Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy 9780748637584

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INTERMITTENCY

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. . . chè tra li lazzi sorbi si disconvien fruttar lo dolce fico. (Dante, Inferno XV) But what particular rarity, what strange, Which manifold record not matches? (Shakespeare, Timon of Athens) À jamais souviens-toi de ma parole pour son goût de malheur et de fumée. (Mandelstam)

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INT ERM I TTE N C Y The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy Andrew Gibson

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© Andrew Gibson, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3757 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3758 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5075 0 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5074 3 (Amazon ebook) The right of Andrew Gibson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Foreword Jean-Jacques Lecercle

vii ix xii

Introduction Kojève’s Hegel An Anti-schematics of Historical Reason Sartre: History and Hysteresis The Example of Orwell

1 1 6 14 20

1 The Logic of Intermittency: Alain Badiou The Structure of Intermittency Inexistents Custos, Quid Noctis? The Example of Flaubert

24 24 34 43 54

2 Sporadic Modernity: Françoise Proust The Beginnings of Modernity Catastrophe in Permanence Explosions of Justice The Example of Wordsworth

68 68 82 87 96

3 A Counter-phenomenology of Spirit: Christian Jambet The Great Resurrection of Alamut The Paradoxical One The Dark Event The Example of Rimbaud

112 112 124 132 141

4 Alternances Indépassables: Guy Lardreau The Remains of History Kanto-Lacanianism

157 157 162

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Art and the Moment of Spirit The Example of Kleist

180 183

5 Intermittency and Melancholy: Jacques Rancière Egalitarian and Democratic Events Historical Decompositions Aesthetics and Partage The Example of Rossellini

202 202 213 229 236

Conclusion: Prolegomena to a Critical Synthesis Badiou and Speculative Realism The Question of Rarity The Unerasable Conviction The Necessity of Literature The Example of Sebald

246 246 256 267 275 284

Appendix: Lardreau: Philosophization, Negation and Veracity Bibliography Index

291 294 317

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Acknowledgements

I owe substantial debts of gratitude to the following, in different ways: Alain Badiou, Mieke Bal, Françoise Balibar, Judith Balso, Cathérine Bernard, Antonia Birnbaum, Andrew Bowie, Thomas Docherty, Mladen Dolar, Martin Dzelzainis, Danuta Fjellestad, Penny Florence, Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournes, Evelyne Grossman, Vanessa Guignery, Peter Hallward, Robert Hampson, Stephen Hill, Ahuvia Kahane, Kojin Karatani, Richard Klein, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Martin Middeke, Katie Normington, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jacques Rancière, Mark Robson, Will Rowe, Kiernan Ryan, Yoshiki Tajiri, Derval Tubridy, Rasmus Ugilt and Anne Varty. My sincere thanks to all of them. Various lectures, seminar papers and presentations contributed largely to the development of this book, notably ‘The Philosophy of Guy Lardreau: Lacan, Kant, Aesthetics’, to the English Faculty theory seminar, University of Cambridge (2010); ‘Repenser la logique de l’intermittence: Badiou, Platon et Logiques des mondes’, at the conference on Alain Badiou organized by the Institut Français, Athens and the University of Athens (2009); ‘Guy Lardreau, Art and the Failure of Philosophy’, to the English Department at the University of Uppsala (2009); ‘Badiou, Rancière, Historical Intermittency and Popular Will’, at the English Department, Birkbeck College, University of London (2009, with Peter Hallward); ‘From Kojève to Jambet: History, Intermittency, Literature’, at the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, University of Warwick (2008); ‘The Concept of Intermittency: Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Contemporary French Philosophy’, to the conference on Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Globalisation, University of Aarhus (2008); ‘ “The Unfinished Song” (ii): Intermittency and Melancholy in Rancière’, at the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway College, University of London (2007); ‘Françoise Proust, Walter Benjamin et l’intempestif’, in ‘Lire et relire le présent’, research seminar series, Université de Paris vii

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VII (2006); ‘ “Thankless Earth, But Not Entirely”: Narrative, Event and Remainder’, to the conference on The Ethics of Contemporary Narrative Fiction, University of Zaragoza (2006); ‘Françoise Proust and Walter Benjamin’, to the English research seminar, University of Sussex (2005); ‘Actual Infinity, Event, Remainder’, to the conference on Contemporary Writing Environments, Brunel University (2004); ‘Badiou and Françoise Proust’, to the conference on Badiou’s Ethics and Subjectivity, London Metropolitan University (2004); and ‘Why Not Melancholy?’, to the conference on The Philosophy of Jacques Rancière, Institute of Romance Studies, the University of London (2003). I am most grateful to all who thought to invite me, attended, raised questions for me and generally engaged with what I had to say. Not for the first time, I am particularly grateful to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant which afforded me three precious months of research in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. I am sincerely grateful to all at and associated with Edinburgh University Press who worked on and supported this book: Eliza Wright for her copy-editing skills; Rebecca Mackenzie for her help with the cover; James Dale; Jackie Jones; and above all my editor Carol MacDonald.

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Abbreviations

AM AW BK CC CD CI CO CR CS CT DE DO DZ EA EE ES ET IT LE LM LS MP PE PM PT PU SA SI SM

Alain Badiou Abrégé de métapolitique L’Antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein Beckett: L’Increvable désir Circonstances, 5: L’Hypothèse communiste Casser en deux l’histoire du monde? Circonstances, 1: Kosovo, 11 Septembre, Chirac/Le Pen Circonstances, 3: Portées du mot ‘Juif’ Circonstances, 2: Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France Conditions Court traité d’ontologie transitoire Deleuze: The Clamor of Being D’un désastre obscur Gilles Deleuze: ‘La clameur de l’Être’ Éloge de l’amour L’Être et l’événement Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil L’Éthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy L’Explication Logiques des mondes Le Siècle Manifeste pour la philosophie La Philosophie et l’événement Petit manuel d’inesthétique Petit panthéon portatif Peut-on penser la politique? Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Saint-Paul et la fondation de l’universalisme Second manifeste pour la philosophie ix

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x

LA LeM

Intermittency

Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau L’Ange Le Monde

The separate contributions of the two authors are clearly indicated throughout both volumes. Christian Jambet AE CA GR LO

L’Acte d’être Le Caché et l’apparent La Grande résurrection d’Alamût La Logique des orientaux

SO VM

Guy Lardreau Dialogues L’Exercice différé de la philosophie Fictions philosophiques et science-fiction La Véracité Présentation criminelle de quelques concepts majeurs de la philosophie Le Singe d’or Vive le matérialisme!

DR DT HC KA PO

Françoise Proust De la résistance La Doublure du temps L’Histoire à contretemps Kant: Le Ton de l’histoire Point de passage

DI ED FP LV PC

AR AU CH CM CV HD LL MA ME MI

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Jacques Rancière ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’ Aux bords du politique Chroniques des temps consensuels La Chair des mots: Politiques de l’écriture Courts voyages au pays du peuple Hatred of Democracy La Leçon d’Althusser Malaise dans l’esthétique La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle

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Abbreviations

NH NP PA PL PP PS SE SP

xi

The Names of History La Nuit des prolétaires: Archive du rêve ouvrier La Parole muette: Essais sur les contradictions de la littérature Politique de la littérature The Philosopher and his Poor Le Partage sensible: Esthétique et politique The Emancipated Spectator On the Shores of Politics

Save where indicated, all translations from French, German and Italian are my own.

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Foreword

In the English-speaking world, we tend to consider contemporary French philosophy from a high altitude, as from a jet cruising over a range of mountains: from a thick layer of cloud, a few majestic peaks emerge. Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard are now behind us (and Althusser has been under a cloud for some years), but Rancière and Badiou, the twin peaks of that part of the range, are now in full view. Andrew Gibson, a bold explorer, just back from his notoriously successful ascent of Mount Badiou (see his Beckett and Badiou) has decided to reconnoitre the land that lies under the cloud and introduce us to a few of the minor foothills. Hence a book which has chapters on Badiou and Rancière, as might be expected in the current context, but also about three little-known, because as yet hardly translated, French philosophers, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau. I am afraid this metaphorical beginning is unjust to Gibson, who is not merely a skilful interpreter of texts, not merely a passeur, who enables us to discover new vistas in contemporary French philosophy – a valuable task in itself, which Gibson fulfils with his usual attention to the details of the argument – but also a philosopher in his own right. And this he is in two ways. First, he not only reconstructs but actively constructs a tradition, the tradition of intermittency. For this is, according to Althusser, the task of the philosopher: to do things with words, that is actively to construct his object at the very moment when he is phrasing it. So this is not merely Badiou’s, Rancière’s and others’ view of intermittency, but Gibson’s concept, which amounts to a philosophy of history and of literature (of the contribution literature makes to a concept of history), which he calls ‘an anti-schematics of historical reason’. As a result of which the second way in which Gibson is his own philosopher is to be found in his conclusion, more of a full chapter than a conclusion, in which he sets down a number of theses that formulate a philosophy of literature and history of considerable interest and originality – there lies the importance of his book, the object of which is not xii

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merely to give intellectual exposure to little-known texts, but to make philosophical headway. But first, let us go back to the construction of a tradition. The dominant philosophy of history in contemporary French culture is broadly speaking Hegelian. It is continuist and progressive: history is the site of the dialectical development of the Spirit, or, in Marxist terms, of the succession of the modes of production. As such, it is teleological: there is a sens de l’histoire, inseparably a meaning (history makes sense, and a philosophy of history captures that meaning) and a direction (it irrepressibly moves towards its endgame, the reign of Absolute Spirit or the classless society). In the French context, this Hegelian tradition is based on the interpretation of the Phenomenology of Mind which Kojève gave in a classic series of seminars, famously attended by the crème de la crème of the French intelligentsia (Bataille, Lacan, etc.). And this is Gibson’s starting point: his five philosophers enable him to construct an anti-Hegelian tradition, which breaks with the Hegelian schematism of historical reason, to construct a concept of history based on the scarcity of historical events, and therefore on the intermittency of history. In the Hegelian tradition, events there are, often with devastating consequences, as in the case of revolutions, but such crises are only the marks of the stages through which the constant flow of history must pass on its journey towards its ultimate goal. They are predictable, and they make predictable sense: they are symptoms of progress. In the philosophy of events proposed by Alain Badiou, to which the first chapter is inevitably devoted, events are unpredictable, as they puncture a hole in the ordering of the situation, as well as unsayable, as they cannot be expressed in the current language. And above all they are rare and transient: the event occurs and vanishes in a flash, leaving traces in the truth that can be extracted out of it, and in the fidelity of the individuals it interpellates into subjects. So history is a dotted line of event sequences (the May events of 1968 are no longer with us), the consequences of which, however, are lasting (the truth revealed by the May events is still with us, at least with those of us that can still hear its call, and as such it partakes of eternity). This is the core of the ‘intermittency’ that Gibson analyses in the philosophers that make up his tradition, even if he is well aware of the heterogeneity of the texts: Jambet and Lardreau enjoyed a brief moment of fame with a post-Marxist philosophical best-seller, L’Ange, but Lardreau is now mostly known as a Lacanian philosopher of ‘veracity’ (he has devoted a book to the concept), as well as the philosophical analyst of science fiction and detective stories; whereas Jambet is a distinguished Islamic scholar (a far cry from the usual French ‘theorist’). The late Françoise

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Proust was the author of an extraordinary interpretation of Kant and of a groundbreaking book on Water Benjamin. As for Rancière, an old colleague cum adversary of Badiou, his concept of history is certainly characterized by intermittency, but for him an event has little relation with what Badiou intends by the term. We must thank Andrew Gibson for bringing all of this, most of which is still unfamiliar to the English-speaking reader, to our attention. Even his chapter on Badiou (who these days is not lacking in exposure) covers new ground, being largely devoted to the second part of the great opus, Logics of Worlds, only recently translated, in which Badiou develops a theory of subjectivation that takes into account other forms of subjectivity than the faithful subject: in the wake of the event, there appear reactive and obscure as well as faithful subjects. In spite of their heterogeneity (Jambet and Lardreau, former Maoists like Badiou, were briefly captured by the nouveaux philosophes and their politics is of the pessimistic kind, whereas Badiou, Rancière and Proust remained steadfastly on the left), the five philosophers, as thinkers of intermittency, in other words as thinkers of history in the wake of the demise of State communism and the dissolution of Marxism as a hegemonic force, have a number of points in common, by way of which Gibson is able to develop his antischematics: the centrality of the concept of event, in its scarcity (as opposed to the development of intelligible history), the consequent contrast between two forms of historical time (the cumulative and gradual time of the meliorist narrative vs the apocalyptic time of the rare explosion of the event), together with the consequent ambivalence between melancholy (in between the rare events we live in what Badiou calls a monde atone, a world without qualities) and ecstatic messianicity (since the event cannot be predicted, not being phrasable in the language of the situation, it must be the object of messianic expectation and hope). The consequence of those consequences is nothing less than a characterisation of modernity: this is the tradition that, Gibson maintains, is able to think our modernity not only in its origin and development, but in its most contemporary aspects. At this point, great is the temptation to become a reactive subject, to betray the Gibson event and adopt the point of view of the unreconstructed Marxist, in other words to contrast the sequence of concepts that makes up the tradition with another sequence and another tradition: the necessity of historical events rather than their absolute contingency (here Althusser, by way of his late texts on aleatory materialism, becomes not the archetypal Marxist opponent but an honorary member of the tradition); a continued struggle for emancipation

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rather than a revelling in melancholy (in the blank intervals between the dots of historical events, the situation does not call for unbridled optimism); a revival of the narrative of historical progress rather than the pessimism of the scarcity and immediate vanishing of the event; and, if we must throw Marx and Hegel overboard, a return to Spinoza and his joyful affects, rather than the inevitable Kant and his concept of the sublime. But, apart from the pointlessness of such inversion (and the difficulty to combine what Gramsci called the pessimism of reason with the optimism of the heart in the present conjuncture), this, again, would be unjust to Gibson, who constructs the tradition but is also quite capable of critical distance towards his authors, in order to propose his own philosophy of history and literature. There is a clear symptom of this in the fact that every chapter of the book, including the introduction and conclusion, ends on a section devoted to a literary or filmic text: our philosophical journey thus takes us through the work of Orwell, Flaubert, Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Kleist, Rossellini and Sebald. Badiou is all very well, but wait till we reach Flaubert; Françoise Proust is the thinker of sporadic modernity, but Wordsworth is even better. Gibson introduces the texts of art, which he calls ‘examples’, not as illustrations of the truths disclosed by the philosophers, but for their very exemplarity, for the fact that they go further than the texts of philosophy. A philosophy of history, therefore, must also involve a philosophy of literature. We can formulate this nexus in the form of four theses, most of the contents of which have already been evoked. The first thesis is the thesis of intermittency – of the scarcity of historical events, of history as a dotted line. But Gibson, taking advantage of the fact that literature too, and not only philosophy, is able to think history, goes further than this: the limitation of his five philosophers is that they are excellent at describing the extraordinary event, but rather weak at accounting for the normality of Badiou’s atone world, the lasting intervals between the transient dots. This is where Flaubert is more instructive than Badiou, as his subject is not only the event but the situation the event punctures, which is partly recomposed when the halo left by the flash subsides. Hence the second thesis: the relation between philosophy and literature must be reversed, to the detriment of philosophy. For literature not only thinks history, but it thinks it rather better than philosophy. On the face of it, this is unjust to most of the philosophers of the tradition of intermittency, as they would all recognize that literature thinks (which means: literature is a source of truths) and they even seem to be prepared, as is obvious in the case of Badiou, apparently to give pride of place to literature: according to Badiou, literature (like politics, science

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and love) is a site for the emergence of truths, but philosophy is not, as its task is merely to ‘compossibilize’ the truths that emerge in the four event sites. But it can be argued that this is mere illusion, as philosophy, in the very act of compossibilization, soon recovers its guiding role, by thinking the truths that literature fosters but that it cannot think on its own, without the help of philosophy. Not so in Gibson, where, in the immortal words of the old Heineken ad, literature reaches parts that philosophy cannot reach – namely, it thinks the banality of in-between situations, which the philosophy of intermittency either neglects or ignores (Badiou’s Logics of Worlds may be read as an attempt to bridge this gap). The consequence of this may be expressed in a third thesis: it is literature, not philosophy, which is best able to account for our modernity, to produce a theory of modernity (which goes beyond mere modernism). And here we may remember that Badiou’s own analysis of modernity, in Le Siècle, is based on a close reading of literary texts, which is also what I have elsewhere called a ‘strong reading’: he imposes the concepts of his philosophy on texts, which undoubtedly benefit from such a coup de force, but he also lets his concepts be read by the literary texts which are thus not merely exploited but philosophically productive. Gibson’s practice pushes this reversal to its logical conclusion: the literary texts he systematically considers as exemplary do not only support the philosophical conception of history as intermittent, but also criticize it, insofar as, being restricted by the scarcity of events to an understanding of history which is itself intermittent, such a concept of history cannot account for history as a whole, in its revolutionary as in its banal stages (in his conclusion, Gibson suggests that this intermittent view of history is predicated upon French history in the nineteenth century, with its succession of revolutions, but that consideration of Irish history or of the history of the realm of Naples might paint another picture). This enables us to understand Gibson’s fourth thesis: the modernity inscribed in the intermittency of history is characterized by melancholy. But this is not the melancholy of quiet despair, nor is it the melancholy that resembles madness. It is not one of those sad passions that disempower the subject but rather an active and positive affect – the affect that goes with the lucidité of the right understanding of the conjuncture, which precludes the revelling in foolish hopes, but does not prevent action. This is where literature is unsurpassable: it, and only it, is capable of thinking the break-up of the world in epiphanies and events (whereby it is ecstatic) but also, and inseparably, recession, empty repetition and obscurity (whereby literature is melancholy). We have gone a long way beyond the mere presentation and com-

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mentary of a number of contemporary French philosophers. I am not advising you to skip the five chapters and go straight to the conclusion, but we must be aware that the conclusion to this book is not the farewell of a tired author to a blasé reader, but a whole book in nuce, the exposition of a philosophy of literature by way of a philosophy of history – no mean feat. It is customary for the author of a foreword to congratulate the prospective readers of the book for the quality of the experience on which they are soon to embark: in my case, this has nothing to do with a rhetorical flourish – the book you are going to read is not merely a book, it is a landmark. It would seem I cannot quite forego the topographical metaphor. Jean-Jacques Lecercle

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In memory of Françoise Proust (1947–1998) and Guy Lardreau (1947–2008)

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Introduction

KOJÈVE’S HEGEL In L’Ange, the book he published with Guy Lardreau in 1976, Christian Jambet asserts that the world has two histories, that of law and that of grace. They are radically heterogeneous to and discontinuous with each other. History as grace is what commonly remains unthought and unsaid within history as law, arriving more or less abruptly and dramatically to interrupt it, only to be swallowed up by it again. Jambet subscribes to a conception of history founded on the crucial significance of historical grace as intermittent, a sporadic and uncommon event. The arrival of history as grace indefinitely resists what Jambet calls ‘the Hegelian formula’, which reduces history to the status of ‘ “universal gaol” ’ (LA: 49). It forbids all final historical synthesis, and logically points towards an ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’ (LA: 50). This book is about the occasional interruptions of diurnal history by unprecedented, unexpected and unparalleled events for the good. That, in its largest and most general definition, is what intermittency means, the term deriving from Daniel Bensaïd (and more loosely from Françoise Proust).1 What I mean by the good will have various different aspects in the book, by no means necessarily political. But the concept of justice is never very distant from it; justice and the good, for example, as represented by Barcelona in 1936. As George Orwell evokes it, after the July revolution, with its compelling blend of libertarianism, anarchism and communism, its extraordinary women’s movement, Mujeres Libres, its will to abolish the material symbols of the past, its air of instantaneous friendship, automatic and unquestioned solidarity, Barcelona appeared strangely unreal, caught up in what Proust calls ‘the scandal of equality’ (1997c: 85). One ‘breathed the air of equality’, wrote Orwell (Orwell 2004 [1968]: 102). There 1

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was everywhere ‘a belief in the revolution, a feeling that the bondage of centuries had been broken’ (Orwell 2004 [1968]: 277). He himself shared the belief, became the subject of an event. ‘I . . . at last believe in Socialism, which I never did before’, he wrote to Cyril Connolly, on 8 June 1937 (Orwell 2004 [1968]: 269). He was particularly sensitive to the mood of the moment at the level at which it most counted, the ordinary one, involving ‘generous feelings and gestures’ between ordinary men and women, evident generally in ‘small things’, that were impossible ‘in normal circumstances’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 232, 287). The book, then, is about the way in which certain kinds of newness continue to enter the world, breaking with the usual run of things, habitual scenarios determined by specific historical conditions. It is not just about historicity, but the immediate manifestations of historicity within history. It follows its theme through five recent or contemporary French philosophers, in the conviction that that theme has become apparent and explicit in their work. The book unrepentantly casts the philosophers into certain moulds which simplify certain aspects of their thought and wilfully exclude others. That is because it not only insists that all five produce an ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’, but that the shared production is of cardinal importance at our own particular historical juncture. The five philosophers define the key terms in many different ways, and differ very markedly in their understanding of both intermittency and its implications. But all of them think of outbreaks of historical reason as rare. Historical reason is occasional, neither the substance nor the essence of history, but rather at odds with it. It occurs as and in events: of justice and equality, but also love, beauty, invention, scientific vision: these happen as events of historical reason, and define historical reason itself. This book entertains the assumption that, without occasions of historical reason, however little we customarily know or admit it, the world may conceivably stand condemned, as nothing save what Walter Benjamin called ‘catastrophe in permanence’ (2002b: 164). Undeniably, events take place; but they also identify what, throughout the book, I shall call the historical remainder. The remainder is what is principally given to knowledge and historical experience. In a theological register, we might call it the fallen world. It is that portion of history at every level – and, since events are rare, it must be by far the larger portion – that is neither disrupted by events nor traversed by what Alain Badiou calls truth-procedures, but is revealed by both as their antithesis or foil. We shall come upon various creative responses to the rarity of the event, and one or two compelling accounts of the

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logic of rarity, but, all the same, the question of rarity is perhaps the most difficult philosophical problem we will encounter. Philosophy has seldom shown any interest in the concept of a remainder. By contrast, modern literature has repeatedly talked, never ceased talking about it. This book insists on thinking event and remainder together, and will constantly summon literature as a necessary companion to philosophy, the Panza to its Quixote. It starts out from the premise that, at its fullest extent, the concept of intermittency requires this, that philosophy everywhere illuminates a certain kind of literature but that, in its turn, literature fills out, completes and may indeed transform philosophical presentation, not least in that it testifies to an ‘existential situation’ that is not merely a question for thought, but ‘fully lived’ (CA: 21). The philosophers of intermittency crucially help us in understanding the modernity of modern writers, but equally, modern literature stands as a recurrent caution to a will within modern philosophy to counter modernity, or resist its full implications. I shall take my initial bearings from Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, since Kojève’s is the Hegel that principally matters to all the philosophers in this book, and then run Jambet up against Kojève. Jambet is no more central to this book than the other four philosophers, and his principal concern – a phenomenology of Islamic gnosticism – may appear initially to skew its concerns, perhaps even rather direly. I nonetheless begin with him, because it is he who most explicitly and comprehensively addresses the Kojèvian categories.2 As Jambet insists, the dominant modern French readings of Hegel are all substantially Kojève-derived, or respond to Kojève. Jambet himself defines an anti-schematics of historical reason against Kojève’s Hegel, and treats Kojèvian ideas as though they were Hegelian (though he also wonders whether Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s ‘theologico-political truth’ never errs, 1994: xvi). After Jambet, I will turn to a philosopher of major importance to the philosophers of intermittency, the late Sartre, since it is he more than anyone else who dictates the terms of intermittency to philosophy. Finally, I shall exemplify the Sartrean case via Orwell, the first in what will emerge as a series of literary understandings of what Sartre called history as hysteresis that, precisely because of their acuteness, constitute a lesson or caution to the philosophers. We may begin by isolating twelve key features of the Kojèvian Hegel. Firstly, for Kojève, Hegel is the first truly modern, atheist, materialist philosopher. Hegel eliminates ‘the transcendent idea’; that is, he ‘brings Heaven back to Earth’. He gives up on, repudiates ‘the ideology of the “two worlds” and the duality of human existence’,

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bringing in ‘nothing from outside’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 56, 67). Hegel is the first to announce it: the ‘other world’ is merely an expression of Entsagung, abnegation, the Slave’s self-betrayal (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 178). Rooted in theology from Plato to Christianity ancient and modern, the Western mind situated Spirit outside man and the world. Hegel makes it immanent to history. The whole of Hegel can be summed up in a single sentence from the Phenomenology: ‘ “Was die Zeit betrifft, . . . so ist Sie der daseiende Betriffte selbst” [“As for Time . . . it is the empirically existing Concept itself”]’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 131–2).3 Secondly: in constructing a doctrine of immanent spirit, Hegel ‘fills history in’. In Kojève, human time is all there is, there is no other of time. Furthermore, everything makes its historical contribution, everything works. Hegel ‘grasps labour as the essence of man’, wrote Marx (2000 [1932]). In the Hegelian world according to Kojève, there is no idleness, no inertia, no désœuvrement. There are no waste spaces and no waste times. Because it posited two worlds, the theological tradition made possible a concept of historical intervention, the unforeseen, abrupt historical break or leap, but, in Hegel, the historical work of the dialectic is inexorable and continuous. Nothing either escapes it or intrudes upon it. It is, in that sense, consistent, homogeneous, self-same, a great, all-absorbing, cosmic machine. Thirdly: where theology places Spirit as ‘existing outside of Man and independently of his Action’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 71), Hegel understood that Spirit itself is nothing but negation as creative action. If there is no idleness in history, there is also no passivity. Man negates Being through action, in the two forms of dialectical negation, fighting and work, and this constitutes ‘truly human’ as opposed to ‘given natural’ being (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 55). Fourthly: action is definitive of human freedom, in that men discover and affirm their freedom in the active negation of the world as given to them. Fifthly: negation is not nihilism, nor is it a work of destruction alone. There is no negation without preservation from what was negated, no negative without positive reason. Dialectics is neither anarchism nor permanent revolution, but sustains the onward movement of history. Point six: the condition of history is plenitude. The work of Spirit reaches completion, achieves an absolute realization which is mirrored in the absolute knowledge of the sage. The famous ‘end of history’ arrives, and this, again, defines Hegelian modernity against the theological universe; where theology takes absolute knowledge to be possible at any given moment whatever, Hegel understands that it is a culmination. If time aspires to completion and is completable, point seven, this

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completion can be specified in that history finds its fulfilment in the State. Point eight: the progress of the dialectic is a movement of overcoming; that is, time is dynamic. One of Hegel’s greatest achievements is to take over the dynamic conception of time that Kant had pioneered but to free it from the spectre of infinite recession, the ewige Aufgabe that is its seemingly inescapable corollary in Kant, insisting that time creates new things in an advance or cumulative process. In ‘the schema of theological knowledge’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 107), there is no truth in temporality or change where, for Hegel, absolute knowledge exists in time, may be ours in and yet is also unrelated to time, in that, through the Concept, man rises above temporality. Hegel is equally a thinker of historical plenitude in giving primacy to the future – but a certain kind of future. Hegel starts out from an anthropology of desire, and it is the future that engenders desire, as the present ‘I am thirsty’ is determined by the future act of drinking. The specifically human phenomenon is thus, point nine, the project. Here Hegel corrects Aristotle: man is working towards a declaration of his essence that has not been finalized as yet but, at the same time, the tenth point, the future is vermittelt, mediated. It does not make its way immediately into the present, but does so via the past, in that it negates a present that thus becomes a past. My eleventh point is that completion for Kojève spells finitude, notably with ‘the end of history’ for, as man is ‘knowledge incarnate’ only if he accepts his mortality, so finitude is the condition of dialectic itself (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 148). But the aspect of Kojève’s Hegel most immediately important for understanding the concept of an anti-schematics of historical reason is conveyed in my twelfth and last point: Kojève emphasizes the Hegelian transformation of the Kantian theory of the Schematismus. Time is the schema of the Concept, that is, the Concept is significant only insofar as it is ‘ “schematised” ’, related to or mediated by time, laid out in a temporal order (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 127). However, where, in Kant, this mediation is purely passive, in Hegel, it is Tat or Tun, activity. Time mediates the Concept in a dialectical movement, materially. By the same token, Hegel denies that the Concept is a relation to another reality, and thus sets bounds to history and knowledge, makes both self-sufficient and self-contained, for there is no longer any possibility of an ‘isolated Concept’, of ‘partial truths’ or ‘partial facts’. Truth is schematic, ‘ “a system” ’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 121).4 The mutual conformity of the Concept and time is crucial: the ‘schematic fit’ of the one to the other constitutes modernity.

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AN ANTI-SCHEMATICS OF HISTORICAL REASON To recapitulate, then: immanence; plenitude; the active principle; freedom; dialectical reason, negative and positive together; culmination; overcoming; the project; completion in the State; mediation; finitude; the schema. In these, writes Kojève, Hegel discovers a phenomenology, a metaphysics and an ontology of history, giving us ‘the very essence of human being’ (1969 [1947]: 67). All five of our philosophers more or less directly and adventurously challenge the Kojève-Hegelian concept of history. It is Jambet who most explicitly gives us the terms of that challenge, if in a specific discourse. ‘[M]ost contemporary thinkers’, he remarks, ‘have worked against Hegel, in the margins of Hegel, or with the express aim of breaking with Hegelian logic’ (2003a: 36). Since L’Ange and its companion volume, Le Monde, Jambet’s work has pervasively contested the Kojèvian conception of the ‘essence of human being’ whilst not exactly spurning the system of value that underwrites it, in that Hegel and gnosticism, he asserts, have a common nous, but different transhistorical orientations. Our ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’ will steadily provide an implicit critique of Kojève. In the first instance, of course, it takes issue with the notion of the Schematismus, the organization or disposition of the Concept in time, and that of the schematic fit, the truth of the Concept as historically overarching and applicable systematically and at all points. Here we should return to Kojève on immanence. Kojève privileges the modern, Hegelian conception of Spirit as immanent in history over the transcendence of Spirit in Platonic and Christian tradition, where two distinct worlds exist. Jambet counters this with a concept of ‘metahistory’ deriving from gnostic philosophy. Metahistory is not a ‘hidden’, immanent history of Spirit nor a history of a ‘world beyond’ (LO: 246, 266),5 does not indicate a transcendental domain. The time of metahistory is rather the time of ‘creative effusion’ or ‘existentiation’, of Being ‘historicizing itself’, the relevant analogy being natura naturans not naturata. If metaphysics has an essence, that essence consists of events, of ‘surgissements événementiels’ (Jambet 1993a: 18; cf. 1981a: 12). These are metahistorical because they make ‘the creative act’ visible again and again (GR: 327). But they do so only from time to time. It is not often that the naturans is visible within the naturata. The metahistorical principle gives us history in its historicity, as historical emergence and, in doing so, interrupts or ‘provokes’ ruptures in history, even declaring that history has been brought to a halt (LO: 211; Jambet 1983a: 113). Metahistory appears as (in Arabic) hadith, meaning ‘the arrival or production of an event’ (AE: 182),6 an instant that interrupts

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the historical course of time. As such, it is always pure and simple singularity. It presupposes an absent totality, however, what Jambet calls an absconditus, which is inexhaustible, but whose effects within history are occasional. It is inseparable from the messianic destiny of history. The time of metahistory repeats itself, but is also not controlled by past events and always arrives as if for the first time. It is ‘acausal’ and ‘reversible’ (LO: 257). It does not appear as or in any particular form of historical ‘linearity’ (LO: 276). Yet the metahistorical rupture does not make of history an illusion or shadow-play. Metahistory and history rather have different ‘places of being’. Jambet does not deny the determining force of history, politics or economics, but asserts that they belong to a distinct and independent sphere with its own density and that is traversed by another historicity which it eclipses, but which also survives it. Metahistory has its own specific relations to history, and is neither secondary to nor a reflection of it, rather forcing us to confront the ‘emergence’ of history (LO: 300). Hence the historical names of metahistory are those of the great revolts. So where Kojève asserts what he takes to be a modern, advanced conception of Spirit as not transcendent but immanent, wholly incarnated in history, Jambet refuses the terms of the transcendence/immanence dyad itself. Here and there, now and again, Spirit breaks into history, not as some envoy from another world, but in a laying bare of historicity itself. Where Kojève’s Hegel presents time as a schematization of Spirit, in Jambet, Spirit arrives to disrupt the customary time of the world. Where, in Kojève, there is a schematic fit between the Concept and time, the one enfolding the other without residue, in Jambet, the instants of the appearance of Spirit, of the emergence of the metahistorical principle within history, are fractures or lacerations of time, make holes in it. The consequence of this, however, is not a mystical recognition of a supernal beyond, but an experience of the historical Abgrund (abyss, Jambet 1983a: 116), of historical indetermination. Such instances constitute opportunities for new and different historical trajectories manifest in the great creative passages in history that undoubtedly do take place. An anti-schematics of historical reason therefore changes our understanding of historical reason itself. In Kojève’s Hegel, Reason is negative reason, the negative aspect of what is, the reason in the dialectical negation of the given, the power of transformation. But it is also positive reason, in which negation negates itself and Being is revealed as totality. In Jambet, by contrast, the negation of negation is reflux or return. In Kojèvian terms, an anti-schematics of historical reason finds value in negative reason alone, which is what Jambet means when he

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asserts that, whilst phenomenology today need not abandon all thought of historical reason, it must submit any concept of historical reason to ‘regulatory Ideas’ other than totality. (LO: 107). Any plausible contemporary philosophy of history will ‘undo continuities’ and multiply historical differences (LO: 253), offering us an escape from ‘our love of totalities’ and the monism ‘which excludes all rupture in Being’ (Jambet 1981: 100). Jambet equally inverts the other key terms of the Kojèvian system. Firstly, the condition of history is in no sense plenitude, in that, far from everything being set to work in history, most of the time, history does not work. The condition of history is intermittency; or, as Jambet puts it, truth is commonly hidden by necessity or material law. Metahistorical tears occasionally appear in history, but the condition of history is otherwise désœuvrement. By the same token, history does not orient itself towards any culminating point, and truth recurs sporadically and unendingly. Here the Kojèvian insistence on finitude and the end of history come into question. Metahistory does not spell the end of history, still less any Hegelian completion of history in the State. It converts itself into or expresses itself as what Jambet calls hierohistory, a history of the occasions of Spirit, of resistances to the State, the State being that within which, because it ‘statifies’ affairs, the event of Spirit cannot conceivably take place. Jambet equally presents us with no concept of historical overcoming. In Kojève, in its dual work of nihilation and preservation, time creates new things dynamically, progressively. Through man’s fighting or his work, time manifests itself as the negation of the world, but the identity of that which is negated ‘becomes its own opposite’ and ‘continues to be the same being’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 202). Identity reverses, and returns to itself having incorporated its own reversal, and this, the Aufhebung, completes the dynamic principle. By contrast, says Jambet, in Islamic gnosticism, there is and can be no Aufhebung. The metahistorical principle breaks into history in a juddering series of unpredictable and discrete singularities, ‘the multiplied one’, 1x1x1x1x1 . . .,7 one being both the first and the last number in the sequence: emergence is always singular and yet the same, though it seldom imposes itself or is apprehensible in its singularity. Thus the concept of the project has no meaning in the world of esoteric Islam. Kojève gives primacy to the future, and so, too, in his concern with prophetic time, does Jambet. But Kojève privileges the future as completion, for it is the engine of history, engendering desire and therefore ceaselessly driving the present into the nullity of the past, whence the dialectical process returns it to the present. But all

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this is end-oriented: man transforms Being in terms of a concept which becomes a project, but to which Being itself becomes progressively more conformable. In Jambet, however, history and metahistory can never coincide. There is no question of any conformity between them, and therefore no question of any future completion of history, but only of an indefinite, prophetic future, the irregular and discontinuous series of events. The model of a progressively increasing conformity between the Concept and Being is therefore inadmissible. In the world of the gnostics, there is no equivalent of Kojèvian mediation. The future does not enter the present through the past. In the moment at which the event breaks into the present, it is unvermittelt (unmediated), immediately at hand. A prophetic truth produces a ‘brutal temporal contraction’: the distance between future and present is telescoped to a point where the one coincides with the other, the future invades the present, at once (GR: 22). If the distance between present and future dramatically shrinks in the event, however, another kind of distance also opens up, between the unrevealable, inexhaustible, historical absconditus or absent totality and the discrete historical instances it founds. For Kojève, history is conditioned by desire, and chiefly one particular desire, the desire for social recognition. According to Kojève, ‘the desire for Recognition’ actually exhausts ‘all the human possibilities’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 193). Desire is always a desire for desire, for the Slave desires the recognition and therefore the desire of the Master. Jambet replicates this structure, but also reverses it. In the gnostic philosophers, too, there is desire for desire, but this is not a desire for social recognition. The gnostic’s desire for desire is not a will to overcome the other, but a desire for surrender or self-loss. The gnostic subject desires the event as an inward desire that will master his or her subjecthood but that, at the same time, must be emphatically distinguished from ‘pious interiority’ (LO: 19). He or she yearns for the substitution of the cogitor for the cogito, the ‘I am thought’ for the ‘I think’, the passive for the Kojèvian active. We shall return to this later. Finally, for both Kojève and Jambet, historical reason spells freedom, but the concepts of freedom are stake are quite different. Kojève asserts that ‘an account of the phenomenon of Freedom’ is central to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Freedom is willed intervention, action ‘in the proper sense of the term, that is, conscious and voluntary action’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 209), the Slave’s coming to self-consciousness and engaging in the struggle with the Master. Jambet appears to say something very similar, for example, with reference to the uprising of the Zanj, the black slave population in Basra, in 869. But what is at stake for the Zanj is the freedom opened up by a different temporality.

