111, 114, 117 n, 133, 163 postmodernity 7 n, 40, 51, 163, 252–3 Pound, Ezra 17, 147, 148 power set, axiom of 12 pragmatism: Badiou’s critique of 9, 91; Beckett’s critique of 223 prehistoric, the 241, 261 prescription 83, 87, 283 presentation 43, 45, 54, 77; the presentation of 45; and representation 77–80 problematics, modern 40, 228, 252–3, 256, 275, 280–1, 285, 286, 289, 290 proletariat, the: as infinite not empirical class, 70, 84 Proust 176–7 Proust, Franc¸oise 17 n, 166–8, 257–68, 284; Badiou’s critique of 167, 262; and bravura 260–1; and casuistry 261, 262; and counter-time 267–9; and ethics 260–1; and intermittency 257–9; and intersubjectivity 260; and modern time 257–9; and negativity 275; and resistance 261–2; and sensibility 166–9, 259, 262; and subjectification 259–65 Proust, Marcel 110, 269 psychoanalysis 22, 55, 62, 67, 202, 257 Pythagoras 31, 32 Quad 211 n, 233–5, 238–9, 243, 246, 252, 290 quelconque, the 54 Rabi’a, Labîd ben 104, 113 Rabinovitz, Rubin 155 Racine, Jean 61, 62 Ranci`ere, Jacques 70, 79 n, 284; aesthetics of 107, 282–3; art as ‘suspensive’ in 282–3; intermittency of politics in 269–73; intermittency of subjectivity in 271–3; melancholy in 269–73 religion, Badiou’s critique of: 7, 9, 42, 135–6, 156, 159 remainder, the 53; Badiou considers unworthy of thought 19, 23, 85–6, 104, 133, 141, 283; Beckett locates work in 26, 36, 37–8, 137, 141, 169, 200, 216, 226, 233, 235–6, 237, 238–9, 240, 242, 245, 251, 263, 290; characterized 18, 235; derivation of 18 n; and the end of dialectics, 22, 263; logic of 71–2; and logic of appearance 173–7; and logic of modernity 266–7, 279–80; and modern writing 104–16; and objectivity 179; political 85–6, 265, 269

Resistance, French 81 ‘Restoration’, the (1980-present) 17 n, 86 restricted action 63, 73, 85, 104; in Beckett 119, 122–25, 130, 132, 149–52, 155, 285 revolution: cultural (China) 55, 85; French 55, 85, 100–1, 140, 258, 261; Iranian 55; July (1830) 271, 272; Russian 173, 261 Richelieu, Cardinal 25 Rimbaud, Arthur 2, 81, 108–11, 114, 130, 279; impatience of 110–11; interruption in 108–11; as poet of undecidability 110–11 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 28 Robespierre, Maximilien 100 Rockabye 237, 242, 244 romanticism: Badiou’s critique of 6–7, 51, 261–2 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 145 Rorty, Richard 41, 184 Rothko, Mark 163 Rough for Radio II 88, 236, 238, 252 Rough for Theatre I 236, 237 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19, 60 Roussel, Raymond 17 Rudge, Olga 148 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas Brown 25 Rumsfeld, Donald 91 Russell, Bertrand 11, 28, 50, 155–6 Sade, Donatien Alphonse Franc¸ois, Marquis de 227; phantasm of 255 Saint-Just, Louis 83, 84, 99 Saint-Simon, Henri, Comte de 271 Salisbury, Laura 88 same, the 97, 123, 129 n sans-papiers (French immigrant workers), the 78, 257 sans-part (non-stakeholders), the 87, 110, 257 n Sartre, Jean-Paul 97, 118, 121, 184, 185; existential act in 62; intermittency in 22–3, 24, 133, 274, 284 Schneider, Alan 245 Schoenberg, Arnold 17, 55, 59, 67, 136 Schopenhauer, Arthur 153 Schwab, Gabriele 187–8 science: as truth-domain 58 Sebald, W.G. (Winfried Georg) 193, 279 sensibility: Badiou’s resistance to 166–7, 262–3; Badiou’s resort to 167; and melancholy 265; modern 259–60; as passivity to the event 166–7, 259–60; importance of 168–9 sequences, political 22–3, 84–6, 105–6, 179, 257–8; examples of 55, 85, 173