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Hegel’s Slave must act, writes Kojève, because of his terror of nothingness. In Jambet, by contrast, the invasion of metahistory is in a sense an invasion of nothingness, a reduction of the historical scene to nothingness. This reduction to nothing invokes the temporality of the ‘journée’, the new-born day.8 ‘Journées’ are extracted from clock time. Strictly speaking, they are not extraordinary days at all, but points of the extraordinary real in days, of ‘history in its pure state’ (GR: 45). In the time of the ‘journée’, the infinite appears within the finite (GR: 46–7), the freedom at stake in the ‘journée’ being ‘the unfounded freedom of the real’ (GR: 345), the Arabic Haqiqa, the effective reality of Being. The ‘journée’ institutes a practice of liberty like the pure liberty or ‘creative spontaneity’ of the absconditus (AE: 38). This practice of liberty is not a practice of masterful action, but an openness to being mastered, is even marked by ‘the disappearance of the person’ (LO: 193), conferring an infinite obligation. Hierohistory, the history of manifestation, epiphany, intermittent crisis, is therefore the significant history. But for the gnostics, history must have a double aspect, the appearance and disappearance of the Imam, ‘occultation and manifestation’ together (GR: 64). The time of redemption also implies a time of stupor. If the ‘structure’ of Being is ‘epiphanic’ (AE: 175), involving an experience of recurrent desire and fugitive lights, it can be grasped only as Kojève’s negative reason perpetually recommenced, a ‘gnosis of singularities’ (LO: 102). It never produces the universal, which would only ‘obscure’ things (AE: 176). Thus the history of Being ‘cannot rejoin its supreme principle’, but carries within it the repeated experience of loss and destitution (AE: 178). The absolute spirit will never incarnate itself as objective spirit in sensible temporality, and there can be no happy, post-historical state, that is, the condition of the Slave indefinitely returns. Grasped integrally, Jambet’s is what I shall call a melancholic– ecstatic conception of history. Indeed, there is a logic to its being so that is itself historical. Jambet might appear to be obviously closer to Kojève’s Platonic-Christian than to his modern, Hegelian tradition, but this is the case only if we ignore the former’s conviction that the later development of the Platonic-Christian tradition in Europe takes place at the expense of another which runs from Plato via Neoplatonism to Islamic gnosticism. Jambet sees European conceptions of history as having revolved around a problematic staked out for them by what was only one derivative of Platonism. The other derivative faded from the European scene with the increasing dominance of Copernican and Galilean thought (Jambet 1993: 164), and the accompanying decline of a world represented in its dying phases by Florentine Neoplatonism

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and the Cambridge Platonists,9 but remaining alive in the intellectual culture of Islam. Jambet even suggests, if fleetingly, that what we today call manic depression or bipolar disorder is conceivably a faint, degraded residue of what, before Cartesianism, was once an experience of time, a melancholic–ecstatic mode of historical experience.10 Jambet’s work is haunted by melancholy.11 He can write very well about the absence of or declension from gnosis. The gnostic intelligence is ‘dazed [éblouie] by sadness at the knowledge that it is powerless to reach the very principle which animates it’ (GR: 217). Gnostic evil is the collapse or lack of ‘a thitherto luminous landscape’ (GR: 246). The name of Allah himself means affliction or sadness. Sadness is as much a question for the subject as the event is; ‘the same movement’ grants the subject both unhappiness and freedom (GR: 240). This must be maintained as a paradox, in a simultaneous vision, producing a ‘pathetic’ concept of the divine (GR: 218). This concept is necessary to Islamic gnosticism. Gnostic sadness is endemic to the habitual world in its powerlessness to seize its own liberty. The ‘repetition of messianic acts’ is infinite and indissolubly linked to melancholy (GR: 219). Jambet particularly grasps the melancholic obverse of epiphany in poetry. The poet understands the ‘exile’ that is ‘privation of the epiphany’ (CA: 26). Hegel himself wrote of ‘the excellent Rumi’ – the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi – as exemplifying the consciousness of the One ‘in its finest purity and sublimity’ (Hegel 1971 [1894]: 308). But for Jambet, Hegel ‘strangely obliterates the movement of the negative’ in Rumi, negation as both ‘inhabiting affirmation and ceaselessly ruining it’ (CA: 26). Within a melancholic–ecstatic purview, negation is characteristically ambivalent, as Jambet sees most fully in his accounts of Islamic poetry. In Le Caché et l’apparent, he argues that Persian poetry not only comes to ‘inhabit’ philosophical practice but indeed ‘completes’ it (CA: 10). Here ‘spiritual philosophy’ is ‘definitively tied’ to ‘literary language’ (CA: 22). Poetry both ‘preserves the hypothesis of a singular and rare resurrection’ and bears witness to the loss of ‘the authentic revelation of the real’ (CA: 14–15), takes the burden of the ‘anxiety’ of loss, grasping melancholy as ‘the very tonality of being’ (CA: 15–16). Jambet might seem close to the Heidegger for whom poetry’s ‘power of unveiling [dévoilement]’ takes ‘distress’ as its element, but he is not concerned with a melancholy knowledge of a modern ‘loss or flight of the gods’. In the Persian poets, melancholy is not historical in this fashion, but rather grasped as ‘at the heart of reality’ itself (CA: 11). Up to a certain point, this study coincides with Jambet in this understanding of it. Kojève states that one of Hegel’s great achievements is to release us

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from the theological tradition, which understands human existence as ineluctably conditioned by misery. Hegel is the first philosopher to understand the possibility of finally purifying history of unhappiness. The end of history, writes Kojève, echoing Marx in Kapital, provides ‘everything that makes men happy’. The end of history gives man ‘full satisfaction’ (Kojève 1969 [1947]: 192). Whilst few serious modern philosophers have confidently anticipated the arrival of a complacently ‘post-historical’ era, it is above all modern literature that has radically contested any equation of modernity with the supposed prospect of any such ‘satisfaction’. But to some, I must appear to be sidestepping an obvious problem with Jambet. That I have begun my book with an apparently religious philosopher might seem dismaying, heralding a brusque reversion to a theological disposition of thought. But for Jambet, belief is definitively not at issue. The concept of undergoing any ‘conversion’ to Islam is trivial. Our modern (Western) experience leaves us very remote indeed from, say, Persian philosophers (Shahab al-Din) Suhrawardi (1155–91) and Mulla Sadra (1571–1641). Modern experience is not a question of a relation to God at all. It is extremely doubtful whether religious experience properly speaking has been available to the European mind for several centuries. Jambet readily admits his own distance from ‘the Muslim subject’ (GR: 390), rather placing his project within a Nietzschean tradition. ‘Nietzsche’, he writes, ‘is infinitely closer to us than Marx’ (Jambet 1985: 24).12 This may come as a surprise. But what Jambet means is that he is Nietzschean insofar as Nietzsche opens the way to a genealogy or science of religion. Where the later Marx turns religion into superstructure and thereby makes it secondary, for Nietzsche, ‘the religious fact comes first’ and is foundational, organizing a priori categories that philosophy exposes, thereby making others possible (Jambet 1985: 12–13, 24). To Nietzsche, however, Jambet adds Foucault and (after all) Heidegger. Foucault partly supplements Nietzsche because he does not seek refuge from the genealogical discovery ‘in the play of the will to power’ (Jambet 1985: 27), but chiefly because he relentlessly asks, not whether a given experience (including religious experience) contradicts the nature of things, but ‘what type of truth it deploys’ (Jambet 1989b: 277). Jambet sharply dissociates himself from Heidegger, notably his Nazism, inseparable as it was from the empty abstraction and ultimately noxious academicism of his concept of liberty (see Jambet 1987). Indeed, Jambet’s work might be thought of as increasingly turning from a radical revision of the Hegelian to a radical revision of the Heideggerian tradition in modern French philosophy. But Heidegger nonetheless furnishes us with a context for thinking

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genealogically, particularly in his concept of Geschehen,13 which Henry Corbin, the most significant influence on Jambet, translates as ‘historiality’. Every historical situation is founded on a hermeneutics which comes first and is an understanding of time. Historiality is not historicity or contingency, but the past ‘constituted by a present when the latter projects its future’ (Jambet 2001a: 12). It is the structure proper to a human reality which makes possible the historicity of a world (LO: 16). ‘Fallen into’ historical existence, Heideggerian man forgets his historial origin. Europe will save its thought only by engaging with others which reveal to it the ‘historiality’ of its own, the historical emergence of its historical facts (LO: 22). Hence gnostic philosophy is our witness, and reading the gnostics is ‘like a forbidden past or pleasure’ coming back to us (LO: 26). Jambet is concerned, then, not with ‘onto-theology and its deconstruction’, but with the ‘crisis’ or ‘scandal’ Islamic gnosticism spells for our reason (1992: 3). He is uninterested in questions of the validity of faith, for they ungenealogically presuppose that faith can be judged by some ‘exterior norm’, and therefore have no relevance (AE: 10). But at the same time, to historicist, materialist or empirical explanation, he opposes a ‘phenomenology of the spiritual fact’ (LO: 288).14 Foucault allows us ‘to treat spiritual universes “phenomenologically” ’ (Jambet 1989b: 285), to explore the manner in which ‘a spiritual fact, issued from a strictly religious practice, can become an object of philosophical examination’ (GR: 16). A ‘phenomenology of the spiritual fact’ seeks to understand spiritual experience without using ‘sociological methods’ to kill it first, thus ‘saving the phenomena’ (Jambet 1993a: 23; LO: 237–8; cf. 1992b: 122). In the case of the gnostics, it becomes a general phenomenology of ‘always singular forms’ (LO: 240–1), ‘saving’ the singular revelation. Where the positivist or empiricist ‘saves’ only exterior conditions, a ‘phenomenology of the spiritual fact’ thinks the pure singularity of the event (LO: 238). For spiritual facts are real but not linked to an exterior chronology, that is, they are not to be known through their determinations, which are inessential. Revelation tears the subject from empirical history. Thus where the positivist ‘saves’ existence in history, the phenomenologist ‘saves’ historical existence, the historical existence of subjects as the origins of their own histories. This is not to say, however, that phenomenology makes historical thought otiose. Historical thought is altogether necessary: it speaks of effective reality. But so, too, is phenomenology necessary: no harmony between history and metahistory is conceivable, and the distinct modes of thought to which they appeal cannot be substituted for one another. Points of contact between history and metahistory exist, but are finally

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enigmatic; as Jambet has repeatedly emphasized (e.g. 2004: 16), they therefore call to a double methodology. My own project is not genealogical or phenomenological, and is more adamantly secular than Jambet’s. I hope to articulate and preserve a principle of secular historicism, in however minimal, qualified and ambivalent a form. But I coincide with Jambet in a certain suspension of the religious question, at least insofar as this study not only implicitly recognizes the impossibility of breaking with the theological register tout de suite, but is deliberately reluctant to do so, for reasons that I will make explicit in my conclusion. If the book concedes as little as it reasonably can to theology, however, like Jambet, it also decisively and radically departs, not only from the most significant historical schematics, whether Kojève-Hegelian, Marxist or progressivist, but equally from the erasures of the historical principle involved in a contemporary thought of historical finitude (as in the pragmatisms and presentisms) and any banal conception of history as meaningless chaos. As Jambet says, that history is not determined by ends does not mean that it consists solely of ‘la poussière des jours’, the dust of passing days (LO: 14). The book will depart from such conceptions of history, however, not via a genealogical move, but through what will steadily emerge as a peculiar and distinctive conception of modernity, to which an anti-schematics of historical reason is intrinsic. An anti-schematics of historical reason refuses all thought of a historical guarantee, a founding historical truth, reality or good (like the proletariat). It refuses historical necessity and all redemption of imperfection in the dialectic (as, say, Marx redeems nineteenth-century Capital as a relatively developed phase of historical progress). It refuses the temporalities on which, whether consciously or not, the progressivisms are founded, and does so without the lapse into a reactionary temporality that commonly follows that refusal, or any assertion that it leaves us with no alternative but to turn indifferently from the historical mess or identify the historical horizon with our own. In intention, it constitutes a significant enquiry for those who wish to preserve the methods and purposes of the secular historicisms in a time inhospitable to them and inclined to repress their knowledge. Above all, perhaps, it provides testimony to the obstinate survival of a desire – let us call it messianic, as Jambet does – that matters ‘as much today as it ever did’ (GR: 390). SARTRE: HISTORY AND HYSTERESIS Any assertion that Kojève’s Hegelianism has neatly ceded to the philosophies of intermittency would grossly simplify matters and leave out a

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number of intermediate stages in the process. Some of Kojève’s early listeners were resistant from early on. They included Georges Bataille and Corbin (a ‘close friend’ of Kojève’s, Jambet 1994: xiv). But two great minatory figures particularly hang over the philosophers in this book. The first is another sceptical member of Kojève’s audience, Lacan. It is Badiou above all who makes clear his debt to ‘my master Jacques Lacan’: ‘I call contemporary philosopher’, he writes, ‘he who has the courage to cross through, without faltering, the antiphilosophy of Lacan’ (CS: 85, 196). Indeed, one might conceive of not only Badiou’s, but Jambet’s and Lardreau’s work partly as driving philosophy straight at Lacan, particularly the late Lacan, and seeing what remains of and for it in the wake of the encounter.15 Lacan leaves philosophy in danger of ruin, of foundering on an exact concept of what is irreducible to its terms, the non-thinkable par excellence, radical lack, the Real. But Lacan I will leave till later. Here I shall rather focus on the second figure, Sartre. Sartre did not attend Kojève’s lectures, but the relevant Sartre in this context, the late Sartre, the Sartre of the monumental Critique of Dialectical Reason, is in any case historically quite distant from Kojève. This Sartre is a repeated if often implicit point of reference for recent French philosophy. Badiou’s short memorial to Sartre (1981), for example, is chiefly a meditation on the Critique. Rancière’s Le Philosophe et ses pauvres includes an extended engagement with one particular aspect of the Critique, and its shadow hangs over his work elsewhere. So, too, the philosophies of Lardreau, Jambet and Proust are influenced by a historical thought whose source is the Critique, by what Badiou sees as the ‘historical-ephemeral’ complexion of Sartre’s late thought.16 Badiou sums up ‘historical-ephemerality’ in a single sentence: for the late Sartre, ‘man exists only in flashes, in a savage discontinuity that is always finally reabsorbed into inertia’ (Badiou 1981: 14). This is one definition of intermittency. The Critique, however, goes further: its massive core is substantially composed of a theoretical account of an initial political event and the declension from it, the fading of its effects, thus supplying an exhaustive account of how and why the ‘reabsorption into inertia’ occurs. Several conditions determine the trajectory in question, the first being the ontological condition of scarcity or rareté. Scarcity is the original condition, at least insofar as thought must begin from it. There is not and has never been enough to go round. Strictly speaking, for Sartre, scarcity is not an ontological but a quasi-ontological principle. It is certainly possible to imagine historical worlds not ours which might not be determined by scarcity. We have no knowledge, however, of a world involving human beings where this has been or

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might conceivably be the case. The Sartre of the Critique begins from the condition of scarcity, a founding, radical lack, and sees it as decisive for thought. There is an obvious objection to the concept of scarcity as determining condition: scarcity is itself dependent on a founding injustice. It can therefore in principle be brought to an end by the rectification of injustice, or what we wistfully call redistribution. But this holds no water for Sartre. For scarcity is various and manifold, and exists in a complex and dialectical relation to need. Need and scarcity constantly define and redefine each other. There is no concept whatever in the Critique of a rationally engineered and administered comprehensive justice with which we might all finally be satisfied. Because there is scarcity and need, and the two exist in a reciprocally determining relation, there is violence, the recognition of which can no more be shirked than the reality of scarcity. In Sartre’s conception of it, violence is not necessarily or even principally bellicose. It is the defining characteristic of social relations insofar as there is not enough to go round. My violence is intrinsic to my life and imperative to me insofar as I need or possess what it is not possible that everyone should have. Violence is pervasive and irreducible, and no one escapes it, as either inflicter or victim. Here we are on familiar Sartrean terrain, and arrive at one of Sartre’s great themes, complicity. Complicity becomes the rule. But the necessary reflex of complicity is self-concealment. ‘In the Manichaeanism of scarcity’, writes Sartre, with extraordinary penetration, ‘violence is the service of Good – it is Good itself’, and ‘there are a hundred, a thousand different ways to realize oneself . . . as Good making itself terrible’ (Sartre 2006 [1985]: 24). Take as an example contemporary networks: these in no way diminish complicity in violence. One need think only of one particular history of exploitation, the political and economic history of the minerals in laptops and mobile phones. But the networks offer us progressively more sophisticated means of deflecting complicity and avoiding the immanence of the relation of violence. They rather exteriorize that violence, thereby deflecting or ‘sidetracking’ complicity (Sartre 2006 [1985]: 30). Violence is inextricably bound up with the series, serial existence, serial organization. Armies, boxing matches, bus queues, political parties and workplaces are among Sartre’s principal examples of series. Serial organization is the dominant form of social life, the structure ‘of the most ordinary, everyday gatherings’ and the ‘fundamental constitution of sociality’ itself (Sartre 2004 [1960]: 269). A series is an ensemble each of whose members is determined in alterity by the others. Everyone’s project is isolated, a negation of reciprocity, a refusal of possible unity. But everyone is also integrated and interchangeable: they

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are united, but formally, from the outside, as a queue is united in its project but its members are also separated and set against each other by need and scarcity. Each is defined by the others, and each is the other of him- or herself insofar as he or she is defined by a place in the ensemble. In this respect, seriality is the very image of alienation, passivity, inertia; but the principle of seriality is nonetheless one of implicit violence: it is violent in severing the members of the series from one another, but also in uniting them elsewhere, in exteriority. Against the series, Sartre pits the group-in-fusion. This concept is best illustrated by his narrative of the storming of the Bastille, the central image of the Critique and its classic point of reference. The storming of the Bastille is the supreme instance of the Sartrean conception of the event or explosion of justice, an outbreak of freedom and equality as immediate praxis. It is the paradigm of a transvaluation of all values in which those who appear to amount to nothing decisively stake their claim and overturn the structure that has declared them to be nothing. The group-in-fusion is born when a given set of historical and social circumstances force a group of subjects to understand that theirs is the impossible or unliveable life. The subject is delivered over to his or her own reflexive freedom; that is, to an originary subjectivity that represents the beginning of a life, emerges in the vector of a project, lives in and as invention and awaits completion in an indeterminate future. But the freedom in question is only possible within a structure of reciprocity. In the group-in-fusion, ‘everyone [can] propose his own end in so far as he recognizes that of the Other’ (Sartre 2004 [1960]: 187). Reflexive freedom can come about as such only if another shares it, confirms my freedom as transcending me and my interest. Equally, the other confirms that my freedom refuses to make use of him or her solely as a means to my end. Within reciprocity, we rather become means to each other’s end. Each of us is the guarantee that the other may start to live. The other is as much the concern of my project as I am. His or her interests are my interests, not however because I choose altruism rather than egoism – these concepts belong to the world of serial organization – but as a specific instance of the common concern or danger. Indeed, the common concern effectively functions as a third party. At a given moment in the events surrounding the Bastille, when the Provost of Paris Jacques de Flesselles attempts to trick the group, it ceases to function in a molecular and reactive manner (see Sartre 2004 [1960]: 357). Everyone decides to act in a new way, not as an individual or an other, but as an incarnation of the common person. This decision then sweeps across the city, which itself becomes a groupin-fusion, in an outbreak of what Jaurès called historical fever.17 But

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the moment of incarnation can never be willed or given to oneself as an abstract imperative. Freedom and reciprocity are always concrete and appear materially, in a historically particular praxis. The appropriate material conjunctures are sporadic and rare. Thus the Sartrean event takes place as ‘the liquidation of an inert seriality under the pressure of definite material circumstances’ (Sartre 2004 [1960]: 361). The group-in-fusion makes serial inertia appear for what it is, inessential. It abolishes the distance between individuals. In a world conditioned by ontological scarcity and therefore violence, however, whilst not necessarily doomed to defeat, the group-in-fusion must adapt to survive; it must extend and develop its work; its praxis must mutate. This means, however, that it is subsequently infected by the very inertia it has shrugged off. But why should the group-in-fusion not indefinitely perpetuate itself and its spirit? Why should it suffer a relapse? The answer lies in the famous Sartrean concept of the practicoinert. One cannot consider the meaning of praxis apart from its consequences, its products. But the products of praxis are not neutral. They are imprints on matter and persist as such. This persistence establishes a different principle to the ongoing, spontaneous creativity of free praxis. In effect, there is a politics of ‘worked matter’ that cannot coincide with praxis in its freedom. Materiality is not neutral: it bears historical traces, harbours historical memories, and therefore political ends alien and even inimical to those of the project. These are reactive; they lag behind, counselling inertia. The major triumph of the Critique is Sartre’s great, immensely protracted meditation on the narrative of the declension from an event, and its separate stages or features: the pledge, organization, institutionalization, the State, the sovereign, the reconquest of the world by series. His examples are always context-specific and various, but the story he tells is chiefly determined by his grasp of developments in the Soviet Union after 1917, the emergence of Stalinism, and its meaning for the Communist promise. This becomes apparent when he analyses political developments in Russia 1917–33, and the relevant section of the Critique conveys a very exact sense of the complex operations of the practico-inert. ‘Worked matter’ may indeed be thingly and make up bodies (the practico-inert is latent in things). Thus the Stolypin reform of 1906 enables a new class, the kulaks, which emerges with a regrouping of land holdings, a literal reshaping of the landscape which means that the ‘enrichment of the rich’ further determines ‘the impoverishment of the poor’ (Sartre 2006 [1985]: 171). Here we grasp a fundamental aspect of the practico-inert: as men and women dictate their ends to it, so it also dictates its ends to them, ends which do not escape

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history but comprise those of earlier men and women. The Revolution is chiefly the product of the industrial working classes. But these are small: if Russia is to transform itself into an industrial power, it must recruit massively from the peasantry for the industrial proletariat. But the peasants have bodies profoundly habituated and fitted to one kind of task and not another. They cannot be easily transformed into factory workers. The result is the peasant resistances in the 1920s and the grain strike of 1932–3, which itself opens the doors to the horrors of Stalinist repression. But the practico-inert also lurks in forms of organization, in institutions, discourses, languages, concepts. For historical reasons, not least the hostility of its enemies in 1917, Russia has at once to give up any serious commitment to the idea of international socialism. This quickly returns it to an investment in the practico-inert structures of tsarist nationalism, which conditions the whole of subsequent Soviet history. Because the practico-inert can only be nullified in acts of abrupt and comprehensive destruction – hence the centrality of the fall of the Bastille – it is a seemingly infinite source of historical irony. The practico-inert will doggedly resist the finality of any project envisioned by free praxis in a movement of what Sartre calls counter-finality. Counter-finality is that within the historical project which the historical project cannot see, because it has always already entered into composition with the practico-inert. Thus the peasants of Szechwan civilize the land through deforestation and cultivation, only to find that they have helped create appalling floods. The counter-final logic at stake here is that involved in global warming: in Sartrean terms, the West would by now be wagering on a serial management of the counter-finality of climate change that is necessarily doomed to its own special and unique form of failure, for serial management is itself a modality of the practico-inert. But the great instance of the logic of counter-finality comes from a prescient reactionary, the Algerian colonialist who tells Sartre, presumably some time before 1960, that ‘[w]e have committed too many unpardonable errors, too many acts of cruelty, and too many crimes ever to hope that [the Muslim world] can be reconciled to us, and love us; there is only one solution: terror’ (Sartre 2004 [1960]: 742). Sartre and the colonialist can hardly have foreseen what the historical purchase of their insight would turn out to be. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason offers an important introduction but also a complement to the conception of the intermittencies of history provided by the philosophers in this book. This complement resides in the extent to which Sartre thinks history as hysteresis. Hysteresis is the principle by which history lags behind, is pitted against

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itself, intricately regresses within its progressions. The thought of hysteresis makes impossible any historical totality. If indeed we are still pre-historical, in Marx’s sense, it may be in a paradoxical and very un-Marxian way, because we have yet to start thinking the implications of our profound captivity in hysteresis, and what it might tell us about the lack of any historical completion. Marxism doggedly avoided the law of inertia represented in hysteresis, preferring to think of forces organizing themselves in opposition to the work of transformation. But as Sartre underlines, as the common and practical form of resistance to change, the practico-inert everywhere insidiously returns. To fail to think both the practico-inert and its return is to fall into the hapless fantasy that everything is caught up in dialectics. But it is not: there is an anti-dialectical principle which is not positive but not negative either, falling outside dialectics and shattering any possibility of a dialectical totality. Dialectics and the anti-dialectical principle must be thought together. THE EXAMPLE OF ORWELL The most pertinent and coherent instances of the backlash of praxis upon itself come from Soviet history: the struggle to create the egalitarian utopia, for example, requires successful industrialization, which in turn requires the reintroduction of wage differentials so that proletarian heroes are appropriately rewarded, not least to encourage the others. The project steadily spins off its counter-finalities as a web that will finally threaten to ensnare it. Few understood this kind of logic more lucidly than Orwell. Orwell says he once told Arthur Koestler that ‘History stopped in 1936’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 234); what he also meant is that, in Catalonia, something other than history (in Jambet’s sense) began again in 1936, then stopped in May 1937. This is precisely what is at stake in the concept of intermittency: Spain undergoes a brief outbreak of historical reason; but reason is ignited only quickly to expire. Orwell the journalist saw within the failure of the revolutionary project the insidious persistence of the practico-inert. This is obvious in the key ninth chapter of Homage to Catalonia, when he recounts his return to Barcelona from the front. What he specifically says is that a ‘deep change’ has ‘come over the town’, not least, in that ‘the civil population had lost much of their interest in the war’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 107). Initially, he notices a ‘startling’ and dismaying ‘change in . . . aspect’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 106). The militia uniforms and ‘blue overalls’ have almost disappeared (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 106). Summer suits and sleek cars are much in evidence. The revolutionary forms of

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speech are dropping ‘out of use’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 111). The ‘disappointment of the revolutionary hopes’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 108) is intricately bound up with a kind of material reversion, a failure to transcend ‘worked matter’. So, too, Orwell recognizes counter-finality in the very structure of the ‘huge complicated warren’ of the old building in which the War department is housed, which he associates with his failure to save his arrested colleague Jorge Kopp (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 210). Orwell quite literally watches a world materially disappear. In ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, written later in 1937, he asserts melancholically that ‘[o]f all that the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year’ (Orwell 2004 [1968]: 270, italics mine). By solidity, being Orwell, he means just that. Of course, he also understands the defeat of the group-in-fusion quite otherwise. Most obviously, he knows that the defeat is the consequence of the Communist aggression against and eventual triumph over the Anarchists, P.O.U.M., etc. He sees that the Communists progressively reduce a revolutionary to an ‘ordinary, non-revolutionary war’ (Orwell 1981 [1938]: 69). He understands the complex logic whereby the practico-inert returns to dominate the drives to freedom and equality in organization, apparatus, systems, institutions. The ‘old division of society between rich and poor’ reappears. The army that emerges in the wake of the workers’ militias is ‘modelled . . . on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense differences of pay etc etc’ (Orwell 2004 [1968]: 272; cf. 285). This constitutes a slide back into an inertia of practice, and thus a return of a materiality that had seemed lapsed or superseded. Orwell conveys a vivid and immediate grasp of the processes of counter-finality as experienced in everyday life. What dies in all this, in the sheer uncanniness of historical reversion as it appears on the streets, is ‘enthusiasm’ (Orwell 2004 [1968]: 275). Sartre’s Critique is important because it supplies both a philosophical and a historicizing logic of intermittency. It is particularly remarkable for its account of the declension from the event, the ‘parasitic development of the practico-inert’ within the field of action (Sartre 2006 [1985]: 264). As we shall see, in this respect, Sartre arguably remains in advance of most if not all of those whom his thought of intermittency has most influenced. At the same time, however – and here it lags behind most of them – the Critique contains no theory of emergence. For the Sartre of the Critique, events occur, according to a commonplace Marxist logic, because specific social and historical circumstances give rise to them. He has nothing more to say on the matter. His

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thought of intermittency is also restricted insofar as he develops it only in relation to the political sphere. Pointedly, there is no aesthetics at all in the Critique, and no place for the aesthetic, where particular conceptions of the aesthetic domain are integral to Badiou, Rancière and Lardreau’s accounts of intermittency. Modern art repeatedly teaches us the lesson of intermittency, in complex ways; the occasions of modern art are themselves intermittent. But the Sartre of the Critique shows no interest in the possible relevance of art and aesthetics to its theme. For a formal theory of the occasion of the event itself we must turn to Badiou above all, and my first chapter is necessarily about him. For Badiou, the condition of the event is the void that underlies but persistently threatens to reappear within all structure, though it cannot appear as and in itself. Badiou supplies us with an altogether larger conception of where and how intermittency matters – of the domains in which the event takes place – than that supplied by the Critique. He also provides a certain way of thinking the relationship between art and politics which is absent from Sartre’s text. Sartre’s accounts of the later Stalin, for example, might now seem less creakily dated had he tried to factor a reading of Mandelstam into the equation, as Badiou does. Yet Sartre’s Critique will cast a long shadow over the philosophers in this book, not least Badiou himself. Sartre is a great exponent of a seemingly irremissible historical irony from a vantage point which does not capitulate to or slide smoothly into acquiescence with it. In the following pages, historical irony will sometimes appear to be a demon that philosophy labours painfully to hold at bay. By contrast, modern art, above all, literature, has been willing to contemplate the demon at length – think for instance of Joyce, supreme master of both historical irony and its treatment – which the disciplinary exigencies of philosophy make it hard for it to do. History as hysteresis: modern literature has insistently absorbed it, then thrown it back at us, continues to throw it back at us as what appears to be an irreducibly difficult complication. In this respect, if the Sartre who thinks history as hysteresis does not grant us any corresponding aesthetics, that is partly what my own book may hope to do. NOTES 1. See Bensaïd (2001); Proust (1997e): 403. Bensaïd uses the word critically: Badiou, Rancière and Negri all separate events from ‘the movement of history’, leaving themselves caught between a discourse of mastery and a new populism. Badiou retorts – surely rightly – that Bensaïd’s position is ‘vieux-marxiste’ and his materialism mechanistic (PE: 146). 2. I am grateful to Andrew Bowie and Rasmus Ugilt for alerting me to other

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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possible Hegelian modes of (historical) thought. I have not pursued them here, above all, because the Hegel at stake in contemporary French philosophy is primarily Kojève’s. The quotation is from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, §46. For a different translation see Hegel (1977 [1807]): 27. The double inverted commas in the paragraph enclose terms that Kojève presents as Kant’s. Jambet has become seriously interested in an Islamic ‘beyond’ only quite recently. See Jambet (2008). Contrast the concept of it in Jambet (1983a): 113. To be exact, hadith means ‘that which is new’, like reports of statements or actions of Mohammed. In the terms of Naser-e Khosraw, this is wahid not wahdat, the multiplied one, not unity. See CA: 46. Jambet is clearly thinking of the Trois Glorieuses of the July Revolution of 1830, which were also known as ‘les journées’. I extrapolate the Cambridge Platonists from Jambet’s brief reference to them (1994): 103. See GR: 221–2, n271. Jambet’s hypothesis is that the manic-depressive structure ‘is transhistorical and escapes all psychological interpretation’. This study does not produce a theory or definition of melancholy as such. See rather Gibson (2003a; 2007a; 2011). I am grateful to Will Rowe for raising the issue with me. Though we should also note his admiration for the young Marx’s conception of religion. See LO: 261–3. The young Marx understands religion as an archetype of the imaginary world and a model for the reversal of or break with the historical real. Religion is more real than history. The older Marx turns that judgement round, seeing religion as a symptom of social conditions or material history. See Heidegger (1962 [1927]), for instance at 41 (including fn1). Jambet derives the opposition here from Corbin. See in particular Corbin’s dispute with Vladimir Ivanow, Jambet (1999a). For Jambet on Lacan, see for instance Jambet (2003): 38. The term is not Badiou’s but Peter Hallward’s. See Hallward (2003a): 43. According to Sartre (2004 [1960]): 262.

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1. The Logic of Intermittency: Alain Badiou

THE STRUCTURE OF INTERMITTENCY Alain Badiou is the most significant contemporary thinker of historical intermittency and the one to turn to in detail first. Badiou will allow us to grasp the meaning and structure of intermittency with unmatched power and clarity, if with certain lacunae. This is unsurprising: he is the major continental philosopher of the period.1 His thought is rooted in the conviction that, most of the time, the world knows neither truth, nor justice, nor good. This may seem to some like an unusual and even a perverse emphasis to begin with, as though one were deliberately looking at Badiou’s thought down the wrong end of a telescope. But one might also put the point the other way round: so stark is Badiou’s conviction that even his best commentators have usually had trouble quite recognizing it, or at least pursuing its full implications.2 Badiou’s stature in some degree derives from the intransigence with which he rethinks the world from the ground up on the basis of the absolute philosophical privilege of contingency.3 What matters is not the world as it is given us to think, already there before us, but the chance occurrences that break into that world and break it up, what Badiou calls events, and their consequences. To grant contingency a philosophical privilege, however, is not to assume that it has existential priority. Contingency is more thinkable than liveable or lived: this maxim may be very simple, but its common-sense force should be immediately recognizable, and we will come back to it later. It lies at the heart of Badiou’s understanding of intermittency and of this book. Badiou turns away from any time-honoured preoccupation with the one and the whole, above all, with Being as one and whole. Being is indefinitely multiple, a banal infinity. What matters to philosophy is not Being, but what arrives to supplement Being. Those things that are truly 24

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significant for thought appear only rarely, interrupting a prior state of things. They are subject to a law of intermittency. On this basis, modifying a usage of his own, and setting aside the possibility of confusing him with two great anti-philosophers (his term),4 we might characterize Badiou’s philosophy as ‘archi-ethical’. For Badiou, Nietzschean philosophy aims to finish with a tradition within which always lurked ‘the terrestrial power of the priest’, in the interests of a ‘pure affirmation’, and is therefore ‘archi-political’. Wittgenstein attempts to finish with a philosophy that interminably confused concerns tractable to thought with those intractable, separating ‘scientific or propositional activity’ from what lies beyond it, ‘for which the real paradigm is art’, and is therefore ‘archi-aesthetic’ (AW: 15–24). Badiou himself seeks to call an end to an era that has announced the ‘death of philosophy’, to a degree that (he claims) leaves him in a position akin to that of the pre-Socratics.5 The conclusion he arrives at, however, involves a certain kind of philosophical modesty and a diminished philosophical project, even, according to Gillespie, a minimalist one.6 For we can save philosophy only if we perform ‘the transcendental separation of philosophy from its conditions’ (SM: 81). But the ‘conditions’ of philosophy are truths, and the ‘separation’ of philosophy from them also deprives it of any immediate access to (a) truth (of its own). Philosophy no longer knows what is true, but declares truths and lays them bare, cultivates and arranges them, demonstrates their ‘compossibility’ (MP: 69). The first and most pressing task of philosophy is therefore a work of distinguishing the good. Thus, if Badiou treats the current fashionability of the idea of ‘ethics’ with great suspicion and often derisively,7 one might also claim that he drastically ups the stakes for ethics. Philosophical thought becomes inseparable from valuation, from an archi-ethical decision that everywhere comes first. One might object, here, that this is a function of the mathematical ground of Badiou’s thought, the crucial importance within it of axioms. But axioms and their functions as expressed in language are not of exactly the same order as those in mathematics. Take for instance Badiou’s recent ‘materialist axiom’: ‘There are only bodies and languages, if there are no truths’ (LM: 12; PE: 145; SM: 31, 35). This is an apodictic declaration, cannot be thought otherwise than as involving a decision or valuation, and thus summons up the ethical domain. It is a statement of principle (a word Badiou has recently begun to use almost interchangeably with ‘axiom’).8 If, for Badiou, his thought has specific ‘orientations’, these involve philosophical choices and are not conclusions to arguments (SM: 71). There are things that matter, and things that do not, and the two must be set apart. The whole of Badiou’s

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recent Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009) is predicated on a separation of ‘appearances of import’ [‘l’apparaître qui nous importe’] from those that have none, notably the great world of doxa (SM: 16). Intermittently, the possibility of value interrupts a world without value. Philosophy will pose the question of value to any given epoch: ‘What are the things in it that have value? What are the things in it that have no value?’ (PE: 148). The separation of value from non-value defines Badiou’s project in its largest scope as an archi-ethics of intermittency. Certainly, for Badiou, there is no ethics ‘in general’ and no abstract subject. His archi-ethics rather involves a recognition that there is a generality of ethics, in that there is ‘a particular kind of animal convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject’ (ES: 40; cf. PE: 34). Value interrupts non-value – occasionally. In Badiou’s terms, it does so as truth: ‘the category of truth’, he writes, ‘is the central category of all possible philosophy, whether under another name or not’ (CS: 62). But truths are specific and intermittent, and there is no truth in general. There are four principal domains in which truths appear: art, love, science and politics. The question of how exactly a truth-domain is defined, in all its complexity, whether or not all the specific definitions work, whether Badiou’s examples are persuasive, all these are open to practically endless dispute, contradiction, elaboration. What is crucial is the thesis on which they implicitly depend, which is the thesis of intermittency and expressible succinctly: here and there, truths appear. A truth ‘can only originate in an event’ (SM: 95), the event being a sudden arrival of newness that is supernumerary to an existing situation. This does not mean that truths are aboriginal creations. Events happen because the void exists, but Badiou has never been a proselytizer for newness ex nihilo, asserting that events are always particular to particular, already existing sites, always compose with these sites or ‘mobilize’ their elements (SA: 25).9 In a seeming paradox, however, he also asserts that, if truths are always sporadic and local, they are universal, too. He does not mean this, however, as Aristotle means it. Badiou’s ‘universality’ is that of a truth valid for and available to all, and is therefore projective and proleptic. But universality is a function of historical intermittency and can never be other than putative. For truths are invariably contingent: Heidegger equated truth with Being, but that equation ‘must be abandoned’ (EE: 391). Truths do not have being, but come into being. This means that ‘ “temporal discontinuity” is the “mode of being” of truths’ (MP: 13, italics mine). They and their trajectories are always aleatory, are not guaranteed to last, and have no allotted or predetermined lifespan and no foreordained conclusion.

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This is in effect a historical proposition. For Badiou, truths have histories, inaugurate what he thinks of as history, and are interruptions of what is more commonly called history. Badiou’s understanding of the structure of intermittency is integral to his ontology, supremely as articulated in L’Être et l’événement (1988). I have described this aspect of it already, in my book Beckett and Badiou (2006). Here I shall briskly summarize that account, working again through the sequence of its key terms, but also repositioning certain of its features. Subsequently, however, I shall move on to the different version of the same thesis that emerges via the logic that Badiou devises to complement his ontology, chiefly as articulated in Logiques des mondes (2006). For Badiou inflects certain of his key concerns differently according to whether his theme is ontology or logic. Certain concepts take on a more precise form in his logic, and indeed undergo ‘very important modifications’ (LM: 49). From there I shall move on to the question of the remainder, seeking as I did in earlier work to build a concept of a remainder into the structure of Badiou’s thought.10 This would be a radical and necessary supplement to it, addressing the most formidable and significant critique of his philosophy, Agamben’s.11 The critique has to do with Badiou’s exceptionalism. It raises a fundamental question: how, on the basis of intermittency, does one think justice – how does one commit oneself to the thought of the possibility of a better world – save through a more or less militant exceptionalism which finally threatens the very world it hopes to save? Badiou’s archiethics of intermittency is unrepentantly exceptionalist. His concept of the intermittency of truths is an assertion of the value of the exceptions in which the philosopher’s true investments lie. Agamben problematizes this assertion in the name of ‘bare life’. This chapter will both pursue Agamben’s line of questioning and seek to draw a limit to it, finally addressing both Badiou and Agamben by introducing Flaubert as example. But an account of the structure of intermittency must start from the void. In the beginning is the void, and an ontology is ‘constrained to propose a theory’ of, ‘in a certain sense . . . can only be a theory’ of it (EE: 70). The void ‘haunts presentation’: every presentation, every structure, every multiple has its void (EE: 110–11). Crucially, however, if ‘the void is at the heart of every situation’, we do not experience or intuit it, but know it because it is thinkable, and ‘by the purest rational means, those of mathematics’ (EE: 92). Here Badiou takes four crucial initial steps. Firstly, in the teeth of many philosophers, notably Wittgenstein, he maintains that mathematics is a form of thought. Secondly, he insists that Being is not one. Modern mathematics,

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particularly set theory, everywhere shows us that there is no such entity as One.12 There are only the void and multiples, multiples of multiples to infinity, multiples of infinity, infinities upon infinities, infinities of infinities . . . This is the condition of what philosophers from Aristotle onwards have conceived of as an actual infinity, and cannot be reduced to any ‘primordial or atomic unity’ (SM: 37). Thirdly, if there is no One, that disables all transcendent, theologically founded and ‘spiritualist’ conceptions of Being. If Nietzsche had not announced the death of God – an announcement which we should ‘take seriously’ (PE: 40) – modern mathematics would have killed God off.13 Fourthly, mathematics says all there is to be said about Being, above all via set theory, because set theory is a theory of the multiple that is incomparably sophisticated, and gives an account of actually existing, accessible infinities. But if the void is thinkable, it is not apprehensible as such. The purest form in which it is available to us is mathematical, as ෘ, the empty set. ෘ is the proper name of Being. It declares the absolute priority of the negative: the void is all there is. But the symbol also acknowledges that to think the void at all is to enter into a symbolic order that, in supervening upon the void in order to designate it, also cancels it. Hence the complex significance of the sign for the empty set is zero ‘affecté de la barre du sens’, as Badiou refers to it (EE: 82). On the one hand, under the ‘bar’, the void is everywhere; on the other, ‘affecté’ not only means ‘affected by’ but also has a mathematical sense: ‘modified in being marked with a sign’. The ‘bar’ is the line across zero, but also indicates that ours is a world of meaning in which we are ‘barred’ from immediate (and unmediated) access to the void. This symbol, ෘ, is the sign of the very condition that determines intermittency. The empty set is the building block of infinite multiplicity, but infinite multiplicity is no more immediately accessible than the void. We know it only in and as particular situations which are available to description in a logic. But we can also think it in the context of Being rather than that of appearance (as Badiou did before Logiques des mondes), which means noting Badiou’s concept of structure. The multiplicity of Being is not graspable as a unity or totality, and is not available to us as such. Being is an inconsistent multiplicity. Philosophy has fantasized a thought or experience of Being ‘beyond all structure’ (EE: 34). In fact, there isn’t one. We can think Being only in and as a structure. Ontology, then, is a structured presentation of unstructured multiplicity. For Badiou, this is paradigmatically the case with number. Mathematics always works ‘to separate the unseparated’ (CT: 43), thus giving a structure to Being. The mathematical Idea makes Being consist-

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ent (EE: 143). Ontology cannot present inconsistency as such. Being has always already entered the realm of consistency. Here we draw close to the very mainspring of intermittency, for it is incontrovertibly the case that there is a fault-line in Being. We know this experientially, but it is also logical. Actual infinity is founded on the void. If there is always structure, the void is also always everywhere, definitively in excess of the consistency of any given situation (EE: 100). Certainly, the void is everywhere ‘under a bar’ but, since presentations harbour the void within them, they must also be at risk from it. The possibility of a breakdown in consistency and an ‘irruption of inconsistency’ always exists. The flaw in Being may always give rise to the ‘explosive’ arrival of an event (‘avènement événementiel’, EE: 90). As for the event itself, it does not ‘come from elsewhere’ and has no ‘depth’ (CT: 23), nor any transcendental dimension: in his account of St Paul, Badiou categorically refuses the Damascene conversion the status of either a coup de foudre, a revelation or moment of ‘illumination’ (SI: 16).14 An event is material insofar as it ‘is nothing other than the possibility of the aleatory in the structure of the world’ (PE: 145), arising as the inconsistency of Being fractures the consistencies of presentation (MP: 89), and thereby making ‘an invisible or unthinkable possibility appear’ (PE: 19). It functions as a radical supplement to ‘the indifferent multiplicity of Being’ (CS: 177), is additional to everything we are used to counting, ‘to everything of which it is said, “that counts” ’ (Badiou 1992a: 113). The event means that what counted before may no longer count at all, and the previously uncounted now altogether counts. It is in this respect that the event arrives to break with a prior history, to set it at naught. The possibility of the event as an occasional or intermittent historical rupture with a given world lies at the heart of Badiou’s concept of historical reason. So the void, the event, and truth: to these Badiou adds a fourth cornerstone to his thought, which is the subject. Truths in their intermittency are products of the ‘pure hazard of the world’ (Badiou 1994a: 38). But they are not entirely at its mercy. That is because whether a truth persists or suffers an eclipse depends upon its subjects. Truths depend for their survival on the commitment of the subjects who are faithful to, develop, elaborate and continue to declare or bear witness to them. Here, once again, Badiou rewrites a modern intellectual scenario attributable to Nietzsche: perspectivism. Certainly, truth is a ‘subjective’ affair, but this is not to announce a fatal lesion in the concept of truth. It is rather to underwrite the cardinal significance of the subject and his or her responsibility. The subject is not a generality, but exists or, better, comes to exist only in relation to truths, emerging

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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. Subjects do not have to exist. Most of the time, there are no subjects; the subject is intermittent, ‘rare’ (EE: 429). Subjects are ‘seized’ by or caught up in events (EE: 444), but becoming a subject also involves a decision. The event radically subtracts the subject from the world of doxa or established knowledge. In doing so, it burdens the subject with the ‘anguish’ of the void (EE: 110), which in turn makes it necessary for the subject to wager on the event itself. Nothing underwrites this wager or proves it right; hence again ‘the hazardous historicity of truth’ (EE: 445). The subject arrives at a decision of whose truth or falsity nothing will immediately assure it, on the assumption that its truth will finally be discerned. In that respect, truths exist in the tense of the future anterior, as that which will have been achieved. Subjects are not merely born of events, but intervene on their behalf, and intervention involves difficult, sometimes ‘almost impossible’ labour (EE: 257). This means that it requires fidelity. Fidelity is the necessary line of subjective insistence in a world in which truths are intermittent, and do not insist of themselves. I shall show how a truth progresses by referring to love. This is not by way of analogy. Contemporary readers have largely taken Badiou’s thought to be at root political, or deemed politics to be its ‘most common reference’, in Pluth’s phrase.15 But Badiou very firmly asserts that we should not ‘suture’ his thought to politics, nor privilege the truth of politics over other truths.16 He has always maintained that politics has a prior claim only in the political domain, and has no preeminent status in his theoretical enterprise as a whole. Politics is not and cannot be paradigmatic ‘where the event-based becoming [le devenir événementiel] of truths’ and ‘the subjective forms that accompany them’ are concerned, writes Badiou, pointedly citing love as another example (SM: 113). So, too, the truths of art, love and science are not mere metaphors or ‘stand-ins’ for the central truth of politics, and each might as well be elevated to the status of supposedly central domain. Truths of all kinds have histories, and are subject to the condition of historical intermittency. This book proceeds on the assumption that the concept of intermittency as historical reason is relevant to various and possibly quite numerous domains, if in differently nuanced forms, even if it cannot often find space to expand on it. By fidelity in love, Badiou means fidelity to the hole love makes in the world. Fidelity is a modality of ‘the discipline imposed on desire by love’ (PE: 60) involving passing from a ‘chance encounter’ to ‘a construction as solid as if it had been necessary’ (EA: 43). This is the

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case, not because desire is unruly, anarchic or immoral, but because its ‘objects’ are ‘always’ partial, and it can therefore not confer on the subject the integrity of a truth-procedure (PE: 65). Fidelity is the ‘tenacious’ assumption of the consequences of finding oneself ‘interior to a truth-procedure’ and ‘decentred’ by it. Here a truth-procedure imposes a norm on ‘my primordial narcissism’, my ‘irreducible singularity’, and thereby possesses a ‘finality’ categorically ‘distinct’ from that of the Spinozan conatus essendi (PE: 60–1, 63).17 At this point we might pause, because the conatus as defined above all in the sixth proposition in the third book of Spinoza’s Ethics – ‘Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours [conatur] to persevere in its being’ (Spinoza 2000 [1677]: 171) – is one of the great anathemata of the philosophers of intermittency. Persistence in self-assertion is intrinsic to the conatus. For Spinoza, it is ‘the first and unique basis of virtue’, which means that no virtue can be conceived of as prior to it (Spinoza 2000 [1677]: 230). But the concept of the conatus is predicated on an assumption of self-sameness, and this the concept of intermittency repudiates. For Badiou, truths run counter to ‘interest’ or self-insistence, as a kind of ‘excess’ to the self that is also in excess of Being (PE: 65–6). Indeed, if there were a paradigmatic truth, it would be love, because the subject in love so obviously passes from self-interest to a condition immediately ‘beyond’ it. A love affair involves a truth-procedure. An event in itself is ‘almost nothing’, ‘not an experience . . . totally opaque’ (PE: 54; EA: 28). Thus ‘everything depends’ on how the possibility it opens up ‘is grasped, worked on, incorporated, deployed in the world’ (PE: 19). A truthprocedure unfolds in ‘sequential time’ (PE: 20), instituting a historical temporality that marks it out from the world before it and is ‘identifiable whatever the historical context’ (LM: 37). The truth of love has a specific temporality repeatedly captured in the theatre and opera (Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde). On the one hand, there is the sheer lightness of the ‘contingency of the encounter itself’, love as a participation in ‘the birth of the world’, on the other, the often extensive and complicated ramifications of its consequences for the two involved (PE: 54; EA: 29). The ‘ecstasy of beginnings’ is comparatively insignificant (EA: 34). What most matters is ‘the immanence of a construction’, a ‘creative’ work which builds a singular ‘duration’, incorporating historicity and contingency into love, where unitary concepts of it as romantic fusion and deterministic concepts of it as fatality (like the Proustian insistence on essential jealousy) resist contingency. As they produce a world existing for and as the two of them, the lovers ‘capture’ a series of ‘elements of ordinary life’ and transform

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them in the light of the event of their meeting, ‘re-inventing’ their lives in the process (PE: 55–6; EA: 34, 36). They thus elaborate their love as ‘a singular experience . . . unique, radical, intense, vital’. Certainly, there are threats to love, not least from within love itself, sometimes violent ones. It may cause sufferings by no means negligible, and end in betrayal. Nonetheless, what remains crucial is the experience of a world ‘suspended, for each, on the couple, on the fact of being a couple’, ‘la scène du Deux’ (PE: 56, 60). In this, Badiou follows Plato: there is a ‘seed of the universal’, the possibility of passing from ‘the pure singularity of chance’ to ‘a universal value’, in every love affair (EA: 22). Indeed, love is the one truth-sequence that ‘all humanity’ at least recognizes, the proof that people love truth, even if they do not know it (EA: 40). In the end, however, if historical reason cannot escape the intermittency of truths as determined by the fault-line in Being, that is most obviously demonstrable in the case of political history.18 For Badiou, politics is by definition emancipatory, since it involves the explosion of presentations on the basis of the void they secrete. It therefore stops its ears to ‘the voice of the time’ (PU: 96), and subtracts thought and action from the dominant (State-sponsored) forms of what passes for subjectivity. Politics begins with events and consists of truth-procedures. It bears no relation to any objective world, and cannot be conceived of in terms of an objective logic of cause and effect. Politics breaks with established doxa, 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. The break with ‘business as usual’ is the foundation of historical reason, but there is no Hegelian ‘Reason in history’ (DO: 33). Indeed, historical reason always involves the ‘occurrence of a hypothesis’ (PU: 18), and events of historical reason are events of political inventiveness: Marx’s great invention, for example, was communism as a ‘strategic hypothesis’, a hypothesis which its subjects then took as a normative principle (PU: 105). For Badiou, politics always requires inventiveness, and a dead or politically negligible world is defined by its lack. Politics exists as historical sequences, and the history of politics is a history of them. There are no transhistorical political categories: politics is always local and singular, occurring irregularly, from time to time, in different ways and different situations, in a world of intermittencies. Politics happens, and has always happened, as and in sequences. A sequence encompasses no whole and does not form part of one, both begins and ends, though the fact of its ending does not affect its status as a truth, since its ‘effects’ are properly ‘infinite’, and ‘persist’ (PU: 69). Badiou has given different accounts of the major modern political

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sequences, one example appearing in ‘Philosophie et politique’ (CS: 234–5): the Montagnard convention from 1792 to 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794); 1848–71 (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).19 There may be a certain ‘solidarity’ between some of the sequences (DO: 34); Marx learns from the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks from the Commune.20 But the essential point remains unchanged: no overarching narrative or logic binds political sequences together. Politics is always and irreducibly sporadic, occasional, fragile, rare, a ‘restricted action’ bearing no relation to any ‘massive history’ (AM: 118). Indeed, the sequences Badiou actually lists seem all the rarer, given their geo-cultural specificity. We might object that a more sophisticated model would present the historical constellation in spatial as well as temporal terms, since 1848–71 and 1905–17, for example, are hardly global markers of a political sequence (think of England). One can also question the rather narrowly Marxist base of Badiou’s understanding of emancipation, and squabble heretically over questions of inclusion – Parnell, Bakunin, Martin Luther King, for example, no doubt contra Badiou? We might also object, as have Hallward and Bosteels – though they would no more coincide with some of my instances than would Badiou – that he tends to slight the post-colonial world: what of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Gandhi, Guevara, Mandela? This is not, however, to diminish the assertion of rarity: indeed, the extreme vulnerability of truths once spatialized as well as temporalized within a larger geo-political scene becomes the more self-evident. Badiou’s concept of intermittency as historical reason is a function of a materialist thought, but here, again, he comprehensively and boldly redefines the very meaning of the term. Badiou argues for a materialism urged on us by modern science and (arrestingly) finally reconcilable with Platonism, though it also has its own classical precedents, notably Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius. It is an ‘aleatory materialism’ taking account of the existence of ‘an absolutely hazardous point’ which ‘cannot be foreseen, calculated, or reincorporated on the basis of the existing state of things’ (PE: 144). In an important sense, matter is not really there or, at least, not there where we think it is, and an adequate materialism must begin from that. In contrast to contemporary materialisms of the existent, of the ‘il y a [there is]’, his is a materialism of the inexistent, the ‘il y a ce qu’il n’y a pas’ (LM: 13), a materialism shorn of any determinism, notably historical determinism. Badiou is emphatically not a historical materialist in any familiar sense,21 but his

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work amounts to a historical materialism of a highly specific and innovative kind. Badiou thinks history, on a number of different levels and in various spheres, not in terms of any laws which regulate its progress, but from the vantage-point of the chances that arrive to interrupt it and set certain processes in motion. But these chances are not amenable to any scientific description. Badiou has long been critical of Marxist ‘science’. Indeed, that they are not apprehensible in ‘scientific’ terms is an exact demonstration of their major value. INEXISTENTS So far, we have conceived of intermittency only with reference to ontology. What happens if we shift from thinking of it ontologically to thinking of it ontically, that is, with reference to Being-there? This is an appropriate question, since, with Logiques des mondes, Badiou shifted his own principal focus from Being to appearance. He quotes Valéry’s ‘Au platane’: Tu penches, grand platane, et te proposes nu, Blanc comme un jeune Scythe. Mais ta candeur est prise et ton pied retenu Par la force du site. (Valéry 1942: 89; cf. SM: 38) You bend, great plane-tree, and propose yourself bare White like a young Scythian. But your candour is caught and your foot held fast By the force of your site.

It is possible to think the tree as a multiplicity, in ‘the pure form of its being’ (SM: 38). But that is not what it is for the poet lodged in a particular world. Valéry is not a Heideggerian poet, a custodian of Being, but one who inquires into the resources of appearance and exhibits the tree’s ‘being-there’, its ‘topological essence’ or ‘localization’ (SM: 39). This is a question of forms of relation, of what links the tree to but also differentiates it from the other elements of its world. Being exists as an infinite multiplicity, but is only accessible to us in appearances. As Badiou pithily expresses the point, a vase that falls can break in an indeterminate number of ways, but when it breaks, it breaks in one way alone (PE: 116). Whatever Valéry’s platane proposes, its ‘candour’ is always caught and its foot ‘held fast’. Being is always ‘localized’ in a particular world, according to a particular set of relations. Logic is a theory of the localization of Being, of ‘the difference of differences’ (SM: 17). The distinction between an ontology and a logic is clear in that between mathematics and physics. Mathematics

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is ontology; it tells us about Being. Physics always theorizes ‘particular worlds’ with their particular laws (PE: 115–16). Nothing states or confirms that physics is ever in command of a general theory or that it describes all possible worlds. It is circumscribed by ‘the empirical limits which are ours’ at a given time, and therefore always involves ‘localization’ (PE: 119). A logic is a formal theory of relations in their ‘consistent complexity’ (LM: 47). To say that a thing ‘appears’ in a world is to say that it is ‘ “constituted in a logic” ’ (SM: 41). Here we need to know what Badiou means by a world. A world is ‘ontologically closed’ (SM: 61). There is no procedure for assembling a world, still less for representing it. Worlds must be grasped theoretically and in one go. It seems therefore as though one might think of a ‘world’ as the object of a phenomenological epoché, an externality conceived of as a limited totality and immediately given to consciousness. One of Badiou’s key examples in Logiques des mondes is an autumnal evening scene in the country. But if Badiou calls his ‘method’ in formalizing its logic ‘phenomenological objectivity’ (LM: 136ff.), he neutralizes the ‘lived’ or ‘intentional’ dimension of the epoché. His descriptions are ‘without a subject’, properly only mathematically transmissible,22 as part of a phenomenology that is ‘calculated’ (LM: 48).23 Worlds are always contingent. Indeed, ‘the rationality of worlds imposes the contingency of their objective composition as readable in objects themselves’ (LM: 339). We may feel we intuitively know this, but what does it mean to think it? Here Badiou has recently introduced a new and helpful concept into his thought. Worlds and their objects are localizations of Being, existing in relation to an actual infinity. Badiou’s long-term and continuing allegiance to ‘the anti-humanist tradition of Althusser, Foucault and Lacan’ (SM: 54) has increasingly led him to suppose that, since objects are determined in relation to human subjects, the space of the relation itself seems to call for a median term between actual infinity and the world of objects, indicating an objectivity as yet undetermined, that is, without properties or predicates. This undetermined objectivity is the condition of the thing, das Ding, which is ‘the pre-objective base of objectivity’. The thing ‘is a pure multiplicity’, where an object is a multiplicity with an ‘identity-function’ (SM: 63). Thus two worlds composed of the same objects are the same, but two worlds composed of the same things can be ‘absolutely different’ (SM: 65). The object has an ‘ “existential intensity” ’ (SM: 68); the thing does not. Or, to put matters the other way round: the thing is the object deprived of appearance, of its locus or site, its world, and therefore haunted by its non-life or death. Describing it in terms of a temporal

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sequence is not altogether inappropriate: a thing ‘is not yet an object’ (SM: 57). Badiou asserts that, if Logiques des mondes seems so largely preoccupied with the question of objectivity, that is because the question of the exception that is the event, and the transformation it produces, depends on it (LM: 46). The real task of the book is a re-examination of ‘the question of change’, its ‘principal goal’ an understanding of it, and therefore of the event, its occasions and consequences (LM: 49, 103). If worlds are always contingent, that does not mean that words and objects are readily available to transformation.24 Indeed, the reverse: in a sense, the transformation of a world is strictly impossible from within it. Worlds are not absolutely static. But they are governed by their own modes of change. This partly involves distinguishing the transformation that takes place as the consequence of an event from its delusive lookalikes. The early Badiou had introduced distinctions into the concept of change only in introducing a concept of événementialité or ‘the event of the event’ (EE: 218). This denoted a principle of fundamental ontological instability which made the event possible. But Badiou did not formalize it, and appears to have relinquished it since. In Logiques des mondes, however, he presents a logical division between four types of change.25 These will be important to the ensuing discussion. The first is modification. Modifications form a network in which ‘the law of a world’ persists in its becoming (LM: 393). They are important, for they include the object ‘in the time of the world’, but they do not at all disrupt or call into question the organization of that world (LM: 379). The second type of change is a fact. A fact is a kind of low-level event that is barely perceptible, leaves no trace, is hardly distinguishable from a modification. Its ‘site’ does not exist with a ‘maximal intensity’ (LM: 393). Badiou cites the last Manifesto of a Paris Commune in the throes of final defeat. A weak singularity, by contrast, exists with maximal intensity but has no significant consequences; for example, the British demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003, which involved millions but did nothing to disturb the logical completeness of the world in which they took place. Modifications, facts and weak singularities are all categorically of a different order to an event, which is a strong singularity irreducible to the worldly context in which it appears and not thinkable in that context’s terms. Modification is the regulated appearance of variations in a world. Modifications are not discontinuities, but relations between already existing multiplicities. Such relations are integral to worlds: a world is the set of its modifications. Nonetheless, for the late as for the early

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Badiou, most worlds constitute only a form of ontological detritus, and modifications only shuffle the trash. It is worlds transformed that matter, intermittently, and transformation takes place only via exceptions to the laws of ontology and their logical consequences (LM: 380). If the later Badiou assumes a need to subtilize his theory of change, he also recognizes that the ontological characterization of the event itself must now be doubled by a logical one. He once thought ‘a purely ontological characterization of the event was possible’ (LM: 381). Others, however, corrected him.26 Admittedly, a logic can no more comprehensively identify or account for an ‘effective discontinuity’ in a world than an ontology can (LM: 225): Badiou’s late reformulation less transforms his fundamental positions than it nuances them differently. The nuances, however, are important, above all, in an increased attention to what Badiou now calls inexistents. For an ontology leaves little or no space for a concept of what the term ‘inexistent’ represents. In a logic, by contrast, that concept comes to seem important. Objects appear in worlds to a greater or lesser degree, exist in worlds with greater or lesser degrees of intensity or vividness. In effect, there is no emphatically demarcated line between thing and object; or rather, there both is and is not. For objects might be thought of as more or less ‘fading in the direction’ of the thing. Thus worlds contain an element of ‘minimal existential value’ (LM: 339), or an element that appears only in the least degree. Mathematics demonstrates this: the appearance of any multiplicity entails the nonappearance of one of its elements, like the square root of a negative real number.27 This is what Badiou means by an inexistent. Inexistents belong to worlds only in not belonging. The least degree is solely the mark of an absence. Here the object ‘is in the world, but its appearance in the world is the destruction of its identity. Thus the being-there of this being is that of an inexistent in its world’ (SM: 70). For Badiou, the obvious political example of this is the proletariat as Marx describes it under bourgeois capitalism, which has being, but no ‘political existence’ (PU: 122). It is the blindspot of a particular political world, does not appear in it. Strikingly, Badiou closely associates a theory of inexistents with Derrida. The earlier Badiou recoiled from Derridean deconstruction as a sophistry altogether too complicit with the world. More recently, however, he has paid tribute to ‘an authentic simplicity . . . an obstinate and unvarying intuition’ (PT: 118) that lies beneath the ‘astonishing, volatile fluidity’ of Derrida’s writing. Derrida is a loving custodian of the inexistent. His whole enterprise is engaged in ‘inscribing the inexistent’; but, since Derrida is far too subtle not to be aware that properly to

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inscribe the inexistent would merely be to assimilate it to its world, and thus destroy it, he rather ‘inscribes the impossibility of the inscription of the inexistent as the very form of its inscription’. Derrida’s labour is unendingly to inscribe within discourse the sense of a point ‘which escapes [their] imposition’, to localize their point de fuite. To localize that point is not to ‘seize’ it, which would be at once to lose or kill it. Indeed, even its localization is impossible, since ‘it is not in place in the place’ (‘Il est le hors lieu dans le lieu’, PT: 125–6). Deconstruction resists the enclosure and occultation of the point. Derrida is like a perversely kindly hunter who loves the sight of his prey escaping him (PT: 123–7). Here Badiou appears to have abruptly promoted Derrida to a status in his thought akin to Mallarmé’s: like Mallarmé, Derrida maintains a trust in and fidelity to ‘[ce qui] inexiste dans le monde’, that which ‘in-exists’ (LM: 340).28 In his exemplary scrupulousness, though not immediately a philosopher of the event or intermittency, Derrida serves as a ‘vigilant guardian’ of their grounds, in conscientiously preserving the thought of the inexistent, but as available to redemption only by means of an event (PT: 133). The theory of inexistence, of minimal appearance, is crucial to Badiou’s later theoretical apparatus. If worlds always include an element of ‘minimal existential value’ (LM: 339), an element that belongs to them only in not belonging, an object that is not distinguishable from a thing, then that element is the flaw in the glass. It ensures that worlds are contingent and that their contingency is always readable in them. In the terms of Badiou’s logic, the inexistent is the very guarantee of intermittency, what makes it possible for events to happen, for local disturbances of the relation between the multiples in a given world and what he calls the transcendental that regulates it, for what in effect is the foundering of a world. Badiou repeatedly cites the voice of the excluded people in the Internationale: ‘We are nothing, let us be everything’ (e.g. SM: 95). It is here that Badiou dissociates himself from Derrida, since Derrida’s ‘obstination diagonale’ (PT: 129), his obstinate attachment to a diagonal thought, means that the stark clarity of the either/or of the Internationale is alien to him. For Badiou, by contrast, the words sum up the relation between the inexistent, which is present only as the name of nothing, and the event which reverses a given situation. A site of an event appears as such if it converts the minimal value of an inexistent into its maximum and thereby arrives at its own maximal value. This conversion is ontologically precarious, a vanishing principle, consumes itself. But it gives rise to an ‘absolute existence’ (LM: 399), an altogether new disposition of appearance, a mutation of logic.

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The emergence of the inexistent into absolute existence is the subversion of appearance by the inconsistency of Being (though it always also produces a new inexistence). The ‘maximally true consequence’ of an event, then, is the coming into existence of an inexistent (LM: 398). Thus the Schoenberg-event, for example, has as its consequence the coming into existence of the inexistent of classical music, atonality. The ‘inaudible’ is now heard within the ‘audible’ (LM: 95). A logic therefore produces a theory of what Badiou has begun to call ‘mutation’,29 according to which ‘that which . . . did not exist previously and unanimously comes into existence to a maximal degree’ (SM: 18). Mutations happen to particular worlds: they do not exist outside the prescriptions of appearance; they are supplementary but local modifications of them. As Bosteels states (2009: passim), they are not miracles, as some have suggested.30 In mathematical terms, they can be thought with reference to the axiom of foundation in set theory. The event is ‘an ontological impossibility . . . the brusque raising of an axiomatic prohibition through which the impossible becomes possible’ (LM: 413). The ‘prohibition’ is expressed in the axiom, which declares that no set can be self-founding. But the event is characterized by its ‘reflexivity’: ‘the site [of the event] belongs to itself, at least fugitively’ (SM: 94). It ‘convokes its own being in its appearance’ (LM: 383). This may seem to be a somewhat cryptic concept: Badiou gives, as one example, 18 March 1871, which marks the beginning of the organization of the Paris Commune. Here an event reinvests the mundane date with a demand for a new political appearance. Thus the date is singular as 18 March 1872 (or 1319 or 1997) is not. The network of relations that constitutes the appearance of a world has become brusquely selfevaluative (SM: 94). ‘What comes to the surface [in such a procedure]’, writes Badiou, ‘deplacing or revoking the logic of the place, is being itself in its redoubtable and creative inconsistency, or its void, which is the non-place of every place’ (CT: 200). Logic requires a rather different thought of truths. The later Badiou effectively defines a truth as the formation that appears in the passage of an inexistent into existence.31 It is the trace of an event as ‘the raising up of an inexistent’ (SM: 130). Truths are no longer the rather abstract entities that Badiou formerly called ‘generic multiplicities’. They are constituted in (always contingent) logics, tied to worlds, and hence real bodies involving relations. We should note, however, that the fact that Badiou conceives of the elements in truth-procedures as connected to real bodies does not make his later conception of them more humanistic. Indeed, he claims (again) to share Foucault and Lacan’s anti- and post-humanism precisely insofar as he rejects an anthropocentric

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definition of appearance. Truths have nothing to do with ‘the limits of the human species’, with finitude, consciousness or the supposed faculties. They are rather experiences ‘of the inhuman’, ‘trans-specific procedures’ that are transferable from one world to another, or ‘immortal’ (LM: 80).32 We shall shortly see the consequences of this argument for Badiou’s theory of the subject. The progress involved in a truth-procedure takes on a slightly different complexion in the later Badiou. The concept of the ‘point’ is now crucial. One does not grasp a truth, nor does it ‘seize’ one. Truths are constructed, on the basis of that opening up to the void that is an event. An event spells a discontinuity in or break with appearance. A power appears which, from the vantage-point of the norms of appearance, did not exist prior to the event. Henceforth all the elements of a world are subjected to a new evaluation. This evaluation proceeds ‘point by point’ (LM: 49). The history of atonal music, for example, is one of successive combats, the successive treatment of problems or obstacles. These are its points. Thus (my example) Schoenberg originally devises the twelve-tone technique to solve a practical problem of composition: how to escape the ‘somnambulistic sense of security’ produced by ‘fundamental harmony’ as ‘theoretically regulated through recognition of the effects of root progressions’ (Schoenberg 1975 [1941]: 218). Berg seeks to address a ‘problem of opera’ beyond Schoenberg, hence Wozzeck (Berg 2004 [1928]); and so on. If the faithful subject treats a worldly situation point by point, however, this is not just a matter of problem-solving. A point reduces a complex of nuances to a binary, an existential density, in the face of both ‘the thickness of being’ and the ‘unwonted transparency’ of the void (LM: 426). Here the relation between an ontology of infinite multiplicity and a logic of the specificity of worlds becomes most acutely evident. A point emerges in the form of an alternative, a transcendental test for the appearance of a truth. Complexity is banal, the usual way of things. By contrast, an alternative is a crystallization of the infinite in a figure; it ‘filters’ the infinite (LM: 425). At a point, one says yes or no to a network of identities and differences. The commonplace world of ordinary life is without points. Points arise in exceptional situations in which subjects are charting unprecedented paths and in which each step must be deliberate, for each is an invention in the face of the void. At a point, the infinite can manifest itself as a Kierkegaardian either/ or, because the choice is between truth and disaster. Sartre’s theatre repeatedly shows us how this works. It is thus that the progress of a truth becomes a strictly infinite negotiation. We return to the question of decisions. But decisions are not merely subjective choices. Their

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condition is not psychological or anthropological. They ‘conjoin’ subject and object (LM: 421); or rather, they blur the separation of the subject (I must decide, ‘it all depends on me’) and the object (there is, objectively, a good and bad choice, LM: 423). In doing so, decisions produce a ‘topological space’: Badiou’s literal and material example of such a space is the city of Brasilia, which makes one feel as though ‘a new world’ had been born, appears ‘as if it had always been in place’, and completes both a topological space and a truth-procedure, together (LM: 436). The later Badiou also shifts his conception of the subject, increasingly describing the process of subjectification as the becoming of a body, ‘incorporation’, the relation between the individual and what he calls a ‘new body’ that emerges in the wake of an event (SM: 20).33 It would be mistaken to suppose that truths confer ‘new bodies’ on their subjects. They are themselves ‘bodies of truth’ (‘corps de vérité’, PE: 73). Here Badiou’s Platonic understanding of materialism comes into play again. Life and the Idea become properly ‘indiscernible’, indistinguishable from one another (SM: 21). The artistic subject now appears as neither producer nor recipient but a ‘system of works’; atonal music, again, for example (PE: 84). So, too, the ‘body’ of a truth of love is not the individual body, still less some magically unitary body of a new ‘two in one’. The subject of the truth of love is ‘not one’ at all, but two; ‘a two’, however, that ‘cannot be reduced to the pure and simple addition or aggregate of two individuals’ (PE: 72). For the elements that compose the truth of a love, from time to passions and tastes to experiences and friendships, are redefined in relation to the emergence and development of a love. These things cannot remain what they were to the two solitary individuals before the event of love. They are ‘reevaluated’ from the point of view of the event. For its part, fidelity is now a question of daring to think or insisting on thinking each element of the site from the vantage-point of the event that has arrived to transform it. The later Badiou distinguishes ‘faithful’ from ‘reactive’ or ‘obscure’ subjectifications of ‘bodies’. The faithful subject remains an enthusiast for the new and its intimacy with the void, as for example in the case of the Russian revolutionary in 1917 and immediately thereafter. This subject cedes itself and its ‘concept’ to the new ‘situation’. The ‘reactive’ and ‘obscure’ subjects prefer themselves to the situation (LM: 24). The ‘reactive’ subject is indifferent to or sceptical about the event: his or her maxim is: ‘nothing really happened’; the illusion of novelty necessarily cedes to the ‘tranquil power’ of ‘conservation’ (SM: 106). Thus (my example) with those who, according to Coleridge,

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Intermittency in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes. (Coleridge 1956–71: 1.527)

The obscure subject rather aims at the destruction of the newness of a given truth, whether by ferociously attacking it (the Nazi internment of Communists), usurping its terms (National Socialism) or supplanting it with a surrogate ‘truth’, one that begins, not with the void, but a putatively original plenitude, ‘a Race [as in the case of Aryanism], a Culture, a Nation or a God’ (SM: 110). Insofar as this ‘truth’ assumes absolute authority, a ‘total power’, it defines the meaning of evil (ES: 71). Badiou’s recent refinement of his theory of the subject is particularly compelling in one respect: he does not merely separate out and oppose modern and reactionary forms of subjectivity. All are ‘new figures’ (SM: 106) determined by modernity, often violently. After the onset of modernity, the ‘reactive’ subject is not merely conservative. He or she cannot avoid ‘the existence of a new body’, and therefore has to invent ‘new conservative practices’ (SM: 109). So, too, Christianity after the Enlightenment is a new Christianity, one marked by the very historicity that its insistence on eternal truth ought logically to debar. The event of the new requires that the ‘reactive’ subject not merely resuscitate but renew old forms. Both conservatism and Christianity reappear on the basis of and in response to a challenge, but as simulacra; hence the hysteria of incessant repetition, the endless announcements, for example, of the death of Communism, the pathetic hollowness of the latest triumphalisms;34 hence also the extent to which contemporary triumphalisms are patently haunted by insecurity if not despair. Both modern anti-modernity and modern resistance to modernity are forms of modernity, but now condemned to secondarity. Modernity has an epistemological priority over both. But Badiou’s revised theory of the subject(s) can also be problematic. At the end of the second chapter, for example, in the figure of Wordsworth, I shall consider a poet who arguably moves through all three phases of subjectification. Nonetheless, one would hardly think of the old patriot and establishment figure as evil. Nor would Badiou, great lover of Wagner (see Badiou 2010a). All the same, it is not clear that Badiou’s categories help with the distinction. So, too, as we shall see later, Badiou thinks of Jambet and Lardreau as ‘honest renegades’ (2008a: 128), which appears to turn them into ‘reactive’ or lapsed subjects. But Jambet and Lardreau do not exactly express an indifference to political truth-sequences. They rather offer a cautionary tale, set

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themselves at a (non-indifferent) distance from politics that is necessary for a certain kind of meditation to take place. Badiou has no positive categories for such positions. There has always been an eschatological tinge to his philosophical imaginary, a will to separate sheep from goats, but it has become more pronounced in his latest work. It will have an important bearing when we proceed to Flaubert. The later Badiou asserts that his ‘doctrine of truths’ specifically avails itself of a ‘materialist dialectic’ (SM: 75) which reinvents dialectics around ‘the necessity of structures’ and ‘the contingency of events’ (SM: 10). As the reference to contingency offset against necessity suggests, Badiou’s shift from ontology to logic by no means spells a shift away from a thought of intermittency. The emphasis on the rarity of events and truths is as pronounced in his later as in his earlier work. Indeed, Badiou copper-bottoms it, grants it added density, sophistication and complexity. The larger part of Logiques des mondes reads like a selfimposed discipline, a rigorous investigation of the condition of worlds that finally do not vitally involve the philosopher’s highest interests. This is even mimetically displaced onto the book’s proportions, in that the theory central to it, that of change, actually occupies only a rather limited space. The platane is indeed held fast. For all the contingency of worlds, the relation between Being and appearance is customarily one of lockdown. In most worlds, that which is of value is their inexistent, the element in them that exists most minimally. Badiou is uncompromising about this: of all the elements that go to make up most worlds, it is the inexistent alone that truly matters. So, too, only one kind of subject and one mode of change matter. To trust to the others is to commit a category error, and indeed one of the principal purposes of Logiques des mondes seems to be to extricate us from such confusions. This returns us to the point at which this chapter began, the logic of an archi-ethics of intermittency that hinges on a Platonic derogation of the ordinary or the pedestrian. We will see something later of the question Rancière raises for this philosophical attitude. I shall go on to raise it myself, but in rather different terms. CUSTOS, QUID NOCTIS? Badiou’s thought is an extremely clear, coherent, and in some respects compelling theory of the essential heterogeneity of historical time at a number of different levels. Great rifts and tears appear in any narrated, serial or consecutive history, grand or small, public or subjective, indicative of the fact that history is unanchored. No origin or telos determines or will ever determine the unfolding of history. No first