Index set theory 7–14, 45–50, 93, 175, 181; account of infinities in 8–14; and Beckett 27, 32–40, 53–4; challenge to principle of continuity in 175; not concerned with objects 46; and the concrete world 28–30; demystification of eternity in 7; paradoxes and contradictions in 11; as presentation 45–6, 49–50; static world of 175 Shakespear, Dorothy 148 Shakespeare, William 244 n Shalamov, Varlam 107–8 Sheehan, Paul 192, 193 site, the: 59, 113, 134–8, 140, 207–8; distinguished from situation 134 n situation, the: Beckett and 138, 170, 207, 210, 219, 243; contingency of 182; definition of 77; event belongs to 136, 210; event fractures 54, 56; event transforms 66, 71; knowledge particular to 68, 71, 99–100; as localization of Being 45, 56, 190, 237; as principal form of existence 134; State dominates 78; void exceeds 54; see also worlds skewing (bent logic), Beckett’s practice of 161, 170, 215–16, 218–19, 222, 224, 226, 244, 246, 273, 285–6, 288, 289 Solzhenitsyn, Alexsandr 107 sophistry 93, 97, 118 Sophocles 56, 228 n, 255 Spinoza, Baruch 78 n, 95; Beckett and 264; and conatus essendi 177; and the event 16 n; God of 51, 76; and infinity 9; and mathematics 6; and perseverance in Being 19, 59, 98, 153, 163, 177 Stalin, Joseph 96, 106, 108, 110, 263 State, the: 23, 29, 60, 76–90, 93, 99, 108, 110, 134; Agamben and 275–7; arbitrary power of 284; Aristotle and 198; Beckett and 34, 165, 211, 237–8, 286; concerned only with finite forms 20, 30, 70, 72, 77, 78, 93; not concerned with justice and equality 83, 86; and doxa 79–80; excludes the Good 203; history external to 17–18; as metastructure 77–9; modern form of 78, 86, 253, 276; permanence of 89–90, 177; and religion 51 Stevens, Wallace 253, 277 Stewart, Ian 53 Still 196 Stories (Nouvelles) 286, 288 subject, the: and age 142; anonymous 103; Beckett and 119, 121–2, 127, 128–30, 142, 143, 147, 150–1, 153, 155, 160, 171, 176, 177, 179, 196, 206, 210, 241, 245, 247, 250, 251, 259–62, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290; charismatics of 74;

321

commitment of 72–3, 97–101; and death 101; as groundless 63, 74; induction of (subjectification) 58–60, 129, 165, 167–8; as intervention 63; minimal 260; obscure 51 n; and prudence 63–5, 67; as rare 58, 71, 101, 271–2; as resistant 81; scission of 59–60, 79–80, 98, 135; singularity of 228; as surd 153; as wager 62–3, 93, 100; waiting (en attente) 90–101, 103–16, 130, 164–5, 170, 178, 192, 200, 226, 233, 244, 245, 263–4 sublime, the: abject 110; Badiou’s critique of 167–8; and the empty form of law 281; as experience of freedom 258, 261; and inaugural passivity 166–7; two times of 266 subtraction: in Beckett 56, 119, 124, 130–1, 132, 138, 143–4, 146, 150–2, 155, 189, 219, 285, 286; in Greek conception of Being 43; in modern art 163; in modern poetry 104–7, 112–13; of thought from doxa 81, 134; of truth from knowledge 59, 64, 73, 134 suffering 1, 24 suture: Badiou’s critique of in Althusser 65 n; definition of 61; and de-suturation 61–2, 105, 116, 141, 204 n, 225

Tajiri, Yoshiki 195 n television, character of 235 temporalities: political versus aesthetic 107 Terence 35 n terror, contemporary fear of 80 Texts for Nothing 126, 131, 140, 143, 150, 151, 186, 199, 209, 217, 286 That Time 240, 241, 242, 248 theatre, Badiou on 231 n, 232 th´eaˆ tre de combat, the 24 theory, fate of 80, 91 Thermidorean, the 100–1, 108, 114 thought: Beckett’s art as 119, 231, 239, 242, 243, 245, 246, 252 threshold: Beckett’s 196, 219, 229, 242, 252, 275, 284–90; see also limit-figure Tiles, Mary 10, 29 time, modern 241, 258–9, 265–8; irony of 266 Tolstoy, Leo 152 Trakl, Georg 114 transfinite, the 9, 13 Trauerspiele, the 267–8 trauma (math.) 13 Tresize, Thomas 118, 123–4