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cause, end or purpose dictates to it. No concatenations, dialectical or other, relentlessly chain its separate instances to one another. No grand rivets bolt history together. What underlies history is the void. That does not mean that history is either meaningless or chaotic. So far as we know, history is rather a sporadically but repeatedly interrupted platitude. Self-evidently, the void can never either vanish or prevail. Here and there, it insists; it punctuates history. But since the void itself cannot appear as such, it punctuates history in and as events, events which have consequences. These are events of historical reason and good: justice, equality, love, beauty, invention. They spring from the void because it sets all precedent at naught, and with it a world in which the good has never prevailed, other than very fleetingly. Historical reason is not, as Hegel thought, the substance of history, a regulative totality. How could it possibly seem so to us now? Modern historical experience has definitively put paid to this idea. Where, for Kojève’s Hegel, there is a progressive hierarchy of worlds, for Badiou’s axiomatic and egalitarian thought, there is no progressive ‘saturation’ of multiplicity (LM: 155). For Kojève’s Hegel, the three-part dialectical whole has a fourth part, the Whole itself, which is the totality of Reason and beyond dialectical construction. For Badiou, for whom there is no Whole, the three parts (Being, worlds, truths) are complemented only by the event, ‘un éclair aboli’, a shaft of light that is abruptly radiant and then as suddenly wanes, as fourth term (LM: 156). Historical reason no longer constitutes itself within history, but as a difference with it, insofar as reason in itself brusquely declares or demonstrates the absence of any historical foundation. This is our truly modern knowledge of history, though examples of it are by no means exclusively modern. However, this description raises two peculiarly stark and closely related questions: that of the ‘other history’ or the remainder, and that of the exception. There is one immediate difficulty with ascribing the position just outlined to Badiou himself: the concept of history in that position is not Badiou’s; he does not use the word in the same way. Badiou’s conception of history is far closer to a certain Marxist one, according to which history proper emerges from ‘pre-history’ with Communism and revolution, when duration becomes charged with significance. Badiou assumes that political sequences appear only very fitfully. But my main point here is that for Badiou the dates in question are not just historical dates among others. They are dates which define history itself. Political truths in their trajectory produce a present, or ‘ “a historical mode of politics” ’ (LM: 81).35 Otherwise, what we slackly refer to as history is merely inert time, time in which

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‘ “a present is lacking” ’ (‘ “[u]n présent fait défaut” ’, in Mallarmé’s phrase), when the world is ‘captive to the idea that nothing begins or is going to begin’ (CO: 23; LS: 197).36 History begins in and as events. These are not exclusively political: a love affair, for example, institutes and constructs its own duration. Truth-sequences alone are historical. In the order of truth, writes Badiou, emphatically, the two months of the Paris Commune are worth more than the seventy years of the Third Republic. The event of the Commune founds a historical duration, whilst 4 September 1870, the date of the foundation of the Third Republic, indicates only a ‘weak singularity’, and is therefore not properly a historical date at all (LM: 395–6). An event is never co-extensive with the becoming of a world. It is a pure cut in that becoming, an interruption of the logical laws of appearance that is also an interruption of the laws of Being, an atemporal instant which separates a past from a future and extracts a time from another (indifferent) one. This is what constitutes history. Setting out ‘from certain truth-procedures’, history constitutes itself as ‘a readable succession of fragments of eternity’, and nothing more – or less (LM: 532). Thus, though there could scarcely be a philosopher better fitted to this book than Badiou, he also fits into it only awkwardly. For he spares little or no thought for what most of us call history. This ‘other history’, outside events and the vectors of truths, is unworthy of thought other than mathematically, polemically or as a topic for ‘bavardage’, chatter (AW: 23). It has the status for Badiou that nonsense has for Wittgenstein, and the severity with which he treats it is as peremptory as Wittgenstein’s. Badiou may bracket this ‘other history’ off or slight it, as he tended to do in the eighties and nineties. He may anathematize it, as he has notably and increasingly done with the culture of the contemporary democracies, particularly in the Circonstances series. Either way, he is clear-eyed about the fact that the world will mostly prevail. The ‘other history’ is therefore a morass through which one cannot but wade (‘we cannot function otherwise’, ES: 50). At a telling point in Logiques des mondes, Badiou characterizes the Sartrean truth as founded on the conviction that I can choose myself, freely decide my being in a given situation. But, he adds, the Sartrean truth is not generally available. Most of the time, consciousness adjusts to a dead world, to what the Second manifeste calls the world of the ‘banal body’ (SM: 43). It dissolves itself in complexity, ‘drowns in communication’ (LM: 446). But Badiou also resorts to the terms of ‘the other history’ when necessary or strategically useful: after all, it is self-evidently difficult to talk in detail about the truth-sequence that is the Commune without talking about the Third Republic and indeed the Second Empire. What

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Badiou will not do is think the ‘other history’ integrally and from within. Indeed, one of the consequences of the ‘calculated phenomenology’ of the later Badiou is that, by treating appearance as a question of isolated snapshots, it allows him to avoid what for him is the snare of historical thought (LM: 48). Badiou is now planning a third major volume of his philosophy entitled L’Immanence des vérités. This will think worlds immanently, from within the processes of truths. How do worlds seem, from such a position? Badiou suggests that he will return to a concept important in L’Être et l’événement, ‘forcing’. Truths seek to ‘force’ a ‘transformation of knowledge’ (PE: 128). For truths are universal, the worlds in which they appear, singular. Truths have a power which lies precisely in their insistence on that rare phenomenon, sameness, their creation of ‘compatibilities’. A political upheaval, for example, may unite classes, or members of classes, that were previously separate (PE: 129). Certainly, to think truths immanently will involve a ‘negative determination’, recognizing the ‘differential element’ through which truth must pass (PE: 136). But this will avoid scepticism via a ‘theory of paraconsistent negation’ which will admit the possibility of ‘contradictory perceptions’ without ‘interrupting the unity’ of a truth (PE: 138). Badiou also tells us the new project will take a rather startling fresh turn: he intends to write about truth and affect, the specific affects associated with specific truth-procedures. Badiou’s shift from ontology to logic has meant taking less interest in Being and the event in themselves than in their specific appearances. This has also meant a more marked and explicit preoccupation with the particulars of his world and ours. That it should do so is understandable enough, since Badiou’s logic lends weight to immediate or direct observation. At the same time, the increased focus on contemporary scenes has gone hand in hand with a shift from an affirmative conception of philosophy – ‘I would agree with Nietzsche without hesitation’, writes Badiou, ‘philosophy must be integrally affirmative’ (CI: 8) – to an explicit doctrine of ‘affirmationism’.37 This has had the effect of further arming his thought against a recognition of the full implications of its construction of history as intermittency. Thus Badiou himself states that where, in 1988, he was bearing witness to the continuation of thought ‘underground’, by 2008, he was able to see ‘that it perhaps has the means to come up into the light’ (SM: 13). He gives no clear or indication as to whence he derives this conviction, however, and the present culture relentlessly points in the other direction. ‘Affirmationism’ means that every affect tied to a truth-procedure is altogether affirmative: enthusiasm in the case of politics, joy for science,

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pleasure for art, happiness for love. ‘Only the person who lives under the sign of the Idea is truly happy . . . The philosopher will experience the true life from the interior of his or her life’ (PE: 150). So much unalloyed positivity in an irreflexively prescribed space might make us think uneasily of a gallery stuffed full of socialist realist sculpture. But that is not what is most important in this context. Nowhere is Badiou’s wariness of ‘negative determination’ more apparent than in his descriptions of the affects tied to truths. It becomes clear, here, that ‘affirmationism’ and the refusal to think the ‘other history’ also involve the circumscription of an affective repertoire. This is abundantly evident if we set Badiou in this context alongside the mainstream of the modern literature in some respects so crucial for him. For from the start, literature responded to the Enlightenment project by insisting on illumination, but also its fading and extinction, its patchiness, its appearances and disappearances, its obverse, shadow. This oscillation and ambivalence has been one of the great themes of modern literature, from Keats to Beckett and beyond, and the pertinent affects have been certainly affirmative, but also and inextricably melancholic. If, however, the two themes together are endemic to modern literature and art, that is only because they are deeply woven into the texture of modern experience. ‘In [Jean-Luc] Godard’, Badiou aptly remarks, ‘melancholy is the colour of everything. I am incurably distant from that subjective colouring’ (EA: 84). Badiou never really wants to see the melancholy strain in modern art and literature or fathom its logic (though, interestingly, with reference to his fiction and drama, he also admits that he is ‘quite a melancholic writer’).38 The result is, that in his version of them, modern artists tend to commit themselves to a strenuous work of uplift which does indeed close the gap between them and socialist realism. But the tones of a Mallarmé, for example, on whom Badiou has written often and well, are flattened and reduced in such a version of his work (see Gibson 2006: 111–16). Here the gain involved in the refusal of ‘suture’ (a philosophical modesty which does not claim to prevail over the truth of art) also involves a loss (the impermeability of philosophy to the obscure and disquieting ambiguities of aesthetic truth). For if modern literature articulates an indissoluble and profoundly self-enfolded relation between truth and melancholy, that is because it takes the full weight of historical intermittency as the condition of modernity. If it keeps on telling us about the event, it also keeps on telling us about the remainder. The earlier Badiou shrugged off the concept of the remainder (‘le reste’): ‘Pour moi’, he once told me, ‘il n’y a pas de reste’.39 But this is a refusal from an ontological vantagepoint. With his turn to the logic of worlds, Badiou might appear to

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have strictly disqualified the concept of the remainder as a generality. From the vantage-point of a logic, there are only worlds that know no truth: worlds of lovelessness, scientific recidivism, political stagnation and gross philistinism. It is possible, however, philosophically to characterize such worlds. Events produce ‘tense worlds’. In a ‘tense world’, decisions are everywhere: every reckoning is an ‘isolate’, a unique and unrelated crux requiring a decision for which no precedent can prepare one (LM: 445–6). A tense world, like that of the French Resistance, abounds in isolates and points. Every circumstance is perilous, every encounter difficult. It is necessary to be watchful and decide (LM: 470). The opposite of a tense world is a ‘monde atone’, a lifeless world (LM: 442–5). In a lifeless world there is no subject, truth or fidelity. There are no isolates, no points, no resistance on the basis of which an active point might fashion itself. Everything is organized, assured. One can decide nothing. Lifeless worlds are complex, ramified, nuanced but homogeneous. No figure of the Two arrives to evaluate them: there is no moment of division at which their homogeneity might be radically interrogated. In Logiques des mondes, Badiou gives a finely chosen example of what ‘subjectivity’ becomes in a monde atone, in a short exchange from Sartre’s Les Mains sales. Here the subject vacillates at every instant, is ‘playful and desperate’, but armed against its own desperation by worldliness. It is thus, says Badiou, ‘that we become servants of the atonia [l’atonie] of the world’ (LM: 446). Tense worlds exist when something happens. By contrast, in a lifeless world, in the end, nothing happens except death. Thus whilst tense worlds always vividly differ from each other, lifeless worlds all refer to a single principle and are identifiable with one another. Hence the later Badiou’s plural (‘lifeless worlds’) turns out to be finally indistinguishable from my singular (the remainder). There is, however, a danger in neatly trimming Badiou’s performances as a philosopher so that they fit his programme. His mind is capacious and, within certain limits, his sympathies large and sophisticated. He is aware that truths have their endpoint, that they exhaust themselves, ‘little by little’ (PE: 20), that, given the rarity of truth-sequences, deserts must logically yawn between them: ‘the State’, for example, ‘almost always cheats political hope’ (EA: 50). He knows that truths have undersides: love involves ‘violent quarrels, real sufferings’, is ‘one of the most tormented [douloureuses] experiences of subjective life’, causes deaths, suicides and has its own regime of contradictions and brutalities (EA: 55). The Badiou who taught Schopenhauer for years is by no means simply immune to philosophers who tint the world in much darker shades than himself.

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His essays on Lacoue-Labarthe provide a striking example of this. Badiou had great respect for ‘Philippe’, thinks of his work as having a ‘seductive’ depth, and writes about him with tenderness.40 But Lacoue-Labarthe puts the truth of inconsolability at the very heart of his thought. For Lacoue-Labarthe, writes Badiou, ‘everything begins in terror’ (2010b: 168). This is terror at a world that ‘has only succeeded in being what it is’ (PT: 144), terror that the world may forfeit all chance of being otherwise; a terror of the possible cessation of the event, any event, all events, fear of ‘the desertion of the truth’ (2010b: 172). We have historical experience of this desertion: that is the very source of terror. Lacoue-Labarthe sustained a vigilant distrust of a multitude of philosophical, political and ethical deceptions and falsifications, because they refuse the fearful knowledge that truth can disappear, and bequeath only the continuing pursuit of what has already been achieved. This fear of the loss of the event makes him work to tear Hölderlin from Heidegger’s grasp, but also draws him to Celan, since what he finds in Celan is a poetry that is extremely difficult because it is so aware of the extreme difficulty of saving the event. At the same time, Lacoue-Labarthe’s commitment to his poets has as its corollary a growing persuasion that philosophy is at an end – for Badiou, Lacoue-Labarthe is perhaps the great instance of the announcement of ‘the end of philosophy’ – because, with modernity, philosophy discovers its own powerlessness either to guarantee truths or to protect them. Thus Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought begins to look like an austere, disabused, severely minimalist reduction of Badiou’s. Badiou has a lucid grasp of and an acute feeling for the knife-edge on which LacoueLabarthe’s thought balances. But he does not allow Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought to test, still less to contaminate his own. In effect, he merely declares that ‘I think otherwise’. To put the point in different terms: Badiou asserts that some of the cardinal modern truth-sequences appear in literature, and even that it is literature that is most expert in the formal knowledge of mondes atones. How is it, then, that he never integrates this aspect of what literature can offer us into his thought? ‘Custos, quid noctis?’ ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ The quotation is from Isaiah 21.11 in the Latin Vulgate Bible. The King James version of the relevant lines reads as follows: The burden of Du-Mah. He calleth to me out of Se-ir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, the morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come.

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Badiou himself introduces the quotation in connection with Lyotard. The increasingly melancholic Lyotard became a philosopher of ‘the night’, above all, the night into which later twentieth-century politics had increasingly sunk (PT: 88–105). In Badiou’s reading of him, the Lyotardian question is precisely, what of ‘the night’? (PT: 88). What possibilities can you descry, in the darkness in which you find you are lodged? But we might put a different form of the question to Badiou: what do you make of ‘the night’ itself, ‘the night’ that your thought pervasively implies – the remainder, that which is ‘left over’ from events and truth-procedures – but that it seldom if ever directly confronts? This leads directly into the question of Badiou’s exceptionalism. For Badiou, it is only seldom that events take place. Truths are ‘rare human experiences’ (PE: 66): ‘works of art’, for example, ‘are rare’ (PE: 73). Subjects appear only rarely. His concern is to apprehend ‘the singularity of the phenomenal exceptions . . . which make living possible’ (LM: 46). The philosopher does not master subjects in articulating their truths for them, or the truth of their truths, but ‘identifies’ truths, declares their existence, shows that they are there, arranges them in relation to other truths contemporary with them, thus telling us about their ‘compossibility’ (SA: 108; MP: 66–9). Philosophy both discerns truths and unifies them. It filters truths in their rarity out from worlds without truth, without converting them into instances of a global, ‘higher’, unitary or total truth. It is therefore concerned with a logic of the exception. From beginning to end of Logiques des mondes, Badiou insists that truths are exceptions. Indeed, as we have noted, exceptionalism is intrinsic to the book’s very structure. My own exploration of the complex problematic involved here will be central to the rest of the book. ‘The category of the exception’, writes Badiou, ‘is a category of dialectics’. Indeed, for him, the exception is what remains of the instance of historical dialectics. His dialectics is neither totalizing nor ‘implacably deterministic’ (PE: 147). For all Bosteels’s concern to demonstrate the extent of Badiou’s Hegelianism, in this respect, he is emphatically not Hegelian (‘Je suis évidemment très éloigné de tout cela’, PE: 148; cf. Bosteels 2004). At the very least, Badiou radically scales down the scope of dialectics. Historical dialectics becomes occasional, sporadic, punctual – exceptional. Near the end of Logiques des mondes, Badiou recognizes the ‘banal objection’ to his thought of the event: ‘aristocratism’, its election of a privileged few at the expense of the many (LM: 534). This objection should not detain us long. It is founded in a familiar social-democratic ‘anti-elitism’, springs readily to the defence of its own, and will more or less automatically impugn any form of critique of or difference from the contemporary democracies. To credit this

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form of critique, one has in some degree to invest in the concept of the end of history, or at least to believe that now if ever we find ourselves, Leibnizianly, in the best of all possible worlds, a world historically privileged, unexceptionable as never before. In Rancière’s terms, one must share the contemporary fiction of a ‘generalized lightening’, the conviction that life has shed its burden ‘of suffering, harshness and misery’ and one can therefore finally dispense with any ‘ontology of poverty’ (SE: 30). Can we really think that its wars, oppressions, exploitations, vast immiserations, wholesale and casual destructions, sustained production of catastrophes and, perhaps above all, its seemingly endless capacity to deceive itself do not make our world a monde atone like (almost) any other? Badiou has increasingly become the Voltaire of this world, and attacks it with the same admirable and abrasive vigour and rectitude with which Voltaire attacked Leibniz. But the social-democratic critique of Badiou’s exceptionalism is not the significant one. Exceptionalism vis-à-vis social-democratic ideology is one thing, vis-à-vis ‘bare life’, another. Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Badiou is rooted in ‘bare life’, and a fear that Badiou is finally indifferent to it. The condition of ‘bare life’ is, precisely, inexistence; in Agamben’s terms, inexistence is the ‘the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant’ (1998 [1995]: 142). Here it becomes exposed to sovereign power. For Agamben, the paradigm of this is Auschwitz. But of course the camps are not the sole or indeed a privileged image of it. They are rather the matrix of a structure from which we seem unable to free ourselves, ‘the politicization of bare life as such’, which reincludes the very bare life that has been excluded, but under a ban, and which may even be the source of the present day ‘eclipse’ of politics (1998 [1995]: 4). Thus, in particular, 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’ (1998 [1995]: 180). Agamben is no more a proselytizer for social democracy than Badiou. Yet he also suggests that Badiou does not escape the problem of exception. Indeed, Badiou’s is ‘a rigorous thought of the exception’ and ‘[h]is central category of the event corresponds to the structure of the exception’ (1998 [1995]: 25). It is a thought of the ‘sovereign decree’ – the decree of an exceptional truth – which lifts itself above ordinary or bare life and ‘includes [bare life] in itself only by suspending it’ (1998 [1995]: 28). The event is ultimately the sovereign exception that dictates the law. Badiou’s conception of subjectification as taking place in a contingent encounter leaves aside ‘the living being as “the animal

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of the human species” as a mere support for this encounter’ (PT: 221). Agamben’s point is not that Badiou’s thought is a fascism in disguise. It is rather that, in erecting a structure which categorically distinguishes exceptional value from unexceptional non-value, Badiou is not exempt from the charge that he grants the first an unlimited or sovereign status relative to the second, which can never be finally dissociated from the possibility of an unlimited or sovereign power over it. In recent years, Badiou has quite ostentatiously used the terms exception and exceptionality (and, less often, ‘sovereignty’) in relation to his thought.41 This would suggest that he is consciously defying Agamben’s critique. The question one must raise regarding Badiou’s more recent work, and which Agamben poses, is not whether it misunderstands and comprehensively undervalues contemporary social democracy, but whether either it or its tones and colorations are finally adequate to the very value at its heart, the inexistent. Even here, the question is anything but simple. As we have seen, Badiou’s thought is commensurate with inexistence insofar as inexistents may harbour new and unprecedented possibilities – insofar as they may suddenly announce that ‘We are nothing, let us be everything’. But what of the ‘We are nothing’ itself? Badiou gives as one example of translations from inexistence to existence the revolt of the Mohawks in Quebec against the legislation that, from 1918 to 1950, disenfranchised them. But what of their inexistence during that period itself? What does philosophy have to say about or to it? Has it ever had anything to say about it? Badiou’s answer seems suspiciously close to finding expression in a novelist not remarkable for his attachment to the event, or his radicalism: ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it’ (Naipaul 1982 [1979]): 9). Inexistents are of no significance in themselves, but only insofar as they enter into existence and change it. That, for Badiou, there is value only in affirmation does not altogether separate his thought off from the social-democratic emphasis on the ideal of empowerment. But why should empowerment, even enfranchisement be all that matters to thought?42 Badiou’s refusal of any thought of the remainder, and the affect appropriate to it, melancholy, is a remnant of a derelict and finally unphilosophical strain in Marxist tradition which, as much as anything else, marks out its present negligibility. But affirmationism itself also pushes Badiou much closer than he would care to admit to contemporary positivities, and his voice – and indeed that of much of the commentary on him – closer to that of contemporary boosterism. This, and Badiou’s complicity in it, will be crucial to my conclusion. Inexistence in itself interests Badiou no more than it does Naipaul’s

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narrator. He would dismiss any concern for it as ‘pleurnicherie’ (snivelling), bourgeois clucking over pathos (LS: 179). But there is something disingenuous about this. Why should one care to have the world overturned at all, have those who were nothing become everything, if one did not suffer at least a faint, vestigial concern for inexistents in the first place? But the pathos of inexistence is not a sentimental matter. It need not be formulated within a sentimental humanist or neo-religious perspective. At its fullest extent, not least as Agamben represents it, bare life is an ontological condition and has no immediate or necessary reference to human beings. Bare life is unfulfilled life, life withdrawn or suspended in limbo, life caught on the hop, before it had reached completion. It is a permanent challenge to our corporate strategies (of all political descriptions). Agamben provides abundant examples 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.43 Bare life is only thinkable along with a range of difficult associations or tones: melancholy, irony, catachresis. Hence the crucial importance of art. Finally, though, however compelling and seriously important Agamben’s larger case, it does not quite hit the mark. That is because, if events and truths are exceptions, it is not clear how far bare life is the rule. Is it not possible, not least given the strange list just given above, that it, too, manifests itself only exceptionally? This is certainly how ‘trauma theory’ treats it, as a catastrophic exception to the norm. Agamben, of course, would have no truck with any cheering new theodicy whether religious or secular (the point, again, at which postmodernism reveals itself to be just Leibnizian). But in his case against Badiou, it is not clear he can altogether avoid sounding as though he has conceded something to Leibniz. The crucial structural opposition is not the event versus bare life but the event versus the remainder, all that falls outside the very small domain of what Badiou calls truth. Bare life is a peculiarly significant and arresting instance of the historical remainder, but the two categories are not co-extensive. At the same time, however, in asking questions regarding the remainder, one is also asking them regarding bare life. The major question in Badiou has to do with the specific character of his separation of value from non-value; or, better, his willingness to think value but not non-value (for it is not self-evident that non-value is unworthy of thought); or better still, since Badiou can justly reply that, in Logiques des mondes, he has now given extensive accounts of nonvalue in terms of the abstract structure of mondes atones, his refusal to

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think non-value from within and on its own terms (as contrasted, for example, with the novel, which insistently does so). Here Badiou is very much a part of modern philosophy, but also repeats a philosophical error: he confuses the philosophical and moral necessity of not being of this world with the peremptory exclusion of it, a principle of nonsaturation. This is why the thought that is modern philosophy has more and more needed the thought that is literature. Of course, philosophers themselves have sometimes admitted this. But if Badiou himself suggests that literature best describes the ‘transcendental structures’ of mondes atones (LM: 443), his own version of them is strictly, philosophically de-realizing. Literature must not contaminate the discourse. This study is founded on a different premise, and points in a different direction. THE EXAMPLE OF FLAUBERT Ontologically, ‘bare life’ is a category of ordinary platitude (my term).44 Ordinary platitude is the characteristic feature of a monde atone: inertia, obscurity, flatness, nondescript, eventless mundanity, nonvalue; being nothing much in particular. For two centuries, mondes atones have repeatedly elicited cries of despair in the arts, whether ennui-ridden, disgusted, dandified, ironical, aestheticized or infuriated. Unlike Badiou, however, the modern arts have been prepared to think modern platitude from within, as a condition that they refuse either to accept or flee. The doubleness of that position has been one of the great engines of modern irony. At this point, I should identify what I mean by irony, since the term has already appeared and will recur in this book. I certainly do not mean irony in the slight postmodern sense (emptiness, surface, play), nor as a moralizing or destructive discourse. Modern literary irony is the consummation of Quintilian’s identification of a figure of speech or trope ‘in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood’ (contrarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est; 1920–2: 9.2.44), but in a specific inflection of it.45 In one of its aspects, it grasps the pervasive irony of history (as in the revenge of the practico-inert), and gives it a thought and form. It states value, in Badiou’s sense, but from within a recognition of the seeming inexorability of non-value. It takes into its core the prevalence of the remainder over the event. It speaks the event in the negative. This is how modern literature thinks, if nuanced in a great variety of ways. Modern irony and ambivalence have allowed literature to escape the danger that Badiou’s exceptionalism runs, which resides in the final inseparability of the exception from the sovereign decree, and the inextinguishable possibility that the sovereign decree may become an invidious prescription.

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Indeed, modern irony has avoided positive decrees of all descriptions, not least those that constantly and wearisomely beset us in academic discourse. Modern literature recognizes that to set a ‘lifeless world’ at naught is to take its life forms to be worth nothing, and takes account of such worlds accordingly. It is precisely within and through irony that modern literature has constantly corrected modern philosophy and politics, not as a recommendation of stasis, but as a caution or subtilization. I shall consider a paradigmatic instance of a modern literature that does not merely dismiss a ‘lifeless world’, even saturates itself in it, yet also does not simply surrender all thought of the event, but pervasively if almost imperceptibly sustains its trace; an art, therefore, whose constitutive element is irony: Flaubert’s. I recently asked Badiou whether he liked Flaubert. His response was brusque: ‘Pas du tout’. This might seem predictable enough. Flaubertian irony appears directly to threaten or to cancel out the truthdomain of politics, and Badiou thinks of Flaubert as indifferent if not reactionary, upbraiding him as one of the ‘non-militant intellectuals’ who maintained ‘ignoble’ positions during the Commune, and indeed supported Versailles (CC: 142). There is no reason to assume, however, that Badiou writes off Flaubert’s art merely for that reason. We should recall again his devotion to Wagner, who, after his participation in the May uprising in Dresden in 1849, was hardly a faithful revolutionary subject.46 So, too, if it is abundantly clear to any reader of Flaubert that his account of love is not Badiou’s, we should not immediately assume that Flaubert’s grasp of the negative aspect of modern love must logically repel the philosopher. Badiou himself writes powerfully about Breton’s version of the same theme in Arcane 17.47 Furthermore, when Badiou asserts that ‘there exists a poetics of defeat, but not a philosophy of it’, he might have exemplified the point by contrasting his own thought and Flaubert’s art (LM: 11). This would merely constitute a proper refusal of ‘suture’. So, too, if, for Badiou, art in general ‘renders complete justice to the event’, is even ‘the great form of the event as such’ insofar as, in art, the event makes a hole in the known (EA: 68), as we have just seen, literature can also be much concerned with mondes atones. Thus Flaubert might logically be of cardinal importance. For Flaubert is perhaps the great master of the literary portrait of the monde atone, Madame Bovary being virtually a paradigm, as is L’Éducation sentimentale, of principal concern here because of its immersion in history. But the illumination is reciprocal: if Flaubert exemplifies a theme of Badiou’s, Badiou helps us understand exactly what Flaubert is about. What is it that makes the world of L’Éducation sentimentale a

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monde atone, for all its urban (and urbane) bustle? Firstly, this is a world whose rule is ‘modification’. Here change is always possible. But change as modification manifests itself only as the futile instability of appearance which nothing will determine or anchor. Flaubert has a quite extraordinary grasp of how this operates in historically concrete terms. His characters are all caught up in becoming; but to be subject only to becoming (as contrasted with truth) is also to be subject to a movement of indefinite self-difference which makes no difference. (Hence incidentally the degree to which, whilst excoriating his world, Flaubert can also treat his characters quite amiably and even warm to them, but sporadically and inconsequentially; that double movement – Thomas Mann called it erotic – is the essence of modern irony). Because modification is the rule here, in love, politics, science and art, any one of the characters may potentially occupy any position within a given spectrum. For this is a desubjectified or asubjective world. If, for Badiou, the subject ‘always pronounces meaning in the future anterior’ (EE: 438) – ‘this will have been true’ – the great use of the future anterior in L’Éducation sentimentale comes at the end of the novel, in the scene of Frédéric and Mme Arnoux’s last encounter: ‘nous nous serons bien aimés’ (Flaubert 1985 [1869]: 502).48 Here there are no subjects, only personages given over to indeterminate (and undetermined) drift. Thus characters may in principle change during the course of the novel from Orleanism to Legitimism to Bonapartism to republicanism to socialism and even to communism.49 None of the positions in question results in any subjectification or has any decisive consequences. The drift among positions, like that among loves, is the reverse equally of a Badiouian truth-procedure, a sustained and deliberate movement from point to point, and a Flaubertian aesthetic practice, an intensely demanding, extremely meticulous labour proceeding minutely, detail by detail. Certainly, there are ‘facts’ in this world. Dussardier’s death would be an obvious example, as the last expiring gasp of a failed petit-bourgeois involvement in a failed revolution. It is a world also plentiful in ‘weak singularities’, indeed one where singularities are never other than weak. But if the future seems pregnant with things (‘l’avenir est gros’, Deslauriers remarks, Flaubert 1985 [1869]: 167), nothing ever quite happens. The event is everywhere present in Flaubert’s realist novels – but in the negative. These mondes atones are defined as such by the absence of the event. The markers, signs, august names of events exist in the world of L’Éducation sentimentale, but it has reduced them to the status of mere currency. Goethe, Mirabeau, Shakespeare, Constant, Michelangelo, Voltaire, Napoleon, Boucher, Rossini, Goya: the more characters assert a connection with names inseparable from events

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– Deslauriers describing Sénécal as ‘a future Saint-Just’, for example (1985 [1869]: 72) – whether the Copernican event, the event of the Revolution or of Rembrandt, the more remorselessly the novel insists on an absence of connection between tense and lifeless worlds. The event is in one sense pervasive in Flaubert, but is ironized, does not happen, or appears to happen but leads to nothing. Flaubert’s world is full of specious events; here the event is an ignis fatuus. Take for instance, Frédéric’s first sight of Mme Arnoux: It was like a vision [apparition]: She was sitting in the middle of a bench, all alone; or at least, in the dazzlement [éblouissement] that her eyes induced in him, he made out no-one else. As he walked past her, she looked up; involuntarily he bowed his shoulders; then, when he had moved further away, on the same side, he looked back at her. (1985 [1869]: 51)

Of course, the novel will duly, pitilessly expose this ‘vision’ as merely formulaic. As all Frédéric’s later involvements (Rosanette, Mme Dambreuse) and the vacillations, compromises and deceits to which they lead make very clear, Frédéric’s ‘vision’ is not the beginning of a truth-procedure. Predictably enough, therefore, within paragraphs of these lines, Flaubert returns to the manner which will dominate the whole novel, and which serves as an implicit commentary on the fate of the event in this particular world: the style of relentless and implacable notation, directly reflecting the bourgeois materialism which usurps the space in which a subject might otherwise conceivably appear. This style is closely related to the famously stifling Flaubertian use of the imperfect, with its insistence on repetition. Critics have noted that this dries up narrative, action, progress.50 But it also erodes the effect of singularity, the chance of the unique occasion which might make transformation possible, and is its true antithesis. This alerts us to two separate aspects of the monde atone about which Badiou has little to tell us but with which L’Éducation sentimentale is much concerned. The first is that Frédéric’s ‘vision’ appears as a simulacrum of the event, of the ‘éblouissement’ of the romantic encounter about which Badiou writes. There are other moments like it in the novel. Certainly, they are describable as ‘weak singularities’; but in Flaubert a ‘weak singularity’ copies or simulates a strong one. The monde atone reproduces events, but in its own terms, terms already in circulation; that is, the void is not in question and language is not at risk. An event foreknown is no event at all: Frédéric knows the event has to happen before it does, that the encounter with Mme Arnoux was an event waiting to happen, not least because ‘she resembled the women in romantic books’ (1985 [1869]: 55). The event was lying in

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wait for Frédéric in history, culture and, above all, language. If Frédéric has a certain foreknowledge of the event, it is because language has already enshrined its expression, and therefore foretold it. But, secondly, how can one tell an event from its simulacrum? We can derive the basis of one distinction from Badiou, but it is Flaubert who fleshes it out. One aspect of Badiou’s thought so far unremarked is his emphasis on the name.51 Events break with a prior order. Logically enough, they therefore demand new names. The subject of an event employs names which have no referent in the already existing situation, thereby resisting capture by an ‘established language’ (MP: 78). Names are the anchor, guarantee and ‘sole certitude’ of a truth-procedure (EE: 418).52 Subjects are no more determined by an existing language than by the current state of knowledge. They invent new names both for themselves, and for the process of which they are a part. One is supremely conscious of an event, then, when shock-tremors run through language. Language is constantly open to modification: the vernacular is ever-shifting. But truth-procedures involve upheavals in language: Joyce is an obvious example of this, but so too is Marx, who also changed language.53 Flaubert knows all this very well. But he chooses to confine his attention to a world in which no such upheavals are apparent, and to confine his language to that world’s. He very exactly understands the gulf that yawns between truth-procedures and mondes atones: it is linguistic. It is Flaubert, not Badiou, who informs us of the linguistic condition of an ordinarily platitudinous world, which is how we can identify one: it is banality, the incessant repetition of the already-said, of formulae. No one could be more alert to this than Flaubert, or have more intimately related the boredom he claimed to feel from an early age, and which never left him, to a terrible suffering induced by contemporary usage, the language he heard all about him. Flaubert’s loathing of doxa is at least as ferocious as Badiou’s. But because he is an artist where Badiou is a philosopher, he identifies a monde atone in terms not of the atrophy of the Idea but of an impoverishment of language: ‘futile’ conversation, language following ‘the weariest old beaten paths’ (1985 [1869]: 186), passionless because intellectually craven and dead because passionless (as contrasted with Flaubert’s own express rage, in many ways the motive force of his work). Certainly, the embodiment of passionless existence in language is everywhere evident in Flaubert’s Paris. Here Flaubert demonstrates the fundamental contradiction between the event and the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois mindset.54 Thus Badiou and Flaubert appear to configure the world in very similar ways, but then approach the configuration from opposed sides.

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Badiou deals in events and truths; he has no interest in that which remains inertly apart from them. By contrast, the world of Flaubert’s realist fiction, at least, is solely that of the remainder. There are no truths proper in Flaubert’s realist novels, no structures of ungainsayable consequence that make truth-procedures what they are. Badiou argues that it is the essence of philosophy to elaborate ‘means of saying “Yes!” to formerly unknown thoughts which hesitate to become the truths they are’ (PE: 74). In doing so, he demarcates a threshold which the philosopher immediately crosses as Flaubert the realist absolutely refuses to. That is, Flaubert the realist does not deal in truth-procedures. Thus where Badiou’s proscription of any thought of the remainder allows his philosophical fervour to survive undiminished, Flaubert’s exclusion of the possibility of the event generates an irony beyond mitigation. Both positions are equally rigorous; sustaining either demands the most painstaking work, as one is aware when reading either author. But as Badiou repudiates the rigour of Flaubertian irony, so Flaubert appears implicitly to repudiate the presumptions underlying ‘affirmationism’, and therefore the rigour of the truth-procedure. But this is surely too simple. For the token of the event ‘in the negative’ does not erase it. It rather retains the memory or the knowledge of the historical possibility of the event, and this memory also pervasively haunts Flaubert’s realist work. The simulacrum in the monde atone cancels the event, but also sustains it, if in anaemic or distorted form. Equally, the very denial of the event in the monde atone demonstrates the partiality of that world, its insecurity or instability, its lack of completeness, if only in the act of opposition. Flaubert understands these mechanisms intimately: they are mainsprings of Flaubertian irony. The names in the list I produced above exist in L’Éducation sentimentale precisely to frame and define its world as a monde atone, but also serve as a trace of what it lacks. Without such traces, the Flaubertian characterization of the monde atone would scarcely be possible. However, there are three events that particularly hang over the world of the novel. Firstly, the revolution: when Deslauriers announces that ‘Another ’89 is brewing!’ (Flaubert 1985 [1869]: 63) he is expressing an awareness many of the characters share, whether hopefully, fearfully, in caution or out of interest, that the shadow of the revolution hangs over the society it founded. The second and third events are interconnected: the event of romanticism, and the romantic event. Flaubert was of course an heir to romanticism, a role he took seriously. There are ‘two distinct fellows [bonshommes] in me’, he told the long-suffering Louise Colet, a man who ‘digs into and investigates reality [fouille et creuse le vrai] for all he is worth’ and one ‘everywhere given to protestations

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[pétri de gueulades], lyricism, great eagle-flights, all kinds of sonorous phrases, inhabiting ideal heights [sommets de l’idée]’.55 Flaubert did not want to be thought of as a modern realist. Realism smacked of complicity with the present. ‘Don’t judge me on the basis of [Madame Bovary]’, he implored Sainte-Beuve. ‘I do not belong to the [realist] generation you speak of; not in my heart, at least. I rather maintain that I am of yours, the good one, that of 1830. All my loves are there. I am a mad old romantic [un vieux romantique enragé]’.56 The year 1830 identifies him precisely with one of Badiou’s ‘tense worlds’, in referring us, firstly, to that brief resurgence of the spirit of 1789, the July Revolution, notably the Trois Glorieuses (27–9 July); secondly, to a ‘tense world’ of art encapsulated in ‘la bataille d’Hernani’, when bohemian modernity took on conservative bourgeois classicism in the name of Hugo’s play; and thirdly, to French romanticism (Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo) which, arriving later than its English and German counterparts, reached its apotheosis as a gospel of ‘liberty and artistic and social renewal’ belatedly, in 1830 (see Heath 1994: 8–15). Louise Colet sent Flaubert a lock of Chateaubriand’s hair (he sent her a flower from his grave, in return).57 Flaubert told Victor Hugo of ‘a charming obsession, a lasting love’ for his work.58 The young Flaubert, at least, said he would give all the knowledge of ‘philosophers, novelists . . . academicians’ and many others for two of Lamartine’s verses.59 Flaubert endows Frédéric with a degraded version of the epiphany, the romantic event, the romantic trust in the event. But degradation, though it may take pathetic, hilarious or absurd forms, is not an expression of pure negativity. This is where Badiou and Flaubert differ cardinally. Badiou can only understand fidelity to a truth in terms of a militancy which at once holds circumstance at bay. But what of a fidelity to truth that, given circumstances, winds, bends, temporizes, assumes profoundly ambiguous and ironical forms, does not carry with it Badiou’s Platonic assurance that its superlative value is finally assured elsewhere? In his German Diaries, Samuel Beckett suggests that the only romanticism ‘still tolerable’ is, like Caspar David Friedrich’s, bémolisé, flattened, as B is flattened to B flat.60 This, with misgivings about ‘tolerability’ perhaps as dire as Beckett’s, is what remains of romanticism in Flaubert. Frédéric and Emma represent a severely contracted form of continuity with a truth inherited from romanticism, a kind of bare minimum of fidelity. Badiou’s Platonism means that he reacts fiercely against the mode of thought at stake here, partly no doubt because of his distrust of romanticism per se,61 but also because such a thought concedes far too much to immediate circumstance, granting it a well-nigh overpow-

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ering force. By contrast, Flaubert holds on to a truth by and in writing it off, by letting the world invade it. Paradoxically, however, it is in this ‘writing off’ that he expresses the preciousness of truth, which is its rarity or extreme vulnerability. Like Badiou, Flaubert assumes that truths do not and seemingly cannot prevail (Badiou’s doctrine of rarity is founded on this assumption). But where Badiou closes the world off and decides that only truths will matter, Flaubert intransigently asserts that the world imperiously states its terms. The assertion might almost seem malicious, were it not that, in its poignant specification of the real meaning of rarity, it actually pursues one aspect of the logic of intermittency with more fervour and discipline than does Badiou. For Flaubert, so exquisite is truth in its rarity that he can scarcely credit it anywhere save art. It is in this context that we may best understand those two staples of Flaubert criticism, irony (again), and aestheticism raised to an absolute principle. Whilst Badiou would hardly underwrite either of them, he helps us understand their logic. For all Flaubert’s collapses into a universalist metaphysics of boredom or despair – his assertions of ‘the eternal wretchedness of all things’ (Flaubert 1985 [1869]: 395) – and for all critics’ willingness to follow him in his slumps,62 there is no novel more saturated in historical specifics than L’Éducation sentimentale until Ulysses, or more acutely, painfully aware of the historical specificity of its social materials. Flaubertian irony hollows out the historical present, a particular historical present, that of the mid-nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie. It repeatedly states the inutility, the ungroundedness of that present, its lack of purchase on any history extended beyond itself. The characters are hopelessly ensnared in a great web of soon emptied and platitudinous signification from which they have no conception and no hope of breaking. How could Emma Bovary ever begin seriously to recognize what Hugo, Chateaubriand, Lamartine were striving to teach her? But what Flaubertian irony everywhere implicitly refers us to is the difference represented by the event, which, in Flaubert’s terms, is superlatively the event of beauty. Scholars have amply demonstrated the quite extraordinary finesse of Flaubert’s prose style in his great novels,63 but not always helped us understand it. A self-congratulating labour of superiority over his miserable creatures? Why bother? The familiar answer is that Flaubert was attached to a gospel of art for art’s sake. But here art for art’s sake is a specific project in that it promotes the unprecedented event or effect of beauty. Style in Flaubert preserves the notion of singularity as an effect which could not have been envisaged before and will hardly be reproducible after him. Style in Flaubert is a vain utopianism, a utopianism

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that will seemingly continue to be vain, since the remainder appears to be all that is the case. Style is the trace of a truth, but one that exactly knows its own limits, recognizes the scope and power of the remainder. Flaubert is eminently reconcilable with Badiou’s thought, if in terms that Badiou would deplore. Flaubert is, par excellence, a subject. He appears to have rejected the rigour of the truth-procedure only if one identifies a truth-procedure as ‘affirmationist’. Flaubert laboured with almost unparalleled dedication, through physical pain and various forms of often great distress, on the perfection of his ironical art. Art spelt method, discipline, immense fidelity. The commitment was necessary, because art preserves that tiny little corner of things in which something other is still possible. For Flaubert, the tiny little corner was beauty. In dedicating himself so wholly and unswervingly to it, he made himself into a pure subject, as the very antithesis of both the bourgeoisie, and the Frédéric he otherwise resembled. Indeed, Flaubert defines subjectification as a tenacious, even obsessive work of evading or at least exceeding the bourgeois identity. In the end, Badiou’s horror of Flaubertianism is political after all, but in a very particular way, as is clear if we consider L’Éducation sentimentale’s presentation of its story of 1848. Certainly, Flaubert’s account of the participants is ironic and at times amused. But importantly, the participants are solely middle-class, and thus distinctly unpromising as revolutionaries. Flaubert’s narrative of 1848 is unsettling in that he refuses to depart from the social horizons that the novel has kept to thus far. Thus as Thibaudet once noted, the novel appears to take part itself, ‘as a work of art, in this wastage, this emptiness, this bankruptcy’ (Thibaudet 1935: 150). In L’Éducation sentimentale, the people themselves are inexistent; Flaubert apparently refuses to believe that 1848 represented their emergence from inexistence, however brief. Flaubert was hardly an apologist for nineteenth-century Capital, as his outbursts against wealth and power in L’Éducation sentimentale sufficiently demonstrate. Self-evidently, he was one of the great anatomists of the suffocating effects of the bourgeois disposition. But he was clearly convinced that 1848 merely repeated 1830, just as 1871 would do later, with an increasingly embittering turn of the screw. He therefore blankly refused to sustain any ‘left positivity’, as contrasted with left melancholia, as is confirmed, for example, by his brusque dismissals of Fourier and Saint-Simon.64 The ideology that Flaubert most comprehensively resists is the nineteenth-century and by extension, the modern ideology of progress in all its various forms, the persuasion that modernity has already been achieved or is in the process of achievement. Flaubert will not share that

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illusion, will not assume that modern society is self-evidently a decisive improvement on the world of St Anthony or Salammbô. This is not a conservative position. Flaubert says to politics what so much modern art has said and continues to say: ‘Not good enough’. Badiou is no more a progressive than Flaubert.65 But what he shares with progressives is a confidence that historical time can leap forwards, produce coherently forward-looking trajectories. If Badiou rejects the global optimism of the grand narratives of progress, he retains their belief in a historically discernible possibility of progressive momentum. But Flaubert rejects this temporality, in his presentation of his world, but above all in his style. When Frédéric ruefully asserts the need for caution in politics, since ‘the people are still minors [mineur]’ (Flaubert 1985 [1869]: 446), he casts doubt on the Republic and progress together. Certainly, Flaubert was disposed to ‘gueulades’: ‘Nous gueulons contre notre époque [we rail against our era]’, he exclaimed, to Ernest Feydeau.66 His epoch maddened him as much as Voltaire’s did Voltaire and the contemporary democracies madden Badiou. But Flaubert also refused immediately to think beyond his epoch, to place solution on problem ‘like a snuffer on a candle’, to quote Beckett again (1983: 92). Indeed, one might argue that he lends his rage and hatred greater purity in doing so. Badiou is a great philosopher. With time, his particular political commitments will doubtless come to seem less central to his work, as Hegel’s romance of Napoleon does to his. But there is far too much at stake in the massive architecture of the two great volumes that constitute the central trunk of his philosophy, and their major offshoots, for him to be set aside. But Flaubert is no lesser a figure. Revolutionary idealists, apostles of love, art and new scientific discovery all have seriously to reckon with him. For the question he poses, not cynically, is this: what do you make of a world like mine, where no truths of your kind appear to have any purchase? This is what is left over from your worlds, and not only that: it is more commonplace than they are. Can you make anything of it? If not, what does that say about the powers, limits and finally the serviceability of your truths? Whilst by no means merely surrendering the system of valuation which Badiou has so tirelessly promoted – ‘gueulons contre notre époque’ indeed, like Badiou, Voltaire, Flaubert and all the others, since, as Agamben and Žižek as much as Badiou have constantly insisted, it is no less wretched than any other – this book will heed the Flaubertian caution to a degree that Badiou would find unacceptable. The following chapters will in effect attempt to think Badiou and Flaubert together, and their worlds as mutually dependent, inter-implying each other. Here, as we shall see, if

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Badiou offers us an account of the logic and structure of intermittency pellucid and incomparable, it is to other contemporary philosophers that we may turn for more ambivalent models than his. NOTES 1. I mean the very late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Derrida’s and Deleuze’s major work belongs to a rather earlier period. 2. The ‘best commentators’ include Hallward (2003), the most distinguished, scholarly and erudite instance; Gillespie (2008), the most riveting; and Barker (2002), Feltham (2008), Bosteels (2009), Pluth (2010). All have much to offer but almost invariably tend to avoid the crucial issues raised by the rarity of events and truths, on which Badiou tirelessly insists. The exception is Gillespie. 3. His thought is distinct here from that of Quentin Meillassoux, much influenced by him, in that the latter thinks the truth not the privilege of absolute contingency. See Meillassoux (2006), and my discussion of it at 251–2. 4. Anti-philosophers are a significant part of Badiou’s pantheon, notably in the cases of Lacan – and St Paul (see SA: 108). Nonetheless, he himself deeply identifies with philosophical tradition. He is very explicitly not an anti-philosopher. But his is a philosophy that takes the full force of the anti-philosophical drive. Contemporary philosophy must ‘traverse’ anti-philosophy, as Badiou himself has traversed Lacan (CS: 196). 5. For this argument, see Badiou (2010b), especially at 175. He also argues that the era of the ‘death of philosophy’ has now yielded to that of ‘ “philosophy” ’, which confuses the philosopher with the media pundit or guru. See SM: 81–2. 6. In that Gillespie sees Badiou as dedicated to ‘reclaiming the powers of the negative’ and endorsing what are in the end only struggles for truth in a world devoid of it. See Gillespie (2008): 15, 148. 7. We should distinguish, however, between serious contemporary ethical philosophies, for example Levinas’s, of which Badiou may be critical but which he respects, and those merely subservient to political and economic interests (not least neo-Levinasian). 8. See for instance SM: 25–6, where he declares that the only principle within the contemporary ‘democracies’ is that there can be no principles; and the discussion of ‘a principle of principles’ (SM: 34). 9. Here I exactly coincide with Bosteels’s insistence on the difference between events and their sites as always ‘impure’ and the space between them equivocal, without seeing any reason to recuperate this under the rubric of a traditional dialectical materialism, as he does. See Bosteels (2009): 130–1; Gibson (2006): 133–8. 10. My Beckett and Badiou seeks to do this throughout, with reference to Badiou’s reading of Beckett. See Gibson (2006). 11. Cf. Hallward, exactly right in suggesting that ‘there is no contemporary thinker who is more opposed to Badiou’s orientation [on questions of existential “pathos” and “remainder”] than Giorgio Agamben’ (Hallward 2005: 23, 25 n20).

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12. Adrian Johnston and others have objected to the extremely narrow mathematical basis Badiou has for this argument. See Johnston (2009): passim. But this is problematic only if one assumes that set theory proves the case, rather than being a peculiarly effective way of illustrating it on the basis of an archi-ethical decision. This would admittedly appear to be Badiou’s assumption. 13. Badiou also notes the intellectual poverty of contemporary ‘returns to religion’, the lack, for example, of any ‘innovative theology’ (LE: 30). 14. Bosteels has rightly insisted that Badiou is quite firm about this. See Bosteels (2009): 136. 15. Pluth (2010): 2. See for instance Barker (2002), Feltham (2008), Bosteels (2009), Pluth (2010) and to some extent Hallward (2003). The political reading is of course very important, but also sometimes unpersuasive, notably when (1) insisting on the crucial importance of Badiou’s early work (up to and including Théorie du sujet); (2) minimizing the break between that and subsequent work; (3) shrinking the gap between Badiou and Althusser. Judith Balso rightly argues that, from the start, in the already acutely problematic first Althusserian turn, Althusser inaugurated the conflation of theoretical with political work. Thenceforth one could conceive of one’s work as political without ever seriously testing it beyond the academy. See Balso (2010). Cf. Jambet, who calls this Althusserian ‘theoreticism’ (2000a: 109), and Rancière, who indicts it as involving an excessive valuation of theoretical revolution (see LL: 239). If Althusser remains ‘our contemporary’, as Bosteels suggests, it is because ours is the era of the demise of politics. Badiou has repeatedly been critical of Althusser. There is, however, a clear relationship between the late Althusser’s concept of ‘aleatory materialism’ and Badiou’s thought. See Bosteels (2005): 250. 16. Badiou’s most succinct account of this concept is in MP: 41–8. 17. For Badiou on the conatus, see for instance ES: 46, 53. 18. For a more extensive discussion, see Gibson (2006), especially at 81–90. 19. It is worth noting the importance of a founding text or texts, in three of these instances. 20. As Badiou tells us, for example, in (2003a). 21. Pace Bosteels, whose invigoratingly materialist reading of Badiou is limited by his need to see Badiou as pervasively making a case for classic Marxist terms of reference (destruction, party, historical materialism, dialectical materialism). See Bosteels (2009): passim. This minimizes the groundbreaking character of Badiou’s thought. 22. Badiou sees his practice in this respect as Lacanian. See LM: 48. Those familiar with the late Lacan will understand the force of this identification. 23. In doing so, Badiou claims to avoid the structure which makes the phenomenologies complicit with the vitalisms, their joint insistence on a unique and totalizing term which transcends all separate states (LM: 283–4). 24. I use the term ‘transformation’ to designate the consequences of an event, and ‘change’ to designate the modifications, facts and weak singularities. Badiou himself does not employ two terms. 25. The ‘types’ are not arbitrary. As Hallward says, the later Badiou has acquired ‘logical operators’ for distinguishing between them. For a detailed account, see LM: 383–401; Hallward (2008): 106.

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26. Notably Desanti, Deleuze, Nancy and Lyotard. For their arguments, see LM: 381. 27. For more details of this and the Italian algebraists responsible for the mathematical development in question, see SM: 73–4. 28. For relevant accounts of Badiou on Mallarmé, see Gibson (2006): 66–7, 111–16, 139–41, 183–6; Lecercle (2010): 92–118. 29. See in particular the section of SM entitled ‘Mutation’: 87–96. 30. See in particular Bensaïd (2001). 31. I use ‘formation’ advisedly: with reference to art, Badiou refers to the event as ‘the coming to form, or the formal promotion of a domain which was previously considered as escaping art’ (PE: 83). 32. Or ‘transmundane’. On the ‘transmondanité’ of truths, see for instance SM: 29, 31. 33. See also ‘Incorporation’, SM: 97–104. 34. Cf. Badiou’s great polemical essay on the financial crisis of 2008, ‘De quel réel cette crise est-elle le spectacle?’ (CC: 75–82). The triumph of liberal democracy, parliamentarianism, capitalism and humanism together eventuates in the cry of ‘Save the banks!’ 35. Badiou is quoting Sylvain Lazarus (unsourced). 36. The Mallarmé quotation is unsourced. Cf. Badiou’s presentation of Joan of Arc as an exception to a ‘miserable epoch’ (1997a): 28. 37. See CI: 8; Badiou (2005a); ‘Troisième esquisse d’un manifeste de l’affirmationisme’ (CR: 81–105). 38. See ‘Live Badiou’, interview with Oliver Feltham, Paris, December 2007, Feltham (2008): 136–7. Badiou is never wholly unambiguous about melancholy. See, for example, his assertion that he can ‘share in a certain manner’ Lévi-Straussian melancholy (LE: 47). 39. In correspondence with the author. 40. ‘Philippe’ in the essay on him in PT: 44–50; ‘Lacoue’ in Badiou (2010c). 41. See for instance LM: 17–18, 42 and passim; PE: 71, 135, 140–1; MS: 28, 30, 87. His earlier uses of the term tended to be in a more predictable context, not least with reference to Carl Schmitt. See for example CR: 24. 42. In Noys’s terms (2005), should we accept Badiou’s insistence that philosophy is defined by its exclusion of pathos and alterity? 43. See Agamben (1985): 65, 68, 82, 95; (1998 [1995]): 184–8; (1999 [1998]): 36–7, 41–86; (1999a): 243–71. 44. ‘Platitude’ is also a recurrent term in the best Anglophone book on Flaubert in the past twenty years, Heath (1994). 45. I owe both the quotation and the prompt to Mladen Dolar. 46. See Köhler (2004 [2001]): 232, 241 and ff; Badiou (2010a); and cf. also 217–19. 47. See LS: 197–207; Breton (1971 [1945]): 115. 48. On Badiou and the future anterior, see Gibson (2006): 60–1. 49. No character runs through the whole list of these options. But Flaubert amply reveals his characters to be what Badiou calls Thermidoreans. For Badiou on the Thermidorean, the very figure of ‘révisionnisme événementiel’, see (2000a): 13; and ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un Thermidorien?’ (AM: 139–54). 50. See for instance Heath (1994): 130–1. 51. Bosteels points out that the emphasis on naming has rather faded out of

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52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

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Badiou’s most recent work. This reflects the growing prestige of politics relative to literature in it. See Bosteels (2009): 150. Consciously or not, Badiou is echoing Beckett. See Beckett (1981): 61. Badiou recently told me, however, that he has no liking for Joyce. One suspects there is simply too much world there for him. Cf. Badiou’s critique of ‘the repertoire of movements belonging to the [contemporary] petit-bourgeois masses’. ‘Where is this “creative” capacity of the multitudes?’, he asks (2002a). Most recently, however, he has seemed to slip back into old-fashioned conspiracy theory and even class-war thinking, and therefore an exculpation of the masses. See for example LE: 26, 38, 44. Letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 13.158. Letter to Sainte-Beuve, 5 May 1857. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 13.575. Letter to Louise Colet, 18 or 25 August 1848. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 12.627, and note. Letter to Victor Hugo, 15 July 1853. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 13.378. Letter to Ernest Chevalier, 24 June 1837. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 12.343. The older Flaubert, however, thought Lamartine soft. Quoted Knowlson (1997): 254. On Badiou and the problem of the romantic legacy, see Gibson (2006): 6–7, 261–2. See for example Victor Brombert on the Fontainebleau episode’s emphasis on ‘the insignificance of all human endeavour in the face of all human change and death’ (1966): 178. See inter alia Culler (1985 [1974]): passim; Heath (1994): 117–36. Letter to Amélie Bosquet, July 1864. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 14.209. This has seemed less certain recently. Progressivism is repeatedly at stake in L’Explication, with Badiou oscillating between a quite conventional progressivism (LE: 30, 104–5, 113–14, 139), his own distinctive version of it (LE: 76–7, 99), and scepticism regarding progressivism in general (LE: 81). This is symptomatic of the (problematic) late shift in his thought. Letter to Ernest Feydeau, 15 July 1861. Flaubert (1974–5 [1830–80]): 14.75.

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2. Sporadic Modernity: Françoise Proust

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERNITY There is a concept of modernity implicit and sometimes explicit in both this book and most of the philosophers at the centre of it. It is sufficiently important to warrant early introduction and explication. Thus, where Chapter 1 was very much about the general concept of intermittency, Chapter 2 will adopt a more historical perspective, understanding the occasional emergences of historical reason as definitive of modernity. It focuses on the work of the quite undeservedly neglected Françoise Proust. For of our five philosophers, though doing so is not her principal aim, it is Proust who thinks the relationship between intermittency and the onset of modernity most cogently and effectively. More than any other, she thinks the question of historical intermittency as intrinsic to the modern Stimmung (Proust 1985), to the emergence of modernity itself, what moderns are, what we remain today. This interpretation admittedly ignores certain key themes of the later Proust in particular (resistance, counter-Being; though I shall come back to resistance in my conclusion).1 It also ignores the late Proust’s efforts to distance herself from Badiou and Rancière (Proust 1997c; 2000a). For they are part of a late tendency effectively to downplay the concepts of intermittency and rarity evident in her thought (see Proust 1995a; 1997d: 109; 1998e: 71).2 I shall first pursue her thought in its Kantian dimension, then, in two phases, explore its Benjaminian aspect, placing Kant and Benjamin as the two poles of the Proustian conception of modernity. Finally, I shall turn to Wordsworth and The Prelude. For Proust as for Badiou, modernity begins with the French Revolution, but also with the late Kant.3 However, we might argue that it equally begins with Wordsworth; indeed Wordsworth grasps the implications of an intermittent modernity in a manner that goes beyond the Revolution and the late Kant alike and anticipates but also supplements 68

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the Benjaminian understanding of it. Wordsworth not only identifies with the inaugural modern moment as represented in Kant and the Revolution, but registers something of its profound force and extreme ambivalence for two ensuing centuries. Here literature turns out to be crucial to, if not the paradigm of the relation between modernity and intermittency in its largest dimensions. Badiou asserts that ‘Françoise Proust’s essential, “classic” point of reference is without doubt Kant’ (Badiou 2008: 164; 1992a: 101). This may initially seem like a surprising idea: as Proust points out (PO: 33–4), Kant produced no critique of political or historical reason. In a sense, however, she herself seeks to make good this lack. In doing so, she wilfully ignores both the characteristic emphases in other accounts of Kant’s view of history and their standard points of focus. Her key points of reference are the Transcendental Aesthetic; the concept of transcendental freedom and the third antinomy in the first Critique; a certain way of thinking reason as practice in the second; the later, political texts written after the French Revolution, most notably ‘Towards a Perpetual Peace’; and, above all, the third Critique, especially the Analytic of the Sublime.4 From this emerges a reading of Kant that is strikingly original and explodes our preconceptions of him. Proust has little or no interest in the Kant who promotes the cause of humanity, Reason and right or the ‘democratic’ Kant of contemporary neoKantians. Whilst she readily admits that there is a confident Aufklärer, teleologist, historical dialectician and progressive in Kant, they are remote from what really matters in his thought, and in some degree bulwarks against it. These aspects of Kant bear little or no relation to the Kant who, in the range of new concepts he produces, demonstrates an extraordinary sensitivity to the possibilities modernity makes available to thought. The ‘scheme’, the Tat der Vernunft or factum rationis, the ‘sign of history’ in The Conflict of the Faculties, the concept of the sublime in the third Critique, of the present in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and the public in ‘Towards a Perpetual Peace’: the innovative power of such ideas is truly startling, and repeatedly takes us aback. Kant is extremely responsive to his tumultuous times, though he is as much inclined to defend himself against as open up to them. His work itself is a succession of events, new events in and for thought, but which he is repeatedly inclined to deflect or smother. His contemporaries, however, knew very well that lightning was striking, that modernity was emerging in Kant’s career itself: for Hölderlin or Fichte (or, as we shall see later, Kleist), the Critiques were events, and represented new historical beginnings in themselves. There can be no return to Kant, says Proust. Any such idea is idle: Kant’s time is not ours. But that does

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not mean that his time is at an end, nor that we cannot or must not repeat the Kantian move. To the contrary: Kant remains ‘the originary matrix of all philosophy of history’ (KA: 11). Modern history has no coherent form and does not constitute a narrative. It is a texture of comings and goings, of interruptions. Kant is deeply enmeshed and participates in the appearance of modern history. Furthermore, for the first time, he thinks it, but also recoils astonished from his thought. To some extent, we must therefore read Kant against the grain, extricating an occluded and even buried Kant from the familiar one, from within the Kantian system. Proust insists that we should read the Critiques as a whole, but as involving a process of discovery with many halts, fausses pistes, misgivings and retrenchments along the way. In effect, she therefore reads them backwards, from what she takes to be their terminus ad quem. Kant continually expresses his amazement at the ideas upon which he happens, at the possibility of a ‘Copernican revolution’ in thought.5 He cannot reconcile himself to what he is daring to think. But that ambivalence in itself is gripping. It was Kant above all who understood that, at the end of the eighteenth century, history was breaking up, though, as he also understood, the break-up did not give birth to a new history, but rather to modernity as the ‘Idea of history’ (KA: 15–16; cf. Proust 1995b: 163). Kant grasps this early, in his account of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Everything is given in a temporal form, appears in and as a determination of time. Kant discovers, as an a priori, the very form of time; not, however, as a synthesis, but in that it affects us. Together with the form of time, he also discovers sensibility as an originary power. Modernity gives birth to a concept of temporality that dispenses with consecutive, interlinked epochs, in which a given time is not deemed automatically to follow on from an anterior one, a concept in which time appears as naissance not renaissance. But the only means of knowing time in this guise is ‘affect and its reflection in the actor or witness’ (KA: 17).6 From the Transcendental Aesthetic onward, everywhere Kant turns, he encounters equally valid but mutually irreconcilable concepts, antinomies, both those he famously and explicitly sets down in the first Critique and others (for Reason is conflictual, and there are different regimes of antinomy). Kant continually seeks final resolutions to the questions he raises for Reason, but the concerns at issue are not amenable to Reason’s terms, and thus Reason unceasingly produces questions in and from the previous resolutions themselves. Antinomies are ‘incontournable’, insurmountable (Proust 1985: 41), and their rule spells an endless dialectic and interminable disunion. Now if the antinomies are

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irreducible, that gives priority to ‘the regime of affect [l’affectabilité]’, for it ‘is antinomic’ from the start (KA: 64). Thus concepts in a sense dissolve into affect; or rather, in Proust’s terms, they are ‘reflections of affect’, ‘positions’ or ‘postulates’ of an affection (KA: 128).7 The mind will necessarily cast affect into the form of concepts, but concepts are secondary, have no pre-existing hold in the mind or on the world. They are produced by the impact of forces on sensibility, and the affective complex thus produced. With this account of sensibility, Kant turns towards a concept of the historical spontaneity to which sensibility responds or which it apprehends.8 The two belong together, and their co-emergence and intimate connection is the mark of modernity. Modernity is inseparable from an impression of historical immediacy that is an affect in the first instance. We will briefly chart the stages by which, according to Proust, Kant edges fitfully towards a new estimation of sensibility, Empfänglichkeit, receptivity. The first Critique asserts that Reason is a power of synthesis which produces the ‘ “regulatory Idea” ’ (KA: 23). Synthesis is given only in the Idea, which is the domain of Reason, free of the limits of experience. But Kant conceives of Reason as producing progressively larger and more ambitious syntheses, which would seem to imply the possibility of a synthesis beyond synthesis, says Proust, a synthesis of Ideas, a kind of ‘archi-synthesis’ beyond and determining a radical limit to Reason, which would then only be apprehensible in terms of affect (KA: 71). But this is precisely the conclusion from which Kant turns away. In the second Critique, he seeks to get round the problem he has created for himself by recasting Reason, thinking of it as producing, not syntheses, but the factum rationis (the ‘fact of reason’). Here the indisputable fact would seem to be that practical reason is the a priori, transcendental condition for morality. Reason becomes the power of freedom and is thetic not synthetic. But here again Kant encounters a major difficulty: unlike a synthesis, a thesis does not bring together the diverse into a form of stasis. It is inextricable from time, history, the world of the senses, and therefore cannot strictly be either transcendental or an a priori after all. Thus Kant’s account of the factum rationis fails to deliver him from his original problem, which continues to haunt him. The (moral) Law in the second Critique ought by definition to be beyond the historical or sensory world. Yet it is a factum, and as such also a datum, a given, and therefore (in Kantian terms) necessarily sensible. Furthermore, if the Law is truly beyond time, is it not curious that we should be able to respect it – for Kant, a crucial principle – since respect is a sentiment, a feeling, a kind of receptivity, bound to the temporal world? Once again, Kant is unable to dismiss the claims that

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historicity and sensibility or affect make on his attention, because his thought itself keeps turning in their direction. He can only repeatedly bracket them off, peremptorily insisting that the Law is unaffected by time. But he remains dissatisfied, and comes back to the question of historicity in the third Critique. The third Critique is eminently available to a historico-political reading, firstly, in that, for Kant, aesthetic freedom is not a freedom that at once accepts obligation, as in the second Critique, but is a freedom to experiment, and experimentation involves a certain position relative to historical time; and secondly, in that aesthetic freedom is shared, communicated, invokes a sensus communis, which implies or can imply a politics. Frustrated by the difficulty of trying to protect Reason and synthesis from historicity, in the third Critique, Kant discovers another, more flexible form of synthesis, free synthesis, the non-synthetic synthesis with no rules involved that is the sentiment of beauty. This is a nascent synthesis that announces a new beginning. But what holds good for art or culture cannot hold good for history: the work of art or culture may be produced out of nature, as a perfection or greater good of nature, but this kind of synthesis is impossible in the case of history, since, as Kant everywhere says, man is not perfectible. In the sentiment of beauty, then, the third Critique appears to opt for a surrogate release from ‘the laws of nature’ which at the same time promises a freedom from the question of freedom itself. Kant retreats once more from an acceptance of his implicit ‘logic of sensibility’ into a thought of aesthetic pleasure as a state of harmony beyond history. In the Analytic of the Sublime, however, he finally de-pathologizes sensibility, bringing it and its cognates, receptivity, passivity and affect, back into focus, and history sharply back into the frame. The modus aestheticus now appears as in fact derivative of the modus patheticus, which de-aestheticizes the aesthetic, revealing the transient affect and mutable world beneath the sentiment of beauty. Here, at last, sensibility to time becomes the properly Kantian motif. The wellspring of Kant’s truly significant historical thought is present in the Analytic of the Sublime, rather than in most of his actual historical writings.9 This is not to say, however, that the Analytic of the Sublime somehow ‘triumphs’ at the expense of the rest of the third Critique. If it represents an unprecedented grasp of a modern theme, it does so in response to the third antinomy in the first Critique, the thesis in which states that natural causality cannot be the only one thinkable, and that therefore freedom exists, the antithesis that ‘There is no freedom; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with the laws of nature’ (Kant 2007 [1787]: 409). The third antinomy is deeply written into the intricate

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Kantian development I have just described. Indeed, a great deal of my own book might be thought of as circling round it as a cardinal focus for contemporary thought, recalling that both thesis and antithesis are defensible and neither can prove victorious any more than, historically, modernity and anti-modernity have been able to vanquish each other. The experience of the sublime is born out of and inconceivable apart from receptivity, a receptivity to a movement whereby an indeterminate force, what Proust significantly refers to as a ‘counter-nature’ (KA: 104; cf. 1995b: 170), displaces, transports or overturns nature, the given. The structure of this experience is an intricate structure of affect: ‘enthusiasm, chagrin, anger, sadness, exaltation’ are all part of it (PO: 43). Kant’s great modern discovery is not that of the faculties, but rather the recognition of a power beyond them that is the foundation of the faculties (and equally of the ‘formal intuitions’ of time and space within the Transcendental Deduction, KA: 71). In the first instance, imagination, reason, judgement and taste are all an openness to affect, a power of being affected; or, to put the point differently, the faculties require a Bewegungskraft, a power to move or ‘interest’ them in the first place. This power is sensibility, and is not to be confused with ‘empirical’ responsiveness to objects, which is just one aspect of it, and for which the Kantian term is Sinnlichkeit (KA: 60). Thus if practical reason, for example, produces a knowledge of the Law through the sentiment of respect (KA: 46–7), here sensibility appears as an originary Neigung (inclination), the capacity of turning in a particular direction, of ‘leaning’ or ‘curving’ towards something (KA: 49). Kant brings out the ‘inaugural demand’ of a ‘passive reception’ which is a priori, and this concern with an ‘originary passivity’ is crucial to Proust (Badiou 1993a: 246). She calls it her ‘pathétique transcendentale’, her ‘transcendental theory of affect or the passions’ (KA 39–73; cf. Badiou 2001a: 101). Proust also has a theory of the event which is intimately related to this ‘pathétique’, for the event and sensibility are indissolubly linked. Kant finally inverts the structure that has always relegated sensibility to a position subordinate to understanding and reason. In doing so, however, he also unleashes the modern Idea of history, since ‘originary passivity’ is a susceptibility to a ‘frappe première’ (Badiou 2001a: 101). This means that sensibility or pure affect dwells in an unalterably historical world as a pure spontaneity (Selbstwirkung) adequate and responsive to the arrival of the new. The discovery of modern sensibility is inseparable from the discovery of modern time. Reason cannot grasp time other than successively and synthetically, in the play ‘of representations situated in time’ and ‘submitted to the rule of contrast

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and affinity’ (KA: 103). The differently directed, antithetical forces indicated in the Kantian antinomies rather point in the direction of the rupture that is an event. For in a pre-Hegelian epoch witnessing the first sparks of modernity (Kant’s), or a post-Hegelian, late modernity (Proust’s), with no dialectical synthesis thinkable in either, antinomies produce only explosions or ruptures. It is in the Analytic of the Sublime that Kant countenances the possibility of such a rupture as an experience available to pure Empfänglichkeit. What is at stake in the event is the (indeterminate, ‘supersensible’) transcendental object = x (in the first Critique) which is logically necessary but beyond empirical bounds, an etwas or ‘something in general’. The stake is historical and political, since the subject of this event undergoes an encounter with groundlessness. The given is ‘violenté, soulevé’ (‘violated, stirred up’, KA: 21); the arrival of an event tears the substance out of the world that is apparently ours. But what kind of concept of the event is at issue, here? In Chapter IV of Kant: Le Ton de l’histoire, Proust poses the question of the Kantian characterization of the event, drawing an analogy between the work of art and the historical event. Genius is the force that produces the work of art as an ‘unexpected, new, unprecedented form’ (KA: 116), one for which we have no prior measure or place, which cannot be conceived of as a Nachbild (copy) of an Urbild (original form) but is simultaneously both together, a ‘first dramatization’ (KA: 119). So, too, there is equally an inspirational ‘historical genius’ which does not take its measure from prior history but rather gives a measure to it. An event presents the Idea of a world without matter, representation, form or figure, as a ‘point de mire [object in view, aim]’ or a ‘mirage’ of ‘all pure experience of liberty’ (KA: 136). But what does liberty mean, here? The significant liberty is not the freedom of dogmatists or empiricists, freedom of choice or a reasoned freedom. Nor is it a moral freedom, the freedom of practical reason in the second Critique. Certainly, the liberty designated in the second Critique is a liberty against nature which dismantles my amour-propre, my presumption, in a moment of passivity to the Law, ‘absolute obligation’ (KA: 149–50). But as such, it is, as freedom, unknowable, undemonstrable and impenetrable. It appears only in disappearing into the Law. But in the third Critique, Kant introduces a different concept of liberty, ‘sublime liberty’ (KA: 153). This is made available in violent, savage and formless natural spectacles. But it is equally present, says Proust, in the events that, here and there, irregularly, tear history apart. It arouses, not a consciousness of the moral Law, but an ‘indeterminate sentiment’ (KA: 154), a ‘sublimity of the mind’ that ‘cannot be con-

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tained in any sensible form’ (Kant 2007 [1787]: 40). Properly speaking, there is no experience of the sublime as such; there are only sublime experiences in which we are aware of a finality that, again, is ‘counternatural’, independent of nature (as the Revolution is, Proust 1985: 45). Where the moral Law is inseparable from a feeling of respect, sublime experience is inseparable from astonishment or wonder. This has to do with the recognition of the impossibility of a representation, since no prior rules or principles for it exist. Where moral freedom immediately knows itself as commitment and a capacity for action, sublime liberty can find no representation for itself without lapsing into self-contradiction, and does not, in the first instance, know itself as a subjective capacity at all. It designates only an openness to affect. It does not defeat or destroy the subject, however, but stretches its powers, calls them into question, renders them problematic, demanding an experimental attitude. Sublime liberty appears as a moment of arrest or suspension, when the ‘powerlessness’ of an imaginary becomes evident (KA: 163). The sublime is the invisible point within visibility, the moment of a reversal or perversion of nature. As such, it determines no future course, is indifferently both ‘promise and menace’ (KA: 164) and may be either repeated, or given an ‘institutional form’, a ‘form of domination’ (KA: 166). What is sure is that it inaugurates a new manner of thinking, and this new thought is ‘public’ (KA: 174). In sum, the sublime experience is an experience of the historical limit of a form. Thus whilst sublime experience is rare, it is possible for the subject to remain more or less close to the thought of it. It is on the basis of such thought that Kant broaches the question of modernity and the event, of the event as modern and the event of modernity. Kant sees the Lumières as expressing ‘the chance of history beginning at last’ (Proust, PO: 62; cf. 1995b: 163). He is the first modern philosopher because he is the first to think the possibility of pure, absolute, originary historical beginnings; his philosophy therefore ‘opens up a time we call modern’ (KA: 9). This time cannot conceivably be exhausted: once discovered as such, modern time is permanently available to us, there is no retreat from it. Modernity constitutes a definitive supersession of everything that went before it. It is what cannot but be there to trouble us. Of course, modernity abounds in failures, ‘aborted starts’ and ‘still-born opportunities’. But it is always possible to redeem modern time from its disasters, however difficult the task may on occasions seem to be (KA: 35). With modernity, we arrive at an understanding or experience of beginnings as bearing no relation to any overarching historical narrative. Beginnings appear fitfully, ‘par “intermittences” ’ (DT: 12, my italics), as historical striations, like