322

Index

Trilogy, The 33–36, 38, 132, 160, 177, 186, 192 n, 217, 231, 288; see also Malone Dies; Molloy; The Unnamable Trotsky, Lev 78 n truth-domains 18, 23, 55, 57, 58, 66, 96, 101, 173, 178–9; see also art; love; politics; science truths 67–75, 98, 99, 100, 111, 113, 114, 121, 131, 132, 137, 162, 167–8, 169, 172, 178, 266, 288; in Beckett, 140, 141, 161, 162, 170, 206–10, 217, 242, 243, 244, 251, 263; central category of philosophy 67, 95; dependent on subjects 69, 72–3, 206; and division 22, 135; as egalitarian 70; not fictions 68; as hazardous 60, 69, 206; historicity of 60; and knowledge 68, 111, 120, 135, 203, 207–8; limits of 95, 209; and naming 71–2, 208; not objects of philosophy 96, 101; opposed to veridicity 70–1; as prospective 61–3, 84; as rare 72–3, 105, 177, 209, 271; as sovereign acts 284; as subjective acts 59; subtractive 69, 73, 86, 121, 206 twentieth century, the 105–7 Two, the (scission): Badiou produces 136–8; Beckett and 124, 153, 205–6, 207, 212, 231–2, 250; desire and 227; ethics originates in 99; infinity begins with 38–9, 48; politics produces 83; subject originates in 59–60, 98, 135; truth produces 22, 136 Uhlmann, Anthony 119 n undecidability 44, 84, 110–11, 122 n, 183–5, 188, 191; see also Mallarm´e; Rimbaud undecidables (math.) 84, 285; definition of 62 n universals 70, 72, 78 n, 83, 86 n, 133, 162, 163 Unnamable, The 38, 73, 96, 137, 177, 182, 186–97, 198, 199, 200, 206, 286 unnameable, the 285; mathematical 65; and poetry 103; and politics 181; of truths 95 utopianism: and irony 271 Val´ery, Paul 115, 186 n, 229 Van Velde, Geer 196 Vattimo, Gianni 7 n, 41 Velazquez, Diego de Silva 152, 179–80 veridicity 70–71, 111, 136, 143 Verstraeten, Pierre 14

vigilance: in Beckett 128–30, 132, 141, 170, 285 Vitez, Antoine 162 void, the 182, 201, 203–4; Beckett and 36, 39, 152, 160, 161, 186, 219–20, 237, 244; event expresses 54, 64, 71, 134, 139, 160; as mathematically thinkable 46–8; nature founded on 52–3; as not existential 46; as omnipresent 46–8, 52, 100, 178; psychoanalyst’s intimacy with 67; State protected against 79, 89; subject as occurrence of 59, 93; truth as occurrence of 86 Von Neumann, John 77; model of, 47 Waiting for Godot 26, 38–9, 88, 165, 232, 234, 243, 244 Warrilow, David 256 wars, European 154 Watt 33, 132, 143, 153, 155–62, 170, 172–3, 187, 192, 195 n, 232, 284, 289 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 148 Weierstrass, Karl 7 n Weyl, Hermann 28 What Where 230, 237, 238–9, 241, 242, 251, 261 Whitehead, Alfred 50 Whitelaw, Billie 245 will to destruction: Beckett’s 73 Williams, William Carlos 17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Badiou coincides with 69; Beckett contrasted with 127, 189, 221–3; Beckett tends towards 225; hostility to set theory 9, 27–28; and modern problematics 253; mysticism of 51, 221; as philosophical constructivist 65–6; as sophist 41 Woolf, Virginia 17, 163 Words and Music 236, 238 Wordsworth, William 258 n worlds: 173–81, 184, 220–1, 238; in Beckett 220–1, 238; as logical account of situations 173; see also situation Worstward Ho (Cap au pire) 36, 126, 159, 200, 216, 217, 268 Worth, Katharine 3, 245 Xenophon 100 Yeats, William Butler 148, 247 Zeno 155–6 Zermelo, Ernst 8 ˇ zek, Slavoj 17 n, 19 n Ziˇ