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meteors in a night sky or the play of light upon dark water, or ‘comme en pointillé’, as stipplings of history (PO: 41). Historical time is not given as a whole. It neither anticipates nor seeks any historical ‘fulfilment’ (KA: 12–13). The only possible completions of time are punctual and fugitive. ‘Manquera toujours la fin de l’histoire’: history will never reveal itself in or as any awesome totality.10 The ‘solar view of history’, which sought to see history whole, from above, is definitively in ruins (KA: 81). Nor can any particular epoch claim to offer the ‘solar view’. History is ‘nocturnal’, not solar (KA: 345). But we should not therefore lament the ‘senselessness’ or ‘desolating contingency’ of human affairs (KA: 82). Rather, for Proust as for Badiou, ‘from now on, we depend on the event’ (Badiou 1991a: 20). The modern question is not ‘Are we moving with or in the direction of history?’ Nor is it ‘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”’ (KA 17)? How may we divine their direction and get the measure of their present site? Accordingly, Proust also offers us a theory of subjectification as an adaptation to a historically intermittent world which hinges on the modern discovery of sensibility. (Compare her critique of the Cartesian subject, 1995b: 173–4). Kant is the first modern thinker because he grasps modernity as inauguration. Inauguration is the consequence of an event. The historical event is not a Heideggerian ‘unveiling’ (Proust 1990b: 116), not a revelation of infinity within finitude, but exposes the Abgrund (abyss) beneath the historical Grund (ground). The experience of an event is a certain kind of modern experience of groundlessness, and eventuates in the modern subject. Existing series are ungrounded, with nothing binding them in place or decreeing that they must forever remain thus. They are therefore always open to interruption. For Proust, the subject’s experience of the event is that of the power of the world itself in its indeterminacy, as a form without form that is the condition of subjective liberty, which in turn discovers the possibility of origination, in itself, and as it is available to a subject. This discovery, however, has nothing to do with the banality of a subject’s supposed arrival at self-knowledge or self-fulfilment. It is rather the discovery of a power of surrender and is inseparable from sensibility. Thus Proust’s theory of the event corresponds to her valuation of sensibility. For ‘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). It is as sensibility that the subject of an event is passive to a power outside the time of natural causality. No knowledge can anticipate the shock of the event, which ‘disarms’ or ‘seizes’

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the mind, breaking up its solidified formations and producing an affective tumult (‘un battement de sentiments’, KA: 156). In the process of subjectification, the shock of the blow comes first, and affects a passive subject. Inauguration is possible, not because a subject or subjects cause it to happen, but because something happens to cause a subject (or induce a ‘character trait’, Proust 1990b: 100–2). In this sense, modernity is not produced by modern subjects. It is not a matter of subjective action at all. The event produces the subject, and in doing so 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 is of an etwas; it has no objective status. Furthermore, the event expires as it arrives, is no more than the ‘trace that it leaves’ (Proust 1995a: 49). In this respect, ‘affected subjectivity’ is minimal. The subject is emptied of what it had formerly been, but otherwise exists only as the possibility of something new. However, this is not at all to disempower the subject: quite the reverse. Proustian ethics is both legislatory and methodical, and legislation and method together function as a regulation and a discipline of sensibility. Since its condition is historical freedom, the subject must prescribe for itself, must abandon itself to being affected by a present, embark on a ‘new trajectory’ and become ‘the legislator of the maxim for its own actions’ (Proust 1995b: 173; KA: 89). 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’ (Kant 1997 [1789]: 12). It is experimental and takes risks, discovering and rediscovering itself with each new case.11 The subject thus emerges as what Proust calls ‘bravura’. Bravura actively and spontaneously decrees its own laws and accepts the consequences. It declares itself: subjectivity requires a declaration, and to declare a thought is at once to practise it. The declaration is ‘a sort of performative’ (Proust 1994a: 16; cf. PO: 39). Kant discovers a ‘performative liberty’ as he discovers a new ‘sensibility to time’ (PO: 40). In making its declaration, the Proustian subject becomes an example; that is, an Exempel not a Beispiel, not a particular example ‘represented as comprised in the universal according to concepts’, but an example to be followed, a call to others (KA: 119). The Law is thus, follow it. A crucial founding injunction runs from one event and its subjects to others and relates them, making of their persistence the power that alone constitutes true history. It is clear that, for Proust,

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important though the French Revolution is to the late Kant, he thinks of the Enlightenment as a more powerful form of emancipation and ‘experience of liberty’ than any revolution (KA: 92). Here, certainly, the injunction that founds the subject derives from the lesson of the Lumières: ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!’ (Kant 1991 [1784]: 43). This is the imperative form of transcendental freedom, and expresses ‘the aptitude to begin a new state of things’ by oneself (Proust, ‘Introduction’ to Kant 1994: 14); or, says Proust, with Nietzsche in mind, ‘make present life liveable and resist the unliveable life’ (DR: 105). This last assertion is cardinally Proustian. But Proustian ethics does not solely consist in bravura. It also involves casuistry, in Proust’s particular sense of that word. If the result of a given event is a radical break with an established order, the break requires that its subjects become casuists. The theological casuist resolves cases of conscience in doubtful questions of conduct and duty where there is no exact, prior guide but where the theological dispensation in itself provides a certain orientation. So, too, Proustian casuistry, and the ‘judiciousness’ that must accompany it, go back for their orientation from the historical rupture to what Hannah Arendt called history as ‘a book of tales’ (KA: 122),12 tales which display the wit (Witz or ingenium) of history, its power of invention, and offer historical modes of understanding, theoretical models or exempla. Armed not least with the knowledge these provide, the subject as casuist engages in a minute, sophisticated, subtle and precise investigation of both the possible conditions and the implications of the historical break. This is necessary, because the consequences of events are not predetermined. I said that Proust identifies subjectification with a refusal to live the unliveable life, to accept the intolerability of the world at hand. That refusal consists partly of a will to repetition. 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 repeatedly coinciding with ‘the power of initiality’ itself (KA: 35). The freedom at stake in the experience of the sublime is a freedom conferred as an irresistible power lays hold of us.13 It can return only in the form of another new beginning. The Proustian subject wills this ‘recommencement’ or hearkens to its eventuality. He or she has a ‘historical ear’, is ‘attentive and vigilant’, observes ‘the comings and goings’, the ‘arrivals and disappearances’ of historical time (KA: 120, 319). Attentiveness, however, is neither a theoretical nor an ethical but a ‘pathetic’ virtue requiring ‘historical sensibility’ (KA: 314). It ‘listens to the tone’ of history (KA: 121, italics mine), ‘takes the measure’ of historical time as one takes the measure of music (KA: 319). In his

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classification of the beaux arts (Kant 1987 [1790]: 50–4), Kant places music lower than poetry or painting, as an art of sensation whose Ideas are at best floating and indeterminate, indeed, mere sensations of Ideas. But this, says Proust, is how matters appear according to the explicit logic of the third Critique. The more clandestine ‘pathetic’ logic of the Kantian project has quite different implications. Here ‘affectability’ is immediately at stake in our relation to music (KA: 322), and music appears as the Ursprache, the original speech of all the arts. Music neither produces Ideas nor expresses them. It seeks rather to affect the listener and thereby stimulate Ideas in him or her, if fleetingly, tenuously, here and there. So, too, history throws up evanescent sense of ‘the most transient and pointed [aigu] kind’ (KA: 324). This historical ‘music’ is not of course regular, still less celestial or sweetly harmonious: ‘It cries, grates, suffocates. It groans, sometimes remains obstinately mute’ (KA: 320). But then, there is no homogeneity to music itself. Music gives, not the universal within the particular, but the universal as the particular (compare Jambet, later). So, too, in the historical break or rupture, the universality of the Idea coincides with an ‘extreme singularity’ (KA: 325). Musical singularity is a question of tone, not sound. Tone is the singular modulation of sound and unrepeatable, yet in its very unrepeatability it has the purity of the historical instance itself, the ‘une fois’ that is ‘pure “fois” ’ (KA: 330), the instance beyond concatenation (‘instance unenchaînable’, KA: 331). True, there is another tonality of history, a counter-tone. The ‘little phrase’ of the event ‘leaves only plaint and melancholy’ behind it (KA: 332). This is the tone of historical relapse. But whilst the Proustian subject will hear the plaint, he or she will continue keenly to listen out for ‘the shift or leap in tone’, or the hint of a concord ‘never given’ in itself – for there can be no final synthesis (KA: 340) – even if it is always in ‘a minor mode’ (KA: 336). Interestingly, however, there is another dimension to Proust’s conception of the subject in (intermittent) history, one that rarely if ever appears in the other philosophers in this book. For she also thinks intermittency specifically as a feature of or within the present. This, she maintains again, is properly Kantian. Kant’s writings repeatedly turn out to involve responses to a contemporary scene: ‘Idea for a Universal History’ reacts to Herder, The Conflict of the Faculties to the French Revolution, ‘Towards a Perpetual Peace’ to the peace of Basle in 1795, and so on. Again and again, Kant’s works pose the question of historical orientation: ‘Where are we?’ (KA: 307). These texts are histories of and for the present; they ask questions both about the events that have immediately determined the present, and the events that can and must

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arrive to disrupt it. Kant problematizes his epoch; he turns it into a question and provides a response to it. As Foucault suggested, in ‘What is the Enlightenment?’, one witnesses the appearance of the present as a philosophical event to which the philosopher who speaks about it himself belongs . . . With this text on the Aufklärung, one sees philosophy for the first time problematize its own discursive actuality . . . (Foucault 1984: 575; quoted KA: 309)

The subject is ideally a critic, a practitioner of critique, critical thought, which turns out to be a thought of present crisis. The very activity required of the modern subject is ‘to undertake a critique of the present’ (KA: 309). However, Proust is not more or less discreetly converting Kant into the philosopher of the era of the French Revolution or a late eighteenthcentury presentist. The relevant historical relations are by no means so simple. Critique does not get its truth from history. The historical and critical events are rather two coincident presents. Nor is it possible to talk of an event in practice on the one hand and an event in theory on the other, for they intervene in and condition each other. The subject must rather imagine Kant’s period as intricately fissured by different but connected events. Critique is a mode in which the philosopher examines the possibilities of his or her time, both the chances that open up and the openings that close; the whole field, as it were, of contemporary intermittency. But this is not so that ‘historical lessons can be learnt’. The subject rather preserves the traces of the complex variegation or streaking of history and the struggles to which it attests, the intense vitality of historical interruption. He or she thus contradicts three dominant modes of historical imagination (‘Vorstellungsarten historiques’, KA: 281): that of the Schwärmer, the visionary or enthusiast who, whether Rousseauist or revolutionary, despairs of the evil in history and demands that it be purged; that of the meliorist who asserts the possibility or likelihood of more or less gradual progress; and that of the Abderite who is persuaded of the ‘eternal return’ of the historical illusion and retires to the sidelines to gaze laughingly at the spectacle. The Proustian subject is none of these three. Kant thinks the present, she says, as a Kampfplatz (battleground) in which the thinking subject intervenes. This intervention is both analytical and dialectical. But the subject also intervenes experimentally, by way of risk and self-exposure, in an effort to invent new hypotheses, open up new spaces for thought and practice, push the Ideas they produce to their limits, and refine the historical sensibility (KA: 285–6); all this in the interests, not of arriving at a cold lump of truth, but rather of insisting on the pos-

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sibility of liberty, an insistence that matters in itself. For though liberty cannot endure, the possibility of the arrival of liberty is always present. Proust is not the only recent thinker to have made a lot depend on the Analytic of the Sublime, and some readers may even have a slightly weary sense of déjà vu. But this is to ignore the significance of the context of her argument. Ours is an age that believes it has experienced the end of history. But this is not chiefly a question, à la Fukuyama, of any supposed consummation of history in the triumph of Western capitalism and present-day liberal democracy as a final, universal regime. The truth is rather the reverse, though it is clearly what inspires compensatory but non-serious fantasies of the Fukuyama brand: the end of history comes not as termination but as closure. History has indeed ended for us, but precisely because we have understood that it has no end, and therefore, in a sense, proceeds indifferently, can offer us no secure foundation for thought. Yet, at the same time, from Paris 1789 to Barcelona 1936 to Berlin 1989, history and modernity continue to arrive, together. This recurrence of the modern moment, the moment of the beginning of history, within modernity, is what defines it as such. By the same token, however, modernity is also defined by its selfseparation, its declension from itself. The contradiction here, again, is that of the third antinomy (KA: 83). In Kant, says Proust, historical time unfolds as a crossing or interlacing of two times.14 On the one hand, there is the determined temporality of natural causality, synthesized time, whose features are linearity, succession, concatenation, ‘necessary and universal laws’, regular series ‘which no act of freedom seems capable’ of disturbing (KA: 80). On the other hand, unpredictably – and causelessly, however a causality may be retrospectively constructed – the new will always ‘leap’ into the world of determined time and break the serial chain (Proust 1996: 51). This is because of the unsynthesizability of time, its existence as pure, diverse ‘time before synthesis’. In this second time, a conversion or a revolution or the emergence of an unattended form is always possible. The two aspects of modern time are interinvolved: the one is the underside of the other, not least as event and remainder. In the experience of the sublime, unsynthesizable time does not cancel out synthetic time but is ‘apprehended at [its] heart’ (PO: 45). Equally, however, temporal syntheses ‘reconstitute themselves and the world pursues its course again’ (KA: 87). The paradox of history is that it ‘trembles, shivers, vibrates, moves’, but also ceaselessly relapses ‘into its “dogmatic slumber” ’ (KA: 8). Beneath the empirical determinations of history, there is an unlocalizable, unspecifiable, ‘indeterminate something in general [un etwas indeterminé]’ (the transcendental object = x, KA: 85). But events don’t have

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to happen and, for the more part, don’t happen. Modernity doesn’t happen much either: it is ‘“séquentielle et rare” ’ (DR: 175, n42).15 Proust understands history in terms of events as rare and scattered or discontinuous sublime experiences of liberty. As Badiou says, like his own and Mallarmé’s, as we have seen, Proust’s is a ‘nocturnal’ as opposed to a ‘solar’ theory of history, but it is also ‘étoilée’ (‘bestarred’, ‘star-studded’, Badiou 1993a: 240). In this respect, ‘initiality’ must be counterposed to a formidable power of inertia. According to what appears to be the inexorable logic of intermittency, inertia commonly prevails and is the rule. Not only must events leave a historical remainder; since events are rare, the remainder must comprise the larger part of historical experience. Hence, if the moral Idea in Kant is inseparable from the sentiment of respect, the political Idea is inseparable from a ‘mélancolie enthousiaste’ (KA: 59). Proust repeatedly returns to enthusiasm and melancholy together (e.g. 1985: 48). Paradoxically, the melancholic subject has ‘mourned all origin’ but also continues to wait and watch out for ‘the risks and chances of the event’ (KA: 105). Or to put the point the other way round: alongside the Kant who both bears witness to and embodies the inauguration of modernity, we should set a Kant who is Rousseauist and even biblical in tone, deeply sceptical of the Enlightenment persuasion of civilization and progress. This Kant experienced the seemingly interminable historical manifestations of ‘folly’, ‘childish vanity’, ‘pretence and glittering misery’ as an ‘affliction’ for thought, inducing ‘a kind of distress which threatens moral fibre’ (KA: 105; Kant 2001 [1963]: 12, 21, 66). Proust thinks Kant and modernity together, as successions of turbulent upheavals or spasmodic outbreaks on the one hand, and ebbs, stagnancies and counterflows on the other. Kant not only articulates the beginning of modernity; he thinks in and as its emergence. This is modernity as we still live it, intermittently. In order to understand that fully, however, we need to address, not only the Kantian problematic of modernity, but the deeper and more sombre colourings it takes on in Benjamin. We shall follow Proust as she explores them, before asking whether it was not the poets above all who, unencumbered by the exigencies of a philosophical programme, most compellingly took hold of the major paradoxes at the heart of modernity, and presented them to us before philosophy properly saw the need to reckon with them. CATASTROPHE IN PERMANENCE Pace Badiou, Proust has more than one ‘classic point of reference’.16 From her earliest writings onwards, she also focuses her thought

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around Benjamin. Indeed, there is a sense in which she balances or oscillates between Kant and Benjamin, in which they exemplify a double-bind or take the form of the Moebius-strip within her work. But though she attends to the importance to Benjamin’s thought of the German Kantstreit of 1915–20 and links him to both a dispute with the phenomenological and neo-Kantian interpretations of the Kantian legacy in early twentieth-century Germany and the modern collapse of the Kantian syntheses (HC: 10–12, 15–18, 129–30), she seldom puts Kant and Benjamin together at any length. Rather, with Benjamin, Proust arduously pursues her thought a second time through,17 but casts it in a radically different mode and tone. Certainly, if we do not place her readings of Benjamin and Kant together, there are limits to our grasp of her philosophy and her understanding of modernity. Proust thinks history as a relation between event and remainder. But where, in Kant, that relation is a question of the scattered seeds of new beginnings, Proust’s Benjamin thinks modernity above all in catastrophic terms, and therefore in the negative. If modernity ‘radicalizes’ the thought that began it, Kant’s (Proust 1997e: 400), it does so above all in Benjamin. Though she never exactly says it, Proust clearly sees Benjamin as coming at the end of the historical parenthesis that begins with Kant; or rather, he brings closure to the parenthesis, but in an unclosed form, insofar as the closure in question involves a seemingly interminable repetition intrinsic to what Benjamin means by catastrophe, and makes the end unending. To clarify the logic of this, we shall have to go through Proust’s concept of a temporal ‘doublure’ in Benjamin, of the underside of modern time, the two times of modernity that correspond in some degree to Kant’s.18 This will involve rethinking the Kantian structure of intermittency. For in Proust’s account of it, the doubleness of time is itself double; that is, it has both a Kantian and a Benjaminian inflection. It is between these two inflections that, compellingly, Proust rethinks the modern predicament. Proust’s understanding of Benjamin is everywhere rooted in his concept of ‘catastrophe in permanence’ (Benjamin 2002b: 164). ‘That things “just go on” is the catastrophe’, writes Benjamin. ‘It is not that which is approaching but that which is’.19 ‘Catastrophe in permanence’ is the unending failure of the human world to prove adequate to, let alone halt the destruction it unendingly inflicts.20 Catastrophe is not a question of the singular calamity, outrage or ‘trauma’ – nothing could be less Benjaminian than such an equation. If the equation is a contemporary one, that is because we have come to believe that ‘[e]vil prowls on the extreme edges of things [aux extrêmes]. The extreme is evil . . . Such is the credo of [an epoch] bursting with good conscience

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but indigent in thought’ (Proust 1995b: 168). Contrary to our selfprotective reflexes, catastrophe is not a question of extraordinary and haphazard breaks with the supposedly familiar world: acts of terror, natural disasters, epidemics. These have no bearing on any serious thought of catastrophe, for they appear as exceptions whose function is to demonstrate the validity of an eminently non-catastrophic rule. Benjamin and Proust both repeatedly insist that, to the contrary, if anything marks out our world, it is that, in the well-known formula, the exception has visibly ‘ “become the rule” ’ (HC: 76, italics mine), an idea pervasive in Proust’s work (see e.g. 1989a; 1990b; 1995a). The ninth of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, and above all the justly famous meditation on the Angel of History, captures his concept of catastrophe precisely. This is where any serious thought of catastrophe would logically have to begin, which is why I repeat it yet again: Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1979: 260)

History everywhere produces vistas of ruined landscapes: this is the angel’s knowledge. The ‘inevitable catastrophic piling-up [entassement] of the past’ continues without cease. Yet the human world does not see as the angel sees, and cannot but continue to recoil indefinitely ‘into the future’, adding to the ruins as it proceeds (HC: 34–5). Those who seek to bring an end to ‘catastrophe in permanence’ are always both ‘ “too early” ’ and ‘ “too late” ’ (Benjamin 1991: 1.695). They try to steal a march on history only to find that it has tricked them once more, that, whilst they were looking in another direction, catastrophe confirmed itself in place yet again, and had always already receded into the past. This turns all modern politics ‘into a theatrical bouffonnerie’ (HC: 77). The tone of the political and moral discourses surrounding us is always and immitigably that of Pyrrhic victory.21 The patient is no longer there. Benjamin thinks the relationship between event and remainder through in the most rigorously paradoxical terms. The two times are the time of the eternal return and the time of the event. For Benjamin as for Kant, says Proust, the new always ruptures the series; but the rupture appears as a banally repetitive gesture. The disclosure of this principle of novelty as repetition is intrinsic to modernity. Modernity

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discovers the time of the eternal return, in a Benjaminian rather than Nietzschean sense. The time of the eternal return has a starting point. It begins with modernity; indeed, it is the dominant time of modernity. Modern time is constituted in and as the eternal return of the new, of the coup or Benjaminian shock. Automatically, unmasterably, the new eternally returns as shock, shock after shock, and therefore as the same. This might seem to be the logical consequence of modern inventions, transformations, technologies. But Benjamin puts matters the other way round. Modernity finally deprives us of the possibility of thinking ‘a beyond-time’ (‘un au-delà du temps’, DT: 14), theological, Hegelian or other. Benjamin understood that, with the onset of modernity, we are no longer able to furnish history with any horizon of ultimate sense, in the way that the progressive totalization of the dialectic did. Events no longer provide foundations or serve as the origins of ‘durable institutions’ (Proust, DT: 8; 1995a: 48). They appear as pure, discrete beginnings that are themselves their own end, proceeding and proliferating with a mad speed. Whatever the ambiguities of his famous essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction in its various versions, for Benjamin, the time of the age of mechanical reproduction is above all the infernal time of modern eternity. Conrad captured this infernal time in Heart of Darkness (see Proust 1990b: 113). It is the time of the unliveable life, a destructive time that disgusts and disheartens, producing the modern ‘loss of experience’ referred to in the wellknown passage in Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ (Benjamin 1979: 83–4), and manifesting itself as ‘catastrophe in permanence’. Nowhere is Benjamin’s point better communicated than in his meditation on Baudelaire’s writings on Meryon’s engraved views of Paris. In the Paris of the second Empire, ‘an inexhaustible wealth of variations’ is available (Benjamin 1973 [1969]: 37). But these also involve the eclipse of worlds: the arrival of gaslight brutally removes the night sky. ‘The moon and the stars are no longer worth mentioning’ (Benjamin 1973 [1969]: 50). From the start, the modern city is indelibly marked by its own decrepitude. In Meryon’s engravings of a city convulsed by the onset of modernity, instantaneous and simultaneous construction and destruction hang everywhere over the city, like a storm cloud, miasma or plague of locusts. The effect is extraordinary. But what is crucial is the doubleness of the logic at stake. Here inconsequence and inexorability join in a single figure. That is what ‘catastrophe in permanence’ means: Benjamin’s Angel of History stares incredulously, eyes open, because the truth is astonishing. Unlike the fatum of the ancients, modern fate does not hold the world in its iron grip as the necessary logic of what must be and cannot be otherwise. Its grip is that of the

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endless, infernal return of the new in its groundlessness. Paradoxically, in a Benjaminian version of the third antinomy, the logic of modern fate is the logic of what does not have to be, can be endlessly otherwise and yet, for that very reason, remains as implacable as fate in the classical conception of it. This is what Proust calls ‘satanic modernity’. Though, in our implacable pursuit of our latest fresh purposes, we may hardly notice the uncanny rictus of history, satanic modernity everywhere grins at us mockingly, laughing all our new efforts to scorn by asserting, time and time again, that it has got there ahead of us. It bars all possible routes, because it has already tried them all. It even provides or underwrites the logic by which, with smoothness and ease, again and again, modern liberation reverses into modern domination, modern pacification into modern violence. ‘Catastrophe in permanence’ is the consequence of the eternal return. Satanic modernity jeers at all attempts to convert the eternal return into a linear temporality or historical narrative, scoffs at all progressive ideologies, all announcements of ‘modernization’, ceaselessly emptying them, letting us hear from the start the irony latent in them. One of the methodological objectives of Benjamin’s Arcades Project was ‘a historical materialism within which the idea of progress has been annihilated’ (Buck-Morss 1999 [1989]: 79). This objective was rather like Kafka’s, in Benjamin’s audacious account of him as evoking the ‘prehistorical’ character of our world.22 But if ‘catastrophe in permanence’ is the law of satanic modernity, it is doubly catastrophic. For modernity unremittingly destines the modern catastrophe to oblivion. Oblivion is what is at stake in the well-known account of the buckliche Männlein, the little hunchback in A Berlin Childhood. When Benjamin goes searching in the cellars of history, he finds that the objects of his search are not available to him: the little hunchback has already exacted ‘the half part of oblivion from everything to which I turned’ (Benjamin 2002a: 385). ‘Catastrophe in permanence’ remains catastrophic because oblivion ceaselessly erases catastrophe. Benjamin presents this work of forgetting as part of the modern ‘shock defence’, a protection from stimuli. For Baudelaire, the doubling of catastrophe in the forgetting of it is as awesome as anything else about Second Empire Paris. Hence derives Benjamin’s concept of modernity as dream-world. Catastrophe remains, in permanence, because of historicity itself. It is the disappearance or ungraspability of history, its very fugitive and ephemeral character, that makes forgetting possible and deprives the angel of any hold. However, only the onset of modernity lays this bare. Modernity massively accelerates the production of catastrophe. On the one hand, modern time is the time of the event, without unity,

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duration or memory: ‘events succeed one another with such speed that they cannot be the source either of durable inscriptions or of immutable foundations’ (Proust 1996: 48). On the other hand, modernity discovers the time of the eternal return, which is that of the event itself. The new incessantly breaks the serial chain, but in a banally repetitive gesture. If we have learnt anything about modernity by now, it is the Baudelairean lesson, that we confront modernity as a radical paradox in which innovation is inseparable from stasis. The shock of the new, its automatic and immediate disappearance and its premature desuetude have all become ritual. Thus modernity lays bare the permanence of catastrophe, making it blatant. It also threatens us with extreme indifference. For modern time is immobile and circular precisely where it unceasingly confirms our sense of historical opportunity, and insofar as it does so. ‘The circling [la ronde] of time is a dance of the devil or a witches’ sabbath’: hence the fact that, from Baudelaire to Nietzsche to Benjamin, it induces melancholy (HC: 53). It makes modernity melancholic at its root, even when – perhaps especially when – modern culture is at its most glitzy and self-celebrating and least obviously inclined to melancholy, most determined to repulse it.23 What is more, modernity bars all the avenues that might seem to promise an exit from our predicament. For ‘it has already tried them all’ (HC: 162). It abandons us to a labyrinth in which we are fated to wander for as long as we believe that we can escape it without paying a price. EXPLOSIONS OF JUSTICE Alongside this, however, we should set Proust’s reading of Benjamin on justice, starting with his concept of modern truth. Modernity leaves us with three possible relations to the world: firstly, ‘bavardage’, the great swell of chatter in a given historical world refusing to think beyond its own limits (HC: 140); secondly, the classic form of modern understanding, the sole one adequate to modernity’s openness to infinite commentary, literature; and thirdly, the experience of truth. This last has nothing to do with a ‘flat universalism’ (Benjamin 1991: 1.212). Truth is not ‘embodied in’ particulars: it is itself intrinsically particular, particular in a particular way. Like Badiou’s inexistents, it appears only on the basis of a prior exclusion and silence. It is speech where there was none before. Here ‘language appears as the matrix of justice’ (Benjamin 1991: 2.361), not in a judgement or a statement of affairs, but as it emerges obscurely, from obscure sources, as in lamentation, prophecy, malediction and benediction (the tone reversing that of bavardage).24 It

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is available only from the position of the victim of catastrophe. In the figure of the victim, the excluded and silenced, we grasp the truth of the whole, of ‘the false, lying totality’, as its reverse (Benjamin 1991: 1.181; Proust 1995c: 525). Here truth is rare, shocking, almost unbearable, and its condition is, after all, finality. It appears as parousia, sudden illumination, an inversion of or break with pervasive falsehood. Of the present, it can tell us only one thing, that it is bad news (HC: 179). It disenchants a situation, shows the dark face of things (‘monstrous, deformed, grotesque, grimacing, Luciferian’, HC: 137). But the movement in which truth appears is also that of its disappearance. The very experience of truth, its revelation, also destroys it (HC: 166). The moment of truth is evanescent, fleeting, and therefore necessarily appears discontinuously, with pauses. Truth occurs as a moment of justice that lays bare the omnipresence of a comprehensively normative injustice, and then disappears from our horizons. Proust calls this an ‘explosion of justice’ (HC: 10). Benjamin confirms but also austerely and bleakly deepens Kant’s understanding of the two faces of modernity. He takes the implications of the third antinomy to a different stage. For Benjamin, the event that matters is not the radical inauguration or unprecedented moment that it is in Kant, nor as in Badiou, an originating occasion within a limited set of domains in which truth is possible. It is not a radically new departure within a given sphere of human endeavour, but rather a redisposition or reconfiguration of historical temporality, ‘the experience of history within the Jetztzeit’. Jetztzeit literally means ‘now-time’, but the Benjaminian concept of the Jetztzeit is not to be understood as the present moment; it is rather its detonation. The Jetztzeit is ‘the time of the now . . . in which the continuum [of present moments] is exploded by a new experience of time’ (HC: 10). It is not so much an inauguration as a new connection or intervention. One expression of it would be the form of the thesis, to which Benjamin was so attracted, the ‘thesis’ being ‘language at a standstill’, a proposition that is neither dogmatic nor debatable. Theses are not be interpreted, but must disabuse us, leave us wide-eyed. They are peremptory declarations made according to the absolute priority of a principle of (absent) justice. Those who ignore them either insist on a fantasy of justice beyond parousia, or choose to continue with the general automatism which simply disregards all questions of justice.25 The thought of the Jetztzeit is a specific thought of historical memory above all. Benjamin called it ‘a Copernican revolution in remembering [Eingedenken]’.26 It is not to be ontologically reduced to ‘the monadic structure of remembrance’ (A. Benjamin and Osborne 1994: 10). We

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will understand this better if we attend to what Benjamin says about the word Ursprung (origin) in the preface to his book on the Trauerspiel (Baroque tragedy). The origin, he writes, is an entirely historical category. To think the origin of the Trauerspiel is not to think in terms of a causal logic according to which the plays came into being, but to think the origin precisely as a question of the event of historical justice. The first event or origin is ‘an eddy in the stream of becoming’; it emerges ‘from the process of becoming and disappearance’ (Benjamin 1977 [1928]: 45). As such, however, it has only a virtual status. It remains an idea confronting the historical world, but one to which, in its will to oblivion, the historical world apparently remains indifferent. The origin awaits its redemption as actualization in the time of the Jetztzeit. It is only as an event, however, that justice can take place. That is the hidden point of the story of the little hunchback and his work of erasure. Only the event of justice can reverse the hunchback’s work, as a deliberate application of the historical intelligence cannot. But how does this concept of the event dovetail with the ‘catastrophic’ one? Certainly, modern events keep piling up catastrophically, are always liable to infernal repetition or reproduction. But that liability is also inseparable from the opportunity constituted by an event. 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 (DT: 14): the only thinkable eternity is that of the groundless ground. Because it lacks all foundations, infernal time also secretes within it the time of events as an awakening from the dreamworld.27 Hence Benjamin restores the Kantian principle of modernity within a structure that appeared to ironize and even to deny it. The logic of infernal time renders the future inert (because anticipated as a repetition of what is already present; that is, every manifestation of the new anticipates a future that is its own unending confirmation). But what is called the past is also dead (because preserved, conserved, an object of knowledge or memory). There is nonetheless a time which revives events smothered by official history. This time is no more linear, progressive or cumulative than infernal time, but rather loops back on itself, is composed of ‘interlacings’ (entrelacs) and ‘arabesques’ (HC: 27).28 Here past events are immemorial, virtually present, close at hand. Within a ‘history in arabesques’, one historical line may intersect with another (Benjamin 1978: 1.479). In the intersection of lines, a second event ‘duplicates’ or coincides with the first (Proust 1996: 49). The present is untimely, not contemporary with itself, irretrievably fractured and disunited, out of joint, a time in which only local unities are possible (DT: 9). For Benjamin, these local unities are the

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‘exceptional virtualities’ of history. They are events of ‘counter-time’ (contretemps).29 ‘Explosions of justice’, writes Proust, ‘always come in counter-time’ (HC: 9–10). Thus, for example, for Benjamin, the condition of the Weimar Republic unexpectedly opens up a route to the seventeenth century and the world of the Trauerspiel. After 1918, Germany seems to promise means of escaping a nightmare that it also incessantly corroborates, thus awakening the historical world of baroque drama. The moment specifically of Brecht and modern German Expressionist drama breaches a historical pathway back to the moment of the Trauerspiel (see Proust 1996: 55). The ghosts claiming justice through the Trauerspiel find it in the present of a new event. Indeed, the justice that Benjamin himself renders to the Trauerspiel springs from a moment of discovery that is itself an event. The redemption of the Trauerspiel did not have to happen. It was, says Proust, modern historical eventualities – ‘ravages de guerre, misères des peuples, émiettement de l’Europe’ (HC: 71) – and their consequences for art and thought, that made possible the redemption of a literary world that history had swallowed up, and that had come to seem intensely strange, remote. It is the relation exemplified here between two events that constitutes justice. As Benjamin says, in a lapidary phrase of which Proust makes much, einmal ist keinmal (‘what happens merely once does not happen at all’).30 The fugitive character of historical time makes it possible to know and fix the first event only in and by means of the second one. The first event is a ghost clamouring for justice in the present. It is the second event alone which can counter the incessant erasure of catastrophe. Only from the second event can we hope to witness a brief conflagration of the ‘phantasmagoric landscapes elaborated by all the many, successive forms of domination’ (HC: 36). The second event is constituted in an intervention or interpretation that blasts the first event free of oblivion.31 It is thus inseparable from a decision which revives or sustains the first event in the teeth of the time that had obliterated it and holds it at bay, as in the case of Benjamin himself and the discovery of the Trauerspiel. The second event isolates the first one from the great welter of modern shocks which otherwise threaten to engulf it in the inertia of infernal time. The relationship between first and second events is well grasped by way of analogy with Freudian anamnesis, Baudelairean correspondances, and (Marcel-) Proustian mémoire involontaire. If the second event is conceivable in terms of Freudian anamnesis, that is because anamnesis lifts the lid on a feature of psychic experience. This feature was the result of a shock against which the defences of the psyche were

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powerless to protect it. It remained at the level of an event, making it irrecoverable save through a second event, though no predetermined logic leads from the first to the second, and the arrival of the second is never assured in advance. For Benjamin, Baudelaire is a poet perhaps uniquely susceptible to modern shocks. His poetry is everywhere shaken by them. But these primary shocks also produce a secondary set which the poetry registers as correspondances. The secondary shock is a form of contact with what Benjamin calls ‘the data of remembrance’ (Benjamin 1991: 1.639). Fortuitously, unpredictably, the world of the primary shock, that is, of modernity, opens unanticipated and unsuspected pathways to unknown, forgotten or disregarded historical worlds. The Baudelairean correspondance is the trace or marker of such a pathway. In Proust’s Recherche, the second event depends on an encounter with an object or sensation that that object arouses (most famously, the madeleine). It is only through this second event that the Proustian subject can lay hold of the experience that was properly his or hers, an experience that itself had the character of an event. It is thus that Proust redeems experience, what Benjamin calls Erfahrung as contrasted with Erlebnis, the experience of the storyteller, but also experience as both a subjective and collective past. However partially or vestigially, Proust accomplishes the forlorn desire of the Angel of History: that is, to ‘awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed’ (Benjamin 1979: 259). Crucially, in the Recherche, the second event is as essentially aleatory as the first. As Benjamin says, an ‘explosion of justice’ cannot be predicted or foreseen. It may or may not take place at a time and in a manner which make it possible to know it for what it is. Nonetheless, correspondances, mémoire involontaire and anamnesis are all instances of a ‘restorative will’, though a will that is ranged against a set of ‘incomparably more elemental and powerful counterforces’ (Benjamin 1991: 1.182). The restorative will is precisely the will of the Angel of History. Of course, the Angel of History struggles against massively forbidding odds. The eternal return continues madly to pile up disaster, disaster upon disaster. It is only rarely, in counter-time, that events are salvaged from the wreckage. This is what the Trauerspiel itself tells us, with its vision of an inert world that is nonetheless haunted by ‘the breath or phantom of another life’ (HC: 60–1). Indeed, the work of historical retrieval itself is indelibly marked by catastrophe. Crucially, the second event is not an act or moment of identification or empathy. Again, Benjamin is explicit about this. To redeem the first event is neither to feel for it nor to live its life. The redemption is rather an act of

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what Benjamin calls ‘critical mortification’. It establishes ‘the settlement of knowledge’ in a work that is recognized as dead (Benjamin 1977 [1928]: 181–2), strips away the ephemeral accretions that the endless repetition of modern novelty adds to the work. In doing so, it reveals the bare form of the work itself; but, in another Benjaminian twist, this form is revealed as incomplete, that of the ruin. The second event does not institute a work of recovery, but exposes the first event along with the process of historical attrition from whose ravages it can never be properly extricable. Again and again, as in Baudelaire, the triumphs made available through correspondances happen only in relation to the waning of the very fervour that creates them, what Benjamin calls the ‘present state of collapse’ of experience. So too for Benjamin the structures connecting events turn out to be extremely flimsy or tenuous. This is the case, not least, because, in redeeming the first event, the second is bound to reveal the ‘measureless desolation’ of the expanse of time between it and the first (Benjamin 1973 [1969]: 143). The event is always what Benjamin calls ‘the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe’ (2002b: 185). The phrase exactly conveys the unremitting logic of modernity as one of event and remainder. ‘Irresistibly propelled’ by the storm of progress, the Angel of History is the paradigm of a modern will to active intervention. But this will is inseparable from a modern passivity that recognizes how far intervention must be driven melancholically beyond the limits of its own resources. The interrelation of event and remainder is deeply written, not only into the logic according to which Benjamin opens up the Trauerspiel, but into the world of the plays themselves, which exemplify it. In Benjamin’s account of it, the baroque is haunted by the idea of catastrophe as opposed to that of restoration. The Trauerspiel is buried deep in the creaturely world. It is ‘taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition’ (Benjamin 1977 [1928]: 81). But the redemption known to the Trauerspiel resides precisely in this hopeless destiny, and not in the fulfilment of a divine plan of salvation. In baroque, the disconsolate chronicle of world-history is not set in opposition to eternity, but is rather opposed to the glancing moment at which is glimpsed ‘the restoration of the timelessness of paradise’ (Benjamin 1977 [1928]: 92). It is thus that, like the Angel of History, we may begin to recognize that it is in fact the past that lies in front of us. We can hope to prove adequate to the catastrophic accumulations of history only by refusing any longer to recoil indefinitely into the future. The mantra of innovation is weary and stale. Rather than progressing hungrily into the future, we might explore means of reining time back, even bring-

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ing it to a halt, ‘now’ (HC: 35). This means putting the future ‘under a taboo’ (Proust 1990a: 96). We should not dismiss the idea of the mechanization or disenchantment of history. We should rather radicalise it, pursue it all the way down. For it is thus that we may stand a chance of finally outwitting progress and declaring the future at an end. The logic of catastrophe is inescapable so long as we do not direct ourselves towards the past; but it is crucial that we make the right kind of turn. We must not choose to dream too soon, for the ‘ “too soon” of the dream’ all too easily reverses into the ‘ “too late” of the nightmare’ (HC: 116). Explosions of justice are not the only alternative to catastrophe. Proust’s Benjamin also argues that, if we have any chance of destroying destruction,32 it will mean neither accepting nor supposing we can reject it, but pushing it to extremes, immersing ourselves in it, miming and ironizing it. Thus we may hope to give it a different twist and propel it in a new direction (see Proust 1994a: 39). The significant modern tradition has understood that there is no way out of modern ‘equivocation’ (HC: 87).33 It has therefore produced a quintessentially modern form of irony which both alternately yields and protests. (This is the Flaubertian understanding of modernity to which Badiou is hostile.) Here justice retains its imminence in doing violence only to itself. The corollary of this is a nihilistic, even a satanic politics, ‘a politics of despair’, of blunt refusal and universal curse (HC: 110). At all events, to live in Benjaminian truth is to distrust the ‘excitements’ of the present. By the same token, it is to ignore the calls of the future, or cease to hear them, to turn towards the past, not out of any conservative impulse or in the hope of reassurance, but because the sufferings of the past await our endeavours on their behalf. Each generation hopes against hope for justice of the future. We are haunted by ghosts complaining that we never appear to make sense of their sorrows, rather unfailingly adding to them. These ghosts require us to pay our debt, a debt, however, not only to their sufferings, but also to their unfulfilled dreams, to what remained impossible for them, to that which they were prevented from achieving and which therefore fell into oblivion (see Proust 1994a: 29). History bequeaths the question of its justification to future generations: the past asks us for justification. If we are the products of the past, it is our task – it is always the task of the present – to decide on the historical logic that produced us, and in that sense to instruct the continuous catastrophe. Thus the future is always ‘situated “behind us” ’ (Proust 1996: 46): that is, in better grasping the virtuality of the past, in opening up forgotten, historical possibilities for development that remained, in the end, virtual, we may also grasp the virtuality

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of a future. It is here if anywhere that we may conceivably divert our destiny. The logic of Benjamin’s thought according to Proust appears to be thus: ours is in fact a spectral experience of history, because justice is almost always at once expelled from it. As Benjamin everywhere insists, like the world itself, history belongs to the victors. It is not clear that matters can be or ever have been otherwise. The victors relentlessly ensure the plausibility of their case; we may never hear any tone other than theirs. The air and light belong to them. They have right and reason on their side. Justice occurs but rarely, here and there, explosively. This in whole is ‘catastrophe in permanence’. It is doubly catastrophic, because the victors bring catastrophe in their wake, but also catastrophically paint catastrophe out of the picture. Within catastrophe, however, there is always the possibility of an inversion of catastrophe which will be catastrophic for the victors. The inversion of catastrophe is secreted within catastrophe itself. But it occurs intermittently, unpredictably, as an event. This might appear to leave Benjamin – and Proust – open to the charge of exceptionalism, which, we saw earlier, Agamben so powerfully levels at Badiou. But for Proust and Benjamin the event does not exactly correspond to what Agamben takes to be ‘the structure of the exception’ (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 24), is not ultimately the sovereign exception that issues a command. For, firstly, neither Benjamin nor Proust thinks the event apart from the remainder, the abeyance of, declension or lapse from the event. Secondly, their concern is with exceptions to the exception, that is, an altogether different image of the exception, which is justice, and in which alone we can trust. The chance of justice, however, does not lie in (satanic) modernity. It rather lies in the faint hope that, here and there, at least, satanic modernity may be prevented from everywhere becoming the rule. Proust’s commentary on Benjamin is distinctive, above all, in how close it stays to his Moebius-strip logic. Freed from an imprisoning totality, dialectics in Benjamin can only appear as what he calls the dialectical image, an occasional, unpredictable inversion of the incessant movement of the new as the same. Proust will not convert the dialectical image into anything other than the paradox that it must to all appearances imply. Uncomfortable with the full implications of Benjaminian lucidity, commentators have often under-emphasized his thought of catastrophe in order to affirm a supposedly Benjaminian system or larger project of thought within which catastrophe can finally be subsumed. Proust everywhere resists such commentary. Her Benjamin is unlike those recently dominant in the Anglo-American

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world. He is not the Benjamin claimed for postmodernism, cultural studies, academicism or mainstream Marxism, nor, certainly, the one claimed for theology or religion.34 He is an austere and in one sense severely minimalist thinker, rigorously coherent, but so gifted as to be able to work in ways that seem to endanger or nullify coherence, thus turning thought itself into a process of fitful illumination, making it appear sporadic.35 Benjaminian lucidity is shocking, searing, almost preternatural: Proust remains faithful to it as such, where others’ Benjamins are finally consoling. Thus Susan Buck-Morss’s cogent, formidably erudite historical reconstruction of the Arcades Project – rich in insight, not least into the Benjaminian understanding of the modern catastrophe – must also show that Benjamin got beyond catastrophe, grasping and articulating a supposed collective project which might produce the necessary liberation from catastrophe. But if Benjamin evokes a ‘collective “awakening” . . . synonymous with revolutionary class consciousness’, it is in slack passages when he falls back into a discourse more pedestrian than his own. At this particular historical juncture, can anyone really credit any longer the power of the ‘collective energy’ informing ‘mass culture’ to overcome the ‘phantasmagoria of false consciousness’ that culture also generates (Buck-Morss 1999 [1989]: 253)? This is an instance of the left version of the contemporary fantasy of plenitude, from which Proust and Benjamin are alike remote. Buck-Morss cannot but associate Benjamin with precisely the progressive temporality which he opens up to question in all its forms, not least Marxist ones. She is finally ill at ease with the conviction of intermittency – of rarity – from which Benjamin’s work can never be disintricated. By contrast, in a singularly brilliant essay, Gillian Rose rightly concludes that Benjamin ‘only knew the dialectical image as a lightningflash, the ‘ “Then held fast” . . . in the Now of recognizability’.36 Thus the rescue that the dialectical image effects ‘can only take place for that which, in the next moment, is irretrievably lost’. But for Rose, Benjamin’s insistence on the lightning-flash of justice is problematic precisely insofar as he is only concerned with justice. Benjamin does not give enough: ‘Benjamin knew no Day of Atonement, no Yom Kippur . . . In his work, the hard heart of judgment does not melt into grief, into forgiveness, or into atonement’ (Rose 1993: 209). But it is surely not possible to accept that there is no grief in the Benjamin who so compellingly identifies the great modern disease as acedia, ‘an indolence of the heart’ that can travel no further than empathy (Benjamin 1979: 258). One might rather say that there is a pervasive sense of grief in Benjamin, but that that grief does not quite come into its own,

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constantly appears but is also deflected, the implication perhaps being we have yet to become sufficiently historical to be fully capable of the appropriate, serious and sober grief. It is not clear, certainly from the Angel of History, that catastrophe can be subsumed at all, that one can do more than contemplate it with wide-eyed disbelief, not least with regard to who it is that must, again and again, perform the forgiving, who it is that endlessly fails to atone. Equally, it is not clear that the rarity of serious atonement, or a historical forgiveness granted readily or even with painful slowness, does not yet again ensure the persistence of catastrophe. If Buck-Morss finally chooses the salve of an unBenjaminian concept of plenitude, Rose thoughtfully chooses a merciful but finally unBenjaminian oblivion. Rose argues that Benjamin’s Angel of History is only traumatized, that it can only look on in horror as catastrophe unendingly unfolds. To Klee’s Angelus Novus, she says, she prefers the Angelus Dubiosus: ‘this molelike angel’, she writes, ‘appears unguarded rather than intent, grounded and slack rather than backing up and away in rigid horror’. Well, perhaps: but it is not clear that the mole-like angel actually sees very much. Rose decides in favour of ‘the humorous witness who must endure’ (Rose 1993: 209). But exactly whose humour and endurance are at stake in this, and who wins and loses by them, if not the usual winners and losers? Benjamin’s Angel of History is not simply an observer, nor exactly passive. Its wings are open: it ‘would like to stay’ and put its redemptive and healing purposes to work. If it is passive, that is because it is hugely disempowered by the storm winds of progress, which are stronger than it is; but it nonetheless has a status beyond that of the witness. In the terms of the seventh thesis on the philosophy of history, the Angel of History is unlike those whose hearts have failed them in that it does not despair of ‘grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly’ (Benjamin 1979: 258). In their different ways, neither Buck-Morss nor Rose can quite bear the poignancy of this concept. Françoise Proust remains intensely faithful to it, for she unflinchingly confronts what it tells us: that the seemingly interminable end of modernity may be finally what we are interminably left with; which is finally no more than modernity’s own wager. THE EXAMPLE OF WORDSWORTH The aesthetic domain is not necessarily remote from Proust’s thought. Her reading of Kant, for example, is rooted in the assertion that ‘even before every concept, what is given and consequently transmitted is a certain condition [état] of mind’ which ‘aesthetic pleasure’ presents

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‘in its pure state’ (KA: 45–6). But art and aesthetics do not occupy the significant position in her thought that they do in Badiou’s and Rancière’s. It would not occur to her that Benjamin might be catching up, and represent philosophy catching up, with the thought of modern history specifically present in literature. Yet here modern philosophy, indeed, modern science and, perhaps above all, modern politics – the very politics that repeatedly sought to rise superior to literature – have all looked belated, failing to understand (as Badiou does) that literature thinks and how it does so (as Badiou at least seeks to do). It is modern art above all, particularly literature, that has conceived of both history and the subject in terms of events and their occlusion or declension, that is, of intermittencies, and has risked pursuing the disquieting consequences of such a thought. There is certainly nowhere better to look than modern art for the reflection of the modern affect in the actor or witness. The philosophers of intermittency formalize a thought that has long been present in a different guise in modern literature above all, though their kinship with it may need drawing out. In fact, Proust’s historical case calls repeatedly to literature, and requires literature as its radical supplement. If Benjamin catches up with the lessons of modern literature, it is above all through Baudelaire (though also Kafka; see Proust 1987a: 114–18). Given his conviction, however, that the ‘core’ of romanticism was messianic (Proust 1990a: 90), he might easily have turned to the English romantics, chiefly Byron, Shelley – and Wordsworth, if with certain reservations. This is the more appropriate in a Proustian context, since, as we have seen, Proust associates the onset of modernity with Kant and the French Revolution. Proust writes of Kant’s grasp of ‘un sentir pur’, a pure sensation, as ‘a hitherto unperceived and unheralded moment in the history of thought’ (KA: 61), adding that romanticism swiftly coincided with this perception or form of understanding. It did so first, and perhaps foremost, in Wordsworth. Wordsworth might be thought of as inaugurating modernity in literature, as Kant inaugurates modern philosophy and the French Revolution modern politics. If, however, Proust’s emphases require that she read Kant to some extent against the grain, this will also be the case with us and Wordsworth. Wordsworth is the great poet of the onset of modernity, above all, in The Prelude in its various versions, the fact of the versions themselves indicating a modern problematic for Wordsworth as for us, but also indicating the particular kind of thought at stake here. He is the first great literary diagnostician of modernity. But he also both affirms and resists what he diagnoses, identifies with and retreats from it. Wordsworth is the first great writer to live out modernity in some of

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its most significant contradictions. He qualifies Proust, her Kant and indeed her Benjamin insofar as he finally includes a hostility or resistance to modernity as part of modernity itself. But this is testimony to his extraordinary faculty for registering the implications of a seismic cultural shift. He becomes, not only a Proustian casuist, undertaking a patient, meticulous enquiry into a historical caesura, but also, beyond her conception of it, Proust’s subject as practitioner of critique. Proust’s Kantianism casts a certain light on The Prelude, and so does her reading of Benjamin. But Wordsworth further allows us to put both scansions of modernity together with a third: a fierce and growing will within modernity to oppose it, a kind of horror of modernity which may finally be inextricable from modernity itself and is therefore also modern, a kind of second-order modernity produced by the modern moment. For Wordsworth, as for Kant in Proust’s account of him, the prime instance of modernity and stimulus to modern thought is of course the French Revolution. New Historicists like Marjorie Levinson and Alan Liu have persuasively argued that the question of the Revolution is a key driving force in The Prelude. Wordsworth’s great poem has an obvious, linear logic, its meditation on the growth of the poet’s soul. But there is another logic to it, too, which, as is evident in the political content of Wordsworth’s revisions between 1805 and 1850, like the account of Chartreuse (1850, VI, 418–88), or the paean to Burke (1850, VII, 512–43), was important to him, and remained so.37 This is the logic of the poem’s autobiographical narrative as a meditation on an event – the Revolution – and its promise. Here, of course, the significant initial passage is Wordsworth’s account of his tour through France in 1790 (1805, VI, 338–425). As, in the mode of the Wordsworthian sublime, ‘mighty forms’ seize the young poet’s ‘youthful fancy’, giving ‘a charter to irregular hopes’, so the experience of a historical event becomes an event in itself, according to the Proustian logic that binds sensibility and the sense of historicity together (1805, VI, 347–8). Revolutionary exultation – the sheerly new experience whereby ‘joy of one / Is joy of tens of millions’ – is presented precisely as a matter of the tabula rasa, with ‘human nature seeming born again’ (1805, VI, 354, 359–60). Here we witness an ‘explosion of justice’, history as naissance not renaissance, the end of concatenated history, the first great modern historical fracture. However far, as Wordsworth says, ‘Nature then was sovereign to my heart’ (1805, VI, 333), natural causality cannot be the sole point of reference. Rancière has commented very strikingly on the passage in Book VI and its ‘invention of a political landscape’ (CV: 18–19). The countryside itself seems literally different:

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Among sequestered villages we walked And found benevolence and blessedness Spread like a fragrance everywhere, like spring That leaves no corner of the land untouched. (1805, VI, 367–70)

But the month is July. As for both Badiou and Proust, the event ushers in a radical break with a mundane temporality. Indeed, it promotes new dispositions of space and time, modifying the natural order itself. Nature and the Revolution are at one in this, in an association which equates the workings of Nature with its own unnatural reversal. The idea seems paradoxical only if we assume that Nature is a single, unitary, encompassing totality. There are of course extremely good reasons for thinking that Wordsworth made that assumption, notably that he explicitly said as much, as his critics often do, not least recent proponents of an ecological criticism.38 But the assertion of the unity of Nature is an archaic (transcendent or religious) residue that can be set aside.39 Whilst Wordsworth’s assertion of that unity is self-evidently important to him, it is much less significant for us than the account of Nature that it is possible to liberate in The Prelude. For the Wordsworth who is a poet of Nature in The Prelude is also a poet of counter-Nature, what (as we shall later see) Lardreau calls nature as Spirit, the ‘etwas indeterminé’, the transcendental object = x, which the young Wordsworth grasps in Nature as also in history. Here, as in Proust’s Kant, Nature neither binds nor inhibits a sublime liberty, but rather includes it, as its own excessive (and self-exceeding) force. The poetic subject responds appropriately, creating an unprecedented thought. What repeatedly emerges in The Prelude in its entirety is not a unified concept of Nature, but a representation of ‘the diverse manner in which Nature works’ (Five-Book Prelude, ‘The Analogy Passage’, 10). Like France, Nature in The Prelude is an unstable entity. Its operations and effects are disparate, rich and manifold, and include a principle of self-transformation, a self-transformative work. Here Wordsworth thinks beyond Proust and her Kant. Poetry turns out accordingly to have resources that can negotiate Kant’s third antinomy with an ingenuity unknown to philosophy. Wordsworth thus becomes the poet of revolutionary times, of a Nature specifically befitting them, and an art befitting both, an experimental subject in Proust’s sense. For the explosion of the political event requires an aesthetic event commensurate with it, in effect provoking a revolutionary mode of imagination and perception. Here the aesthetic sphere promises renewal in keeping with and as a consequence of transformations in the political realm. Wordsworth does not oppose Nature and liberty, but seeks to think

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the two together, the possibility of doing so arising as a consequence of what he repeatedly tells us is the unpredictability of Nature, the revelation of Nature as in fact a groundless ground. By the same token, the multiplicity of Nature is also the multiplicity of the mind responding to it. Of course, even early on, Wordsworth was trying to flatten out that multiplicity, as Proust’s Kant backs away from his own discoveries. But these efforts will not bear much examination. Thus, when, in Book XI, the young poet asks whether his young self ‘could take part in anything but admiration’ of Nature, ‘or be pleased / With any thing but humbleness and love’, the answer is that he could, and was (1805, XI, 234–6). Similarly, in the Five-Book Prelude, the poet’s claim that his young self was habitually accustomed ‘to walk with Nature / magisterially’ will not pass muster (Five-Book Prelude, III, 380–1, italics mine). Indeed, it is the Five-Book Prelude that most strikingly exposes the thinness of the claim, since it does not fit it into a developed argument and places it right alongside the material that contradicts it. What emerges in that material as a whole, including the voice that seeks control of it, is, again, the poet as inaugural modern subject, the variegated, exploratory and innovative subject that Proust associates with the Kantian adventure. This last point is exemplified in the imaginative way that, in The Prelude Book VI, as Rancière notes, Wordsworth fuses the sovereignty of Nature and that of the French people in the Revolution, identifying Nature not only with the principle of stability and recurrence, but with danger, excess, the revolutionary principle, the event. Indeed, Wordsworth himself will later state that ‘the [revolutionary] events / Seemed nothing out of nature’s certain course’ (1805, IX, 252–3). Nature affords, not only the comfort of a return to familiar points of reference, but the disruptive power of the sublime and the surprise of an unexpected emergence. Indeed, this has been evident since Book I, above all, in the greatest of the Wordsworthian epiphanies, the episode with the shepherd’s boat (1799, I, 81–129). Wordsworth’s claim, immediately following it, that the passage demonstrates the purifying effects of ‘eternal things’ from the ‘first dawn of childhood’ (1799, I, 133–6) is patently a post facto gloss. The passage itself conveys a quite different impression. The cliff ‘uprears’ its head and comes ‘striding after’ the boy. The Nature at stake here is extremely volatile, the subject to some extent precarious and baffled, because perched on the edge of a new thought. Bravura is an odd quality to associate with Wordsworth, yet the passage is very much about it, in Proust’s sense, about what it might mean to ‘make use of your own understanding’. Nature appears to have no given or established foundations, and therefore to be likely

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to assume radically different aspects. The ‘modes of being’ of this Nature are neither predictable not finally knowable. Here, again, as in 1805, VI, 346–48, Nature and modernity are one, and produce a modern subject: And after I had seen That spectacle, for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts There was a darkness—call it solitude, Or blank desertion—no familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields, But huge and mighty forms that do not live Like living men moved slowly through my mind By day, and were the trouble of my dreams. (1799, I, 119–29)

What Wordsworth means by ‘a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’ takes on shifting implications. On the one hand, the experience belongs among what he later calls ‘things . . . yet not shaped’ (1805, VII, 515). The ‘modes of being’ are ‘unknown’ and the poet’s sense of them ‘undetermined’ at the time of the episode, and even in 1799. The ‘darkness’ of which the poet tells us, the experience of ‘solitude’ or ‘desertion’, of the falling away of the familiar: all these suggest an experience of a void, the tabula rasa, an event which is not to be interpreted, understood or reasoned away. If the passage has a ‘primary’ content, it is this event. Certainly, Wordsworth will later ‘shape’ this experience; but up to 1799, the point appears to be that such shaping may constitute a retreat from the experience itself. At any rate, the passage from Book VI that I quoted from earlier (1805, VI, 347) actually echoes the one from Book I above. In both cases, the poet’s imagination is seized by ‘mighty forms’ that seem initially obscure to him, that are liberated rather than defined or bound by Nature, that can only be determined in an ‘unknown’ future (1805, VI, 347). Here, certainly, is the transcendental object = x in Nature as in history. But one can also inflect Wordsworthian Nature differently and beyond Proust’s Kant. Wordsworth may tell us that what enables him to ‘join things’, to sustain his conception of a single and unitary Nature, is ‘the light of knowledge’ (1805, VIII, 609–10). But he also tells us that we know no more, either of ourselves or the universe, than is emblematized in the blind beggar propped against the wall in London, ‘Wearing a written paper, to explain / The story of the man, and who

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he was’ (1805, VII, 610–23). Just round the corner from knowledge lie confusion, ignorance, chaos, error. Nature in The Prelude is a modern Nature, and constitutionally ambivalent. It is beneficent, sustaining and ennobling us in the teeth of this world. But it is also a source of ‘dismal’ and ‘terrifying’ experience whose ‘awful powers and forms’ do not appear to be clearly distinct from those that make men suffer (1805, VIII, 213, 355–6). There are times when ‘the storms and elements’ and ‘human life’ come together to breed ‘an indefinite terror and dismay’ (1805, VIII, 659–61). The coincidence of ‘wild blasts’ of inspirational music with ‘terrible events’ is evident in Nature as it is in the Revolution (1805, X, 419–20). Indeed, the powers at work in the boat episode seem equivocal in exactly this way. Like Proust’s Kant, Wordsworth hears a ‘tone’ or music in both Nature and history together, and it is even more ambiguous, enigmatic or mixed than it is for Proust’s Kant. Thus if Wordsworth coincides with Proust’s Kant, he also coincides with her Benjamin. Like Benjamin, Wordsworth recognizes that modernity is problematic because Janus-faced. In the first instance, of course, alongside Wordsworthian exhilaration, one can hardly ignore Wordsworthian disappointment. Wordsworth ends up disappointed by modernity: . . . the sun That rose in splendour, was alive, and moved In exultation among living clouds Hath put his function and his glory off And, turned into a gewgaw, a machine, Sets like an opera phantom. (1805, X, 935–40)

This is the poet’s response to the triumph of Napoleon. Here, certainly, a modern promise is displaced by a hollow, mimic form. Wordsworth is disappointed because the event has a remainder, because event and remainder appear to be indissociable from one another. In announcing that, Wordsworth effectively announces modernity. The disappointment has several aspects, the most obviously relevant one being disappointment in the Revolution. This hangs over when it is not the explicit theme of much of The Prelude Books VII–XI, notably, perhaps, in the great passage in which Wordsworth meditates on the stone plucked from the debris of the Bastille (1805, VIII, 63–71), in genuine perplexity at how complicated the political question appears to have become since the Revolution. As lines 209–21 of Book X make clear, even in the 1850 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth did not doubt that the Revolution had been right. The problems it had generated were not intrinsic to the

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Revolution in itself. They appeared because ‘revolutionary power’ is by definition unstable, and can therefore always be sent off course (1805, VIII, 48–9). The Revolution had two aspects: on the one hand, modern renewal, on the other hand, modern violence, or what Wordsworth calls ‘violence abrupt’ (1805, IX, 472). Benjaminianly, modern justice becomes modern violence. The specific problem with modern violence is that, when it explodes, it does not exhaust itself in the explosion. Wordsworth’s great modern insight – his before it is anyone else’s – is that ‘[t]he earthquake is not satisfied at once’ (1805, X, 74). The ‘concussions’ of modernity are repeated ‘day by day / and felt through every nook of town and field’ (1805, IX, 182–3). Modernity does not move forward at a measured and deliberate pace. Nor is it ‘content to barter short-lived pangs / For a paradise of ages’ (1805, X, 320–1). It proceeds repetitively if erratically, shock by shock, as Walter Benjamin says of modern Second Empire Paris. Hence the Revolution gives birth to satanic modernity. ‘Shock’ is a Wordsworthian term before it is a Baudelairean, Benjaminian or Proustian one. It appears repeatedly in The Prelude. The Revolution develops as a succession of shocks. With the Terror, the cleansers of the Augean stable are themselves cleansed. Modernity becomes a mad cyclonic force, a hectic dervishes’ rout, like a child with a toy windmill who ‘runs amain / To make it whirl the faster’ (1805, X, 337–45). The principle is that of catastrophe in permanence as circular repetition, the eternal return. Time begins to circle around the incessant break. Wordsworth grasps this before the inception of the incremental progress of the dialectic puts paid to his knowledge. He understands that, in Proust’s terms, history is becoming a succession of distinct inaugural occasions that have their own implacable purposes, hurriedly germinating and pullulating. Wordsworth eyeballs the Gorgon, stares the uncanny rictus of modern history in the face. This recurrence of the modern moment, the Proustian moment of the beginning of history, within modernity, is what defines it as such. There is an irreducible agony here: Wordsworth dismisses any facile, reactionary scorn. Laudably, even the 1850 Prelude is still excoriating Pitt and his like, who themselves ‘make the guardian crook of law / A tool of murder’, only more secretively and perfidiously than does Robespierre (1850, XI, 52–73). The poet challenges ‘the scoffers in their pride’ who urge us to ‘Behold the harvest which we reap / From popular government and equality’ (1805, X, 430–2): if the harvest was disastrous, look first to the seedbed. If modernity insidiously strips us of its very gifts, however, it also continues to give as it takes away. Wordsworth therefore finds himself swaying between celebrating the triumph of the

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‘herculean Commonwealth’ and denouncing those happy to commit ‘enormities’ in the name of liberty (1805, X, 346–64). The promise of the Revolution does not simply lead to inevitable disaster. The trouble is that, with the Revolution, modernity decisively breaks with all foundations, and the destruction of foundations itself gives rise to an accelerating sequence of breaks. The break, or the production of the break, becomes a good in itself. Thus Proust’s Moebius-strip logic of the new modernity binds promise and disaster together, inseparably. Modernity appears in an acutely paradoxical form, as both event and remainder, as transformation and the endless, repetitive series that is Benjaminian catastrophe in permanence. The paradigm for this is the French Revolution and the Terror. But the same paradox is evident in Wordsworth’s treatment of all the central themes of The Prelude. Significantly, the word ‘desertion’ appears in the accounts of both the Terror (1805, X, 379) and the famous incident with the shepherd’s boat. Both exemplify the modern rule of intermittency: ‘the desert hath green spots, the sea / Small islands in the midst of stormy waves’ (1805, X, 440–2). Indeed, what is true historically is also now true of the subject, notably the subject of poetry: the workings of the modern imagination turn out to be intermittent. Modern poetry reveals itself to be a transitory gift, a ‘deep / But short-lived uproar’, breaking forth, flowing, then drying up (1805, VII, 4–12). The recognition involved, here, is inseparable from Wordsworth’s experience of the Revolution. Inspiration may occasionally overtake the poet, men and women as a whole. But it is also destined to various forms of declension: failure, loss, betrayal, travesty, mockery. The question of the appropriate response to the modern onset of intermittency becomes what is perhaps the great theme of The Prelude, one that, whilst principally aesthetic, never stops being relevant to other spheres of endeavour. Hence the special power and fascination of the Five-Book Prelude (March 1804), that intermediate point between the two-part Prelude of 1799 and the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805. For the Five-Book Prelude offers a uniquely succinct testimony to the new, anxious insecurity of the modern poet as no other version exactly does. It enacts a process of intensely provisional exploration and discovery of the kind that Proust discovers in the Kantian Critiques, is a crucial modern document as they are. The knowledge at stake is poetic, psychic and political, together; the subjective and historical dimensions of experience are inextricably tied together, and if, on one level, the logic of The Prelude is that of a drive to transcend the historical world, to talk about poetry and autobiography is on another level to continue to talk about

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the historico-political world in other terms, and even to allegorize it. The condition of modern poetry is intermittency: . . . gleams of light Flash often from the east, then disappear And mock me with a sky that ripens not Into a steady morning. (Five-Book Prelude, I, 132–5)

Where Wordsworth differs from Kant, however, is that one face of his knowledge is already unalterably melancholic. Dampier’s fleeting glimpses of sunlight serve as a metaphor for the poet’s perception of the unreliability of his gift: ‘the hiding-places of my powers / Seem open; I approach, and then they close’ (Five-Book Prelude, V, 339–40).40 In poetry as in love and politics, a promise seems inextricable from the experience of ‘[a] melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown’ (Five-Book Prelude, II, 446). The predicament is central to the Five-Book Prelude. Wordsworth responds to it energetically, notably with a cluster of epiphanies, as Kant responds energetically to questions with concepts. But the evocation of the ‘spots of time’ and the promotion of the theory that accompanies them confirm the rule of intermittency even as they seek to counter it. Intermittency haunts the very act of recollection, since to recall ‘spots of time’ is also to recall the shock of their emergence and disappearance. Wordsworth would like to assert that the ‘steady cadence’ of Nature underpins the moods of the Five-Book Prelude (I, 278). It repeatedly makes abstract claims to that effect. But the logic it actually tends to assert, and from which it cannot escape, is Proustian: crisis, uncertainty and intermittency are the precondition of any local, discoverable stabilities. In its most sobering form, Wordsworth’s vision of modern intermittency bleakly counts the human cost of catastrophe in permanence in various different realms. The theme of modern loss is conveyed, if somewhat obliquely, in the story of Vaudracour and Julia. What is true of politics and poetry is also the case with love: the lovers initially experience the world as if it had been reborn. Again, this experience finds expression in a transformation of natural time: ‘Earth lived in one great presence of the spring’ (1805, IX, 586). Vaudracour dreams of a paradise swarming ‘with enchantment’ (IX, 594). But paradise fades, not because it has always been an illusion, but according to the modern logic of intermittency. Vaudracour cannot brook this. He and Julia are destroyed by the uprootings, breaks and ruptures that are part of the logic of modern love. Vaudracour himself is wasted away by modernity, and finally becomes a mute ghost of his modern self. The story is the complement par excellence to Badiou’s version of love.

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But the great image of this spiritual devastation, this ghostliness, the admonitory form who casts so long a shadow over The Prelude, and indeed over modernity at its very outset, is the discharged soldier (1805, IV, 400–504). The discharged soldier is one of Wordsworth’s great bequests to modernity, in spite of the fact that the poet himself finally retreats from the awesome portentousness of his own figure. With the soldier, he inaugurates a major tradition that turns the ex-serviceman into the paradigm of an experience of modernity as catastrophe in permanence. As a result of Peter Barham’s extraordinary work, for example (Barham 2004), we now know how, during the Great War, this figure came to loom so large in the British popular imagination that a whole culture was forced to transform its institutions. We equally know of the effect of the figure on American institutions after Vietnam. Wordsworth grasps a Proustian and Benjaminian truth: the soldier returning from service abroad is a modern archetype in that he is constituted through a series of shocks – deracination, subsequent displacement, extreme conditions, modern warfare, a return to a world grown strange – that virtually erase what he might once have taken to be his identity. Indeed, he is so striking as an image of catastrophe in permanence that the poet is acutely shocked on first sight of him, and recoils or ‘slips back’ into hiding. Wordsworth’s soldier is a supremely disconcerting figure, one constituted out of Proustian and Benjaminian exclusion and silence. His speech emerges in and as obscurity. Here a distinctively modern uncanny appears as, to adopt but also adapt Badiou’s term, a spectral trace of the inexistent.41 The soldier’s uncanniness, however, is only distantly related to, say, that of the ‘huge cliff’ uprearing its head in the boat episode. There is no trace of sublimity in it. Wordsworth makes the distinction quite explicit: Solemn and sublime He might have seemed, but that in all he said There was a strange half-absence, and a tone Of weakness and indifference, as of one Remembering the importance of his theme But feeling it no longer. (1805, IV, 473–8)

The poet will finally hug to himself the soldier’s closing declaration of his ‘trust . . . in the God of Heaven’. It will allow him to depart undisturbed, with ‘quiet heart’ (1805, IV, 494, 504). But of course the soldier’s persuasion of the insignificance of all his statements as I have just quoted it must logically apply equally to his closing declaration. This is as it should be: nowhere would The Prelude offer a more empty and unconvincing

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consolation. So patently hollow does it sound that it quite fails to count, and this failure sends shock waves right through the poem’s Christian dispositif. The discharged soldier is beyond all facile rescue. His modern experience has far outstripped his ability to bring it to terms. He is the first great representation of the authentically modern casualty, the very proof of what for Proust is the unliveable life. If there can be, ever, some slim hope of the redemption of those he represents, it must lie in ‘an explosion of justice’; but this carries even less conviction in Wordsworth than in Proust and Benjamin. Indeed, it may never mean more than the poet’s notice. That is what poetry can do, become a surrogate for justice. Of course, in reading Wordsworth this way, I have in some measure reversed the ostensible logic of his career, digging out a hidden or buried logic, very much as Proust does with Kant. Unlike Baudelaire, Wordsworth could not live with modernity or modern intermittency. In Badiou’s terms, he became a ‘reactive’ and increasingly an ‘obscure’ subject of modernity. Modernity per se, the modernity that, as we saw earlier, Kant glimpses as given over to unstoppable dialectic and unlimited disunion, was too unsteady and paradoxical a mixture. Wordsworth turned increasingly to conservatism, Christianity, humanism, patriotism: the declension has been well documented by John Jones (1954) among others. He fell back on assumptions of transcendence, unity, consistency, harmony, centredness, stasis, fullness, completeness, continuity, and, of course, a detestation of ‘upstart theory’ (1850, VII, 529). Wordsworth progressively denounces the abstraction of reason and Frenchmen ‘become oppressors in their turn’ (1805, X, 791–2). Finally, in the well-known, key passage that comes around 1805, X, 878–903, he declares an end in spiritual despair and moral crisis. Nature must lead him out of the labyrinth. At all events, by the beginning of Book XII, he is asserting that ‘now / On all sides day began to reappear’ (1805, XII, 20–2). Before its declaration of crisis and despair, however, Book X has intently charted a magnificent if arduous engagement with Wordsworth’s ‘contrarieties’ (1805, X, 899). It has been fraught with an extraordinary if conflicted, meditative intensity, grown into a truly ‘casuistical’ investigation in Proust’s sense. The poet has struggled repeatedly with his memories of a brief period when ‘the whole earth’ wore the beauty of promise (1805, X, 701), even with a sense that that beauty is still not dead for him (‘yet I feel the aspiration’, 1805, X, 839– 40). The conviction expressed in XII, 20–2 is faltering. Alongside the sustained and gripping work of writing in Book X, Wordsworth’s antimodern choices are bound to look tame. But my point is not that his programme and his performance are surreptitiously at odds with each

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other, still less that he ‘does not really mean’ the anti-modernity of what Badiou might call his work of ‘restoration’ (see LS: 45–6). Certainly, Wordsworth eventually knew, and said clearly, that he would have to forego ‘the radiant joy’ of his friend Michael Beaupuy, who was caught up in and became the subject of a modern political event (1805, IX, 322). Yet, in terms of the internal chronology of The Prelude, at least, that subject never quite dies. The grandeur of the magnificent account of the ascent of Snowdon in the last book may seem to clinch the poet’s revisionist case. But its power has less to do with the assertion of universality tacked on to the end of it than its evocation of the extreme singularity of the modern ecstasis (the shock, the event that happens ‘like a flash’, 1805, XIII, 40). The actual stuff of the passage points less to the grave, dignified conclusion of the poem than its epiphanic wellsprings. Thus if Wordsworth progressively organizes The Prelude in the service of a ‘reactive’, ‘obscure’ or anti-modern position, he can never altogether smother the modernity that position seeks to resist, which produced that position, and of which that position ultimately forms a part. Modernity is now the precondition of anti-modernity, has logical priority over it. This is Wordsworth’s lesson, though hardly one he would have wished to promote. Wordsworth, of course, is no Flaubertian ironist; yet the kind of supplementary, literary logic of the modern subject at issue here can only be grasped through a concept, again, of irony, a literary thought of which philosophy can at best give a diminished or abstract version. This is how literature thinks. The Prelude amply and pervasively demonstrates that anti-modernity is a reaction to modernity, that even as it reacts against it, it also carries modernity along with it, is inextricable from modernity, that the two must from now on twist into each other. Wordsworth’s specific forms of conservatism are not pre-modern but produced by modernity itself, and functions of it. Indeed, the poet shows, cannot help showing, that the victory of anti-modernity can never be comprehensive. It will always bear the trace of what it opposes. Modernity will henceforth always be its condition, which is itself a guarantee of intermittency, the ineluctable return of the event that begins with modernity. Here, we glimpse an assurance of strictly minimal scope whose reliance on an (inverted or double) literary form of thought gives it a purchase and sophistication unavailable to philosophical minimalism. NOTES 1. For resistance, see for example Proust (DR; 1997a; 1997b; 1998a; 1999; 2000a). Proust’s most persuasive account of it is early and melancholic.

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

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See Proust (1990a). Proust the philosopher of resistance is perhaps likely to become the dominant one: see for example the title of Lemirre and Perret (2001). On counter-Being, see for example Proust (1997b; 2000a). Cf. also her concept of the event as miracle (Proust 1987b: 122; 1989: 103). Hence perhaps her late attempt to read the concept of resistance back into the books on Kant and Benjamin (1998e: 69), and her rather different view of Badiou elsewhere (Proust 1998d: 94). For a brilliant account of Marx and Nietzsche as by contrast the diagnosticians of a nascent modernity, see Proust (1995c). For relevant accounts of the French Revolution, see Kant (1994): 127–74, especially at 141–2; Kant (1979 [1798]): 153–6. For the concept of transcendental freedom, see Kant (2007 [1787]): 409–17, 464–79. For a connection between this concept and the Idea of Reason in the third Critique, see Kant (1987 [1790]): 360–8. The concept of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy derives from a passage in the second preface to the first Critique. See Kant (2007 [1787]): 22. Here Proust’s Kant is emphatically distinct from the Kant of common knowledge, who relegates affect to the secondary level of the pathological. For the full logic of this argument, see KA: 64. The closest one gets to a Proustian ‘ontology of spontaneity’ (or événementialité) is in Proust (1985): 125–6. 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. On the sublime and political affects, see Proust (1995b): 168–9. History is ‘non-unifiable’ as is nature: this is the logic of the third Critique. See Proust, ‘Introduction’ to Kant (1994): 10. Judgement is a form of this practice, inventing the singular rule or imperative for each new case to which it is applied. See Proust (1994a): 14; and cf. (1995e): 101. For Proust’s account of practical reason as an experimental production of the real, see Proust, ‘Introduction’ to Kant (1994): 5–8. See Proust, KA: 122, 140, n18; (1989): 110–12. In its political aspect, this freedom is irreducibly public. Unlike a society of obediently democratized individuals, the republic emerges in the experience of freedom itself and does not exist before it. It implies, not a constitution but an Öffentlichkeit, an irruption that signifies that a public is ‘welling up’ (‘sourde’, KA: 22), but does not give it form in a State. Nor is the republic a stage in a historical process with an end. It is rather an end in itself. A more extensive account would examine how far Proust follows Kant in identifying the political event with that of the republic. See KA: 181–221. On occasions, Proust suggests that there are not two times but only one. The time of the event is in fact ‘another relation to time, a non-time, the void of time’ (KA: 99). However, this surely involves a slippage in the use of terms. Proust is quoting Sylvain Lazarus (unsourced). Badiou shows no interest in Proust’s work on Benjamin, for at least three reasons: firstly, on his own admission, he has no interest in what he takes to be messianisms. Secondly, his extraordinarily coherent mind tends to find coherences in others, but also to overlook the tensions in their thought. Thirdly, he

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

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Intermittency is distrustful of both melancholy and sensibility. For an account of this distrust and its implications, see Gibson (2006): 16–69, 262–3. This is not chronological. Proust produces some very fine work on Benjamin early in her career. In HC, which dominates the ensuing discussion. ‘Doublure’ means both ‘lining’ (of a coat) and ‘understudy’. For the ontological status of the concept, see Proust (1996): 47–8. ‘Doubleness’ is my term, but is clearly also implied. I have preferred Spencer’s pithy, vivid translation. See Benjamin (1985 [1938– 9]): 50. Proust relates this to the Spinozan conatus essendi, for which see 31; Gibson (2006): 177; (2010): 85–6. Cf. Proust (1985): 40. Reason is never assured of victory nor guided by the hope of one. Contrast Badiou’s critical account of the ‘binary opposition’ of history and prehistory (LE: 160). The melancholy I associate with Benjamin is ‘saturnine melancholia’, as opposed to the ‘left melancholia’ he excoriated; on which distinction, see Pensky (1993): 14. For Proust’s version of saturnine melancholia, see in particular Proust (1985): 48–50. Cf. Proust on Benjaminian critique as ‘prophetic’ reading (1998b). Cf. Benjamin on the relation between language and truth in translation, notably in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1979): 69–82; and Proust’s commentary on the theme, notably in Proust (1998b), especially at 44. Benjamin (1991): 5.490–91; quoted Osborne (1994): 59. See Proust, DT: 15 for the full argument. A more extensive account of this idea would include Proust’s most effective explanation of it, which actually comes in an essay on Deleuze, suggesting that Deleuze might help us protect Benjamin from any conversion into the numinous. See Proust (1998a): 41. For a connection between Benjaminian counter-time and Proustian resistance, see Proust (1999): 171. For this argument, see Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History XVI’ (1979): 264; and cf. HC: 46, fn14. A full account of this complex and important idea is beyond the scope of this study. But see for instance HC: 46–9. In the spirit of critique – Nietzschean, and Marxian, specifically in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – whose object, again, is ‘to make justice reign’ (Proust 1995c: 209). For a powerful, complex account of this theme, see Proust (1996). For this last Benjamin, see for instance Lane (2005). Proust argues that, like Bataille, Benjamin understood that the great theology is ‘a theology without theology’ which knows that ‘God is dead and the Messiah will not arrive’, that the question, forever, is survival after the Fall, in a nature definitively ‘deprived of [comprehensive] grace’, Proust (1995d): 54–6. For Benjamin, both historical materialism and Jewish theology as he knew them were in a state of chronic decrepitude. For Proust’s own political minimalism – resistance as a work whose chances of success are feeble and whose forces slight – see Proust (1997b): 103. Rose is quoting Benjamin (1991): 5.599.

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37. All references except those to the Five-Book Prelude cite the year of the relevant version of The Prelude and line numbers in the Norton edition (1979). All references to the Five-Book Prelude are to the Blackwell edition (1997). 38. For example, Jonathan Bate, who grants a certain weight to Liu’s claim that ‘there is no nature except as it is constituted by acts of political definition’, but also assumes that Nature of itself is unified, (1991): 18–19; cf. Liu (1989): 104. 39. Since, if the ecological case holds good, it does so on the basis of an ethical principle rather than a transcendentalism, it has no need of this archaism. 40. For the argument in detail, see Duncan Wu, ‘Introduction’ to Wordsworth (1997): 12. 41. Cf. Douglas Wilson on Wordsworth and the unconscious (1993), and Nicholas Royle’s brilliant analysis of the historical coincidence of modernity and the idea of the uncanny (2003).

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3. A Counter-phenomenology of Spirit: Christian Jambet

THE GREAT RESURRECTION OF ALAMUT In the year 1090, Hassan-i Sabbah instals himself at Alamut and proclaims its autonomy. Alamut (which means ‘Eagle’s nest’ in Persian) was an extraordinary mountain fortress in Iran, not far south of the Caspian Sea. Hassan was an Iranian Ismaili missionary who had sworn allegiance to the prevailing Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. When Caliph Ma’ad al-Mustansir Billah died, however, the Vizier chose as his successor, not the Caliph’s older son, but the ‘weak and isolated’ younger one, whom he hoped would become his puppet (GR: 24). Hassan and his followers refused to accept the Vizier’s coup, cut off ties with Cairo, fled eastward, and sought refuge at Alamut.1 The community at Alamut, known as Nizari, was Ismaili in its beliefs. Though much shrunken now, and hardly noticed by the West, Ismailism in the period of Alamut was a major force in Islam, and the Ismailis were a political power. Mainstream Ismailism had been dominant in Fatimid Egypt itself. But the Nizaris were of a different order. Alamut was a fragmented, scattered community, living in bleak and barren lands (‘terres peu accessibles et ingrates’, GR: 26). It was not even a structured community, in that it obeyed a mission not an administration. But it was not a revolutionary, still less a terrorist community or ‘sinister order’ (Jambet 2007a: 7).2 If Islam itself is divided between ‘messianic hope and obsession with the law’ (Jambet 1992b: 123), Alamut was guided by a messianic project. Ismailism had always been distinct from Imami Shi’ism. The Ismailis were gnostics, esoteric, concerned with illumination or vision, and were therefore bound to differ from exoteric Islam and the pragmatic Shi’ite concern with Sharia law, let alone Sunni orthodoxy. The Nizaris of Alamut took this further: unlike the dominant forms of Shi’ism, theirs were antinomian, and they preached ‘the abolition of the law’ and a variety of 112

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dissident doctrines, like ‘moral licence’ and the abolition of sexual difference (GR: 30). Above all, they were committed to a concept of the transhistorical event as that which alone might reverse the ‘disorder of the world’ (GR: 27).3 This commitment ran deep: the true religion was epiphanic. For that very reason, the Nizaris thought, it was also haunted by an awareness of long periods of obscurity. Nizari narratives of the world hinged on a concept of the event and the remainder. For the community of Alamut, Alamut itself precisely exemplified these narratives. The major moment in the history of Alamut comes in 1162, when a second Hassan, the Imam Hassan ibn Mohammed ibn Bozorg Ummid, assumed power. In 1164, he announced the Qiyamat al-Qiyamat, the Great Resurrection.4 The story of the early history of Islam is narratable as a series of progressive radicalizations, reidentifications with its radical roots which insist on a break that is also a return to a tabula rasa. For the Nizaris, the Great Resurrection was the culmination of the series, a nec plus ultra of the revival of the radical principle. However, if it reversed the disorder of the world, the reversal did not last long: in 1210, with the second Hassan’s death, his successor broke ‘with the doctrine of the resurrection itself and re-established Muslim law’ (GR: 31). The messianic experience of Alamut was over. The Nizaris duly resubmitted themselves to the rule of legalism and normativity. Once Alamut surrendered to the Mongols in 1256, both it and what it signified were at an end. As Jambet puts matters, ‘the transhistorical history of the event fell back into the very element that it was a question of leaving behind’ (GR: 29). The story of Alamut and its significance are the subject of Jambet’s most compelling book, and his account of them in a certain way sums up his ‘phenomenology of the spiritual fact’ (for which see 12–13). This conveys, not a religious conviction, but a form of thought which involves a particular concept of history. The different avenues in Jambet’s thought keep leading inexorably to Alamut, though he is resolute in his determination to preserve the historical and intellectual chasm that yawns between Alamut and ourselves, a determination inseparable from his commitment to his own particular forms of genealogy and phenomenology. What took place, then, on that remote, bare hill-fastness that can still rivet a philosopher nearly a thousand years later? Hassan proclaimed the Resurrection on the seventeenth day of Ramadan, 559 (8 August 1164). His proclamation is an event of ‘singular truth’ (GR: 13). The Resurrection was an event, the event being ‘the first category of the Ismailian philosophy of history’ (GR: 65). The event of the Resurrection consisted in an epiphany. It occurred ‘like a

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comet that appears quite close to us, in our sky, before disappearing into the distance again’ (GR: 64). For the Alamut community, it was the fulfilment of the Ismaili dream of the arrival of something ‘which nature does not tolerate’, a messianic triumph (GR: 12). The Resurrection was the product of an immediate desire, of a spontaneous will to interrupt the course of the world and renounce its placid servitudes, which are always a form of spiritual death. It effected a ‘transmutation of all values’ (Jambet 1983a: 124), gave birth to a new, singular subjectivity, conferred a power superior to the law, and bore witness to the possibility of an unprecedented liberty. Hassan spoke to his followers on behalf of ‘the Resurrector’.5 As Imam, he declared that the Resurrector was immediately visible, that here, now, in Alamut, the hidden truth that had long remained ‘deeply occulted’ was manifest (GR: 40), the Resurrector’s function being precisely ‘radical apophatism’, the manifestation ‘of that which withdraws from all manifestation’ (Jambet 2005: 180, 182). Hassan thus ‘decided’ (on) the arrival of the event. But he himself was in a sense unimportant, his ‘physical and psychological attributes’ inessential, indeed he shed them (GR: 87). He preached no gospel and formulated no rules. It was his coming ‘out of hiding’ and ‘intervention’ as Imam (GR: 59, 81), his soteriological role, his function as a witness, and the cut or the break that he thereby instituted, that mattered. Hassan was the representative of the Resurrector, but this representation was in no respect an incarnation – the Nizaris lacked all notion that God in his plenitude might arrive in the world of man. Esoteric Islam is everywhere anti-incarnationist, and in this (for Christians) resembled Docetism, the heretical doctrine that God is never incorporated into the world, that the Christ on the cross was a fantasm only.6 Since Hassan was not significant in himself but only for the principle that was revealed through him, there was no question of his achieving a peculiarly elevated status. He was not associable with any fleshly, Christ-like heroics. Thus if Hassan is effaced in the Resurrector, the Resurrector is not a divine presence within Hassan. He is rather an index of ‘the generative and unifying principle of the existent’ (GR: 51), which is beyond representation. Here, crucially, the messianic event puts ‘an ontology into play’. Esoteric Islam gives primacy to ontology ‘over every dimension of reality’, including the historical dimension. At Alamut, a people are caught up in a communal passion for ‘the ontological foundations of the givens of their faith’ (GR: 93, 140). We may proceed through the distinction between esoteric and exoteric Islam, everywhere important in Jambet. Exoteric Islam is the outward law or formal clothing of religion, as supremely in Sharia law, the canonical law as first put forth

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in the Koran and Sunnah, elaborated by the analytical principles of the schools and adhered to by both Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims. It is concerned with matters of orthodoxy in social and political life, and suited to the generality of believers. By contrast, esoteric or gnostic Islam, to which Ismailism belongs and about which Jambet chiefly writes, has to do only with revelation and theological teachings derived from the Koran. Esoterism consists of doctrines communicated to and intelligible by initiates, to whom it is the religious centre of Islam, where exoterism is its circumference. Exoterism betokens juridico-political dogma.7 By contrast, esoteric Islam betokens a spiritual journey, a philosophical practice and the prolongation of illumination. Its priority is spiritual not temporal power. Most importantly for Jambet, esoteric Islam is concerned with ‘existentiation’, the unending manifestation of Spirit in the production of the world, where exoteric Islam is concerned with the already ‘existentiated’, appearances, a given world and its existing laws.8 In the Resurrection, the world of appearances no longer predominates, in that it is everywhere traversed by and becomes a sign of ‘existentiation’, the creative principle at work. Philosophically, the Nizaris drew on a tradition running from Plato to Avicenna. In particular, they drew profoundly on Neoplatonism, especially Plotinus, as the philosophical work of Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani (c. 971) and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1202–74) amply demonstrates. According to this tradition, and in Neoplatonism above all, the creative principle (or ‘the One’) everywhere sets the world in motion, but also absconds, leaving the world to look after itself. The Nizaris took over this conception of the One, which allowed them to free it from any necessary attachment to beings and to think its infinity as in itself an imperative. The One has no being, nature or essence. It has no body and is not figurable. Furthermore, it is revealed to the gnostic subject as and in illumination, that is, it is not an object of knowledge. It is precisely their Neoplatonic inheritance that leads the Nizaris to break with the Fatimids. For the inheritance appears to assume an open crisis at the heart of ontological unity. The crisis of the One, as the Nizaris understand it, is that the work of existentiation does not complete it. If it ‘existentiates’ itself in and as beings, it loses itself in doing so. For it cannot coincide with the ‘existentiated’ beings which are nonetheless not monadically separate from it. By virtue of its very creativity, the One can seemingly never coincide with itself. The created world does not subsume the creative principle, is powerless to reach or rejoin it. The gulf between the two lies at the heart of esoteric Islam. Exoteric Islam accepts the gulf that yawns between creative principle

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and creation, or what it conceives of as the essences of created beings, and is therefore both pragmatic and reassuring. But for the Nizaris, if everything exists according to a creative power beyond its own, that does not point the subject in a pragmatic direction. Certainly, all existents exist of necessity, and according to that rule, ‘the chaos, the confused dust of things can and must receive stable and compatible forms’ (GR: 53). But all the essences of which exoteric Islam has made so much are only second-order constructions. Man is ineluctably tied to the One itself, however impossible any unity with it may seem, and this in principle places him outside all relation, as a free being, for whom necessity may reverse ‘into the imperative of liberty’ (GR: 41) and the ‘existentiation’ of existents prove a cause of liberation. The Great Resurrection is a supreme instance of the rare exposure of the creative principle itself within the created world. It is an epiphanic presentation of the One as existentiation, a presentation in which truth becomes an event. It ‘reverses’ or calls into question the pragmatic insistence of the imperative of the law in exoteric Islam (Jambet 1983a: 118). The creature now understands that its particular world ‘has strictly neither value nor right on its side’ (GR: 79). It rather sees itself in the creative principle and its ‘infinite power of innovation’ (GR: 129). The Resurrector makes the liberty of the creative principle apprehensible. The Resurrection teaches that man ‘has no essence’ outside his relationship to the creative principle (GR: 321). It issues in a practice of liberty like the liberty or creative spontaneity of the One itself, an exteriorization of that trace of supernal liberty that man carries within him as ‘the free exercise of thought’ (AE: 39). However, there is apparently a contradiction lying in wait to trap us in what I have said so far: Hassan would seem to manifest a crisis in the unity of the One itself, a need to manifest or reveal itself within the world it creates. But how is that possible, given that, as creative principle, the One ceaselessly brings the world into being but does not intervene in it? This was the basis of a key problem for the Nizaris, since an absolute separation between creative principle and the created world seemed to threaten them with the spectre of Manichaeanism. Ismailism owed a great deal to Manichaean thought, but also wanted to hold it at bay.9 For Manichaeanism presents a cosmos governed forever by two equal, distinct, independent powers of good and evil (GR: 81), and therefore gives evil as real a foundation as good, in a structure whereby the power of both is effectively annulled (GR: 236ff.).10 The Manichaean good is spiritual, specifically separated from this world, ineffectual within it, admits no social inscription or incorporation.11

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The Nizaris refused the polar structure of this vision. But the point was clearly tricky, since there could be no question of the One revealing itself to man in a Damascene moment. Here an observation on esoteric Islam that Jambet attributes to Corbin is helpful: man can tear himself away from his historical life; indeed, this ‘tearing away’ is ‘the real sense of human existence’ (LO: 17). But man does not break with his historical existence because an exterior power has summoned him from his inertia; he is turning away from the start. Without what Corbin calls the anthropomorphosis that the Resurrection involves, the absence of the One itself from the creature that proceeds from it incessantly ‘translates itself’ as a void within the monad itself (Jambet 1993a: 20). ‘To go toward the divine’, writes Jambet, ‘is not to go towards the object of one’s demand but to be approached by the cause of one’s desire’ (GR: 381). The desire to tear oneself away from the world in favour of the One is the very gnostic sentiment of life itself, the ‘original rebellion against the servitude of our condition’ (LO: 191). The event is thus a double movement in which the One ‘approaches’ as the subject hearkens towards it. By virtue of this double movement, as in the Great Resurrection, the One itself is completed, reconciled with itself, its crisis allayed. Man and the creative principle redeem each other (GR: 277). The creative principle is visible in the creature. Hassan demonstrates, then, that the event does not take place without the desire of the subject which requires its emergence. The desire of the subject is the desire of the other. But here again we encounter a difficulty, for, according to this line of argument, it might initially seem as if the creative principle is only manifest in the singular perception which affirms it (GR: 347). Hassan nurses an autonomous, inward source of truth. His followers repeat and multiply his original manifestation of the creative principle as human liberty. But how exactly can a messianic community emerge? How does one ‘socialize the impossible’ (Jambet 1983a: 127)? Furthermore, how can the community maintain itself ‘in the state of resurrection’, outside the law? How can it avoid making everything licit and thereby disintegrating (Jambet 1994: xii; 1983a: 122)? This is a question of the social bond. The Imam can only reproduce and convey the truth by reproducing the ‘double movement’ in the master–disciple relation, as desire and approach together. He imposes no truth on the other person, but solicits his or her desire for it. The relationship between master and disciple is not a matter of the domination of one individual and the subordination of another, and knows no fusion. But it is nonetheless a union, if a paradoxical one, insofar as the master listens to the desire of the other, his or her language, as if that desire and language were his own. This

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is the very root of the social tie amongst those in process of forming a community of the One. We will understand this better if we grasp that the conception of liberty at stake here is quite distinct from a modern Western one. ‘If there is a philosophy which truly mistrusts individuality and personal rights’, Jambet tells us, ‘that philosophy is Ismailism’ (GR: 206). Here freedom is something like the reverse of individualism, a liberty sufficiently absolute to leave the subject indifferent to egoistic interests. Indeed, in the Resurrection, statements like ‘I know’ and ‘I do not know’, ‘I want’ and ‘I do not want’, ‘I like’ and ‘I do not like’, ‘I am this and not that, me and not you’ have ‘no signification’ (GR: 126). Liberty is not autonomy, if that means determining one’s affairs independently of the other. Indeed, it has nothing to do with an expression or fulfilment of self. There is no equivalent in esoteric Islam of liberation from sovereign rule or the emergence into freedom of the self-authorizing subject. Liberty rather involves the ‘sovereign amnesia’ of a total break with the conatus essendi (again), the basis of ‘all philosophies of [mere] survival’ (LA: 146–7; cf. LO: 13).12 Liberty is an ‘interiorization of the other, a becoming-other’ that is also an intimate recognition of ‘the super-abundance of truth’. That is ‘the foundation of real liberty’ (GR: 206, 209). At the Resurrection, those resurrected experience themselves as free beings, but only on condition that they turn towards and surrender to the source of their freedom. Spontaneous liberty becomes an infinite duty, bringing with it as its correlative certain forms ‘of obligation and constraint’ (GR: 13, 45); but these above all involve living by liberty or in ‘submission’ to it (GR: 145). If the Nizari conception of liberty is altogether distinct from the modern Western one, then so too is the Nizari conception of the subject. The subject is ‘existentiated’ and singular, an emanation. He or she is capable of recalling ‘the unfounded freedom of the real’ (GR: 345). But if subjecthood begins in revelation, says Jambet, we should conceive of it, not ‘according to the model of the cogito’, but as a cogitor (LO: 216). The cogitor was intrinsic to the prophetic philosophy at the foundation of European reason itself, but was subsequently suppressed by European rationalism. Esoteric Islam, however, maintains it, insisting on a sense of the origin of the subject in a discourse of the other as an origin outside the subject but ungraspable by it. Esoteric Islam feeds off the gap between thought and the thing, exteriority, nature. This might initially seem reconcilable with Cartesianism, since Descartes separates ‘the thinking thing’ and the res extensa. But from Descartes to Kant, European philosophy asserts this distance only to assume the burden of reducing it, committing ‘the thinking thing’ to signifying its other.

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Like Lacan, esoteric Islam asserts that ‘I think there, where I am not’, there where another is absolutely hidden from me (LO: 231; cf. Lacan 1966: 277). Hassan turns Alamut in the opposite direction to Mecca, and this is significant. It is not surprising that one can still find invectives against Nizari Ismailism on the Internet. For Hassan declares that the rule of Muslim law is at an end. The Fatimids insist on the pre-eminence of the law. But law is of the world, transient in its forms. Legislation is historically diverse. That which is immediately visible in and through the Imam is exempt from historical determination. But there is no second or alternative law – no Kantian concept of a pure form of the Law is possible in Islam (see Jambet 2001: 200). Nor is the Imam a lawgiver; or rather, the lesson of the Imam as legislator is immediately present in himself, and is not a ‘representation of meaning’ (GR: 310). What is visible in the Imam is no less than the ‘messianic destiny of human history’, the principle according to which worlds come to an end or are always ‘engulfed’, and which makes impossible any wholehearted allegiance to the law pertaining in any particular world (GR: 67). The event abrogates all ‘positive religions and successive legislations’ before it (GR: 69), calls distinctions between what is legal and illegal into question, and, to legal obligation, counterposes an obligation . . . to renounce the law. The categorical imperative becomes ‘Don’t obey’. But this does not spell a leap to Sadean transgression. The point is rather that, turned towards the creative principle, the esoteric subject cannot brook any mediation between it and him or her. He or she knows that ‘the law reverses the truth it represents’ (GR: 123). Certainly, the subject is bound to show an absolute obedience to the Imam, but this is not an obedience to any commandment, to an exterior imposition of any kind, but an orientation towards liberty, the liberty of the creative principle itself. The Resurrection also made possible ‘une prise de parole’, a new relation to language. Interpretation is of cardinal importance, here. In the wake of an event, interpretation neither knows nor addresses any prior law, for laws belong to the world of appearance, and the subjects of the Resurrection ‘rise up against the domination of appearance’ (GR: 87; cf. Jambet 1991b: 174). Meaning is always ‘incomplete’; there is always ‘a meaning to come’ (Jambet 1992b: 125). But the oppressors will always take the side of the letter, of a finite meaning and a finite world, and it is always possible that authority will overcome the infinity of hidden meaning (GR: 89). Certain strategies of resistance to the literalists may be important: fantastic etymologies, contingent decisions (Jambet 2004: 147). Above all, it is necessary to

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be attentive to the prophetic dimension of language, unfinished, neverclosed (Jambet 2004: 151), to the excess of sense in the utterance, the pyramid of signification over and above the simple letter. The infinity of signification must triumph over finite meaning. Thus interpretation and existentiation become the same process. The major forms of interpretation constitute an identification with the very becoming of the world. Interpretation delivers the subject from the letter of the law and finitude together; the subject is endowed with a lucidity constituted in its knowledge of the super-abundance of truth and its abandonment (as cogitor) to the discourse of the other, together (GR: 209). Since the hidden sense of which the subject knows is pure manifestation, to which interpretation responds by itself becoming ‘messianic action’, interpretation is now ‘nothing other than the productive law of the event’ (GR: 88, 93). Gnostic interpretation implies an indefinite, open language, anxious, non-totalizable. Its maxim is: ‘have the courage to make your own soul tremble’ in reading (LO: 105). Respect for the infinity, the incompleteness, the radical precariousness of meaning will require that you read the Koran ‘in your own contingent manner’ (Jambet 1983a: 126). Since meaning is determined by no law, read in awe, as if meaning were for you and you alone. As a totality, the truth of the Koran is inaccessible, but the Koran can always supply a monadic truth, a revealed truth in its singularity (LO: 113). Everything in the Koran remains a symbol, because the work of interpretation takes place in diverse and successive historical worlds. Interpretation is therefore a ‘perpetual hermeneutics’, a ‘permanent revolution’ (LO: 100).13 Exegetical truth is both singular and universal, given to all, but according to the singular instance (LO: 105). By the same token, the interpreter must know his own knowledge as ignorance and in no respect elevate his interpretation above the humblest alternative. This clearly implies a politics and, whilst what Jambet says about Mulla Sadra, that it would be mistaken to confuse a ‘theology of the spirit of sanctity’ with ‘a political theology’ (AE: 377),14 also surely holds for Alamut and indeed esoteric Islam as a whole, there is no doubt a politics at stake in the Great Resurrection. If the esoteric subject’s intimacy with the creative principle places him outside all relation, and exoteric constructs are merely secondary, second thoughts, this logically leads to a radical egalitarianism. What characterizes the One as such is the radical equivalence or equality of all its instances, the 1x1x1x1x1 . . . of my introduction, an infinite sameness of singularities. In the Resurrection, there is only equivalence: everything which particularizes the relations between singularities is ‘foreign’ to its ‘real’ (GR: 127), singularity being distinct from particularity, which

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makes abstract and general relations possible (Jambet 1993a: 21). The Resurrection has apocatastatic, Adamic or utopian consequences.15 It exerts a peculiar force on behalf of the impoverished, dispossessed and disempowered, since they now appear as myriad singularities amongst myriad others. It spells the erasure of apparent distinctions between people, the disappearance of law in the revelation of truth and of ritual in the immediate presence of the creative principle. Finally, the community must insure itself against anarchy: certain commandments must be kept, in matters pertaining to death, sexual relations and rudimentary ownership, for example, because it is necessary that the community sustain and therefore in some measure continue to regulate itself, that ‘the time of liberty’ be ‘liveable’ (GR: 317). These commandments, however, are ‘the minimal conditions for Adamic existence’ (GR: 318), and scarcely laws. In the Resurrection, in spite of a certain political reticence that the Nizaris derive from Neoplatonism (Jambet 2005: 216), we see the significance that Platonism has always had for ‘the oppressed creature’: for those who have no power or voice, in Ideas lies their cry (LO: 13). Jambet even suggests that the Nizari community accomplishes ‘the essential desire of Platonism’, converting the social bond into a pure kind of love (GR: 365). This is explicit in Tusi, for whom love is the social bond par excellence. Love exceeds politics, but is also true politics. This love undoes commerce, makes virtue unnecessary and is finally a love of wisdom. But this form of the social bond is only possible because the community of Alamut has entered into another historical time. It lives in the time of the Resurrection, in which man has become the Eureka! (‘the simple “I have found” ’, GR: 277). To Hassan and his followers, the event of the Resurrection ‘reveals another temporality’ distinct from the mundane (GR: 43). The Nizaris problematize any concept of time as merely a succession of states in the material world and understand events like the Resurrection as rare eruptions of ‘suprasensible’ time, a time that is habitually unavailable to commonplace experience, the time of the ‘spiritual fact’, into ‘sensible’ time (LO: 13). But time lived epiphanically is not, banally, eternity glimpsed in opposition to the diurnal round. It is a second temporality which does not immediately erase the social temporality that existed prior to it. The whole enterprise of the Alamut community, in one sense, becomes a question of how to reconcile gnosis with a collective historical practice, how to make the temporality they have abruptly grasped become a time that is also lived. The work may fail and meet with defeat, as at Alamut; it is always possible, not least in the wake of such a defeat, to turn away from the principle of intermittency, to insist on the limit of a given historical world and

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to deny the possibility of its metahistorical fracture, to confound truth with a particular horizon. But there is no closure in the Nizari scheme of things, in that no universal will ever subsume the living, contradictory world. This means that history is never closed, sealed, blocked off, that there are always events, that metahistorical interruptions of history will never end. History is an ‘infinity in act’, an actual infinity (LO: 101).16 Thus esoteric Islamic philosophy is prophetic, structured around events and the attente, the practice of waiting. Here we may return to Jambet’s critique of Hegel, and Corbin’s critique, which so influenced him. For Corbin, in (the Kojèvian) Hegel, there is an absolute dissolution of the historical moment, in that only the absolute conserves itself. Each historical moment exists in relation to the whole, which makes it precarious and insubstantial (LO: 256). The Hegelian One never happens as an epiphany without totally incarnating itself. Becoming is not a contingent series of presents, but the interior revelation of the real. There is equally no repetition (in the sense in which the event repeats itself); there is only the unity of the meaning of history (LO: 255). Thus Hegel’s historicism implies a homogeneous causality, a totality of relations and a work of supersession in which presents are constantly being ‘left behind’. But Corbin rejects the Hegelian narrative of the struggle for the mastery of history. There is and can be no Aufhebung (Jambet 2001: 192). In the teeth of the Hegelian absolute, both Corbin and Jambet are fundamentally concerned to preserve the space between the revelation of historical meanings and the absent totality, the absconditus (or void) which founds them, which is also the space of non-knowledge (LO: 16). Corbin’s philosophical question was therefore: is a non-Hegelian phenomenology possible? Can it situate itself outside the space of Hegelian phenomenology? He sought to discover ‘another phenomenology of the spirit’ – a ‘counter-phenomenology’17 – which might preserve the space of events (LO: 19). This, says Jambet, should suit us: our contemporary attitude to interpretation recoils from totality, and we are sceptical about any notion of a supreme reason. But it is where Corbin goes from this argument that is crucial. For Corbin, that we must discount any idea of a supreme reason does not mean that we should abandon any and all ideas of historical reason itself. We must rather give reason other regulatory ideas than totality. This is the supreme task of a counter-phenomenology. The problem is to sustain within logic the rights of that which is ‘non-totalizable’ (LO: 108). Jambet formulates this idea more Lacanianly: Hegelian dialectic secretes a flaw, the real. It is precisely that flaw that one needs to think within historical reason.

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Here Heideggerian ‘historiality’ aids us again. No ‘history in general’ can lay claim to epistemological priority over existence. History is rather irreducibly specific, always made possible by a temporal hermeneutics that functions as revelation. Every historical situation is founded on a hermeneutics which comes first and is an understanding of time, since time is a human production and not natural. But, says Heidegger, ‘fallen into’ historical existence, man turns away from his ‘historial’ origin. He reverses the actual causal relation of history and subject, and forgets his first assertion, which lies in his historicization of time itself. To open up the question of ‘historiality’ is to disjoin or denaturalize the Hegelian chain in insisting on a metahistorical principle beyond or ‘before’ history, outside and irreducible to it. Metahistory is not another, hidden history like that of Hegel’s Spirit. It appears in the instant that interrupts the historical course of time, as pure singularity. Jambet’s phenomenology deals in a ‘transhistorical generality’, a recurrent form, but the recurrent form of pure singularity, saving a universal that is ‘always and only singular’ (LO: 253). Islamic gnosticism points in this direction. It is crucial to save the singularity of the event. Gnosticism affirms discrete temporalities in succession, which are quite unlike the stages of the Hegelian dialectic. There is no other of the other, as in dialectics. There is only the agon of the One. Here historical time knows no sublation, but appears rather as an infinity of differentiations and reversals. The absolute spirit will never incarnate itself as objective spirit in sensible temporality. What returns is always and only the absconditus, the absent whole: the absconditus is never exhausted in the revelatus (Jambet 1991a: xi). Becoming is therefore not homogeneous but dramatic. Contradictions are not surmountable. In the phenomenology of Abu al-Najib al-Suhrawardi (1097–1168), for example, becoming is a continual disunification and rupture of the One, and does not move towards final unity, a reconciliation of the One and multiple. The gnostic understanding of Spirit is likewise very different to Hegel’s. Spirit is effusion, gift, the imperative of liberty, ‘mediation between the creative act and created man’ (AE: 356). It is not caught up in the temporal world, as it is in Hegel, ‘not situable within the world of the creation’ (AE: 357). But if the Spirit cannot be situated in this world, its epiphanies take place here. The Platonic experience in philosophy and history told of a pure gleam of light, the disappearance of one world in the fugitive appearance of another. This is the meaning of the story of Alamut. Ismailism is important because it is so concerned with ‘the great experiences humanity periodically undergoes when it reawakens the fundamental question of its mode of existence’ (GR: 318). Jambet states quite

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explicitly that the messianic event in esoteric Islam is not to be confused with the ‘social revolutions’ of modern politics (GR: 78). Both gnosticism and revolution nonetheless appear at ‘the point of the real’ (GR: 391) – in its Lacanian definition – and thus together make up a history apart from history. The history of the great dawn and the demise of Alamut is partly a metaphor for other such dawns and ruined histories and is intimately related to them. Indeed, the messianic event lays bare a form of historical experience that might be thought of as clarifying the implications of the modern revolutions, and can profoundly instruct our thought about them. For esoteric Islam exists in a state of permanent crisis which is that of liberty lived in the impossibility of its fullness. Its ‘insurpassable horizon is the messianic wait and its recurrent historical obstruction [échec]’ (Jambet 2004: 253). Events in history may produce particular stories, like that of Alamut, but there is no larger historical tale to be told; history neither points towards nor arrives at any end. Events repeat themselves, and go on repeating themselves, they foretell their own return, they exist to be repeated. But equally, as Jambet states, citing the sixteenth-century Ismaili doctrinal treatise Kalam-e Pir, ‘ “periods of occultation [satr] must necessarily follow” ’ them (Herati 1935: 67; quoted GR: 99). In these periods passivity looks like activity, the law takes over the whole of social space, exterior symbols prevail, the inward light dies. Jambet’s interest in the Great Resurrection is an interest in what, the ‘messianic proclamations’ of the Ismailis show us, is ‘the recurrent presence of a form’, and this form involves the proclamation of a resurrection which is also the declaration of a time of justice, peace and a mass movement, not least among the dispossessed. But it also follows a necessary temporal curve through a ‘triumphal time’ to war, repression and martyrdom, to a ‘time of distress’ (GR: 76–7). There are always periods of obscurity, then, in which ‘revelation is obscured, the Imam retreats’ (Jambet 1983a: 117), and these must be densely factored into any account of messianic Ismaili history. To grasp the logic at stake, here, we will need to proceed through a fuller account of the gnostic conception of the One. THE PARADOXICAL ONE Jambet’s conception of the event and his narrative of it and its consequences are partly similar to Badiou’s. But there are obvious divergences between the two. Jambet is not a thinker of the event as aleatory occasion. His conception of existentiation as creative principle seems closer to Heidegger’s Ereignis, the event of Being, to Badiou the very

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‘essence of metaphysics’ (EE: 16). Most importantly, Badiou asserts that modern mathematics precisely and repeatedly shows us that there is no such thing as One, that ‘the One is not’ (EE: 31). By contrast, Jambet everywhere asserts that he is a unitary thinker. But this sounds incoherent. I have variously evoked Jambet’s concept of the One as an absconditus beyond Being, as creative or ‘existentiating’, and as crisisridden. The One at stake here sounds chronically divided. Furthermore, in my account of Jambet’s conceptions of history and metahistory and the Great Resurrection, I have insisted on his being a thinker of two distinct worlds. Jambet is surely profoundly in agreement with the Badiou who insists that ‘one divides into two’ (see e.g. Badiou 1999a). As early as L’Ange, he explicitly identifies power and domination with a unitary and resistance with a dualistic thought, since dualisms defy all quasiuniversalisms. It can, surely, hardly be possible that the young dualist has discreetly mutated into an ageing monist. Indeed, what evidence is there, really, of any serious monism in a philosopher, who, only a few years ago, was writing compellingly of the ‘radical dualism’ generating the ‘relentless [acharnée] and violent struggle’ between ‘the initiatory and counter-initiatory forces’ of esoteric and exoteric Islam (Jambet 2004: 38)? Dualism seems crucial to Jambet’s grasp of philosophy, its history and its priorities, stemming partly from his early Maoism, but also from Plato. In the wake of early political disappointment, in Apologie de Platon (1976), he affirms Platonic dualism against the ‘naturalism’ of Hegel (nature becomes ‘a set of relations within civil society’) and of the very Marx who provides a critique of Hegel (nature becomes ‘relations of production’, Jambet 1976: 41–2, 49–52). In La Logique des orientaux (1983), he also reasserts the importance of Platonic dualism as against the Heideggerian concept of the ‘forgetting of Being’. It is not Being, says Jambet, that, beginning with Plato, Western thought forgets. It is rather the ‘cassure intérieure’, the radical, interior break between two ontologically distinct realms inaugurated by Plato himself. ‘Forgetting’ begins with Aristotle, who thinks Being as homogeneous, lacking in qualitative difference. From Aristotle onwards, the thought of the break is steadily erased. This thought insists on a structure of differentiation situated at the very heart of Being. Islam has long continued to incorporate the remnants of this Platonic scheme, as Western philosophy has not. But it does so above all in esotericism. There is of course a profoundly Aristotelean tradition in Islam, too. The great Aristotelean Islamic master Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) opposes gnostic dualism, asserting the mastery of the law (LO: 189), and the thought of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037), though complex

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in its allegiances,18 makes Aristoteleanism integral to exoteric Islamic tradition and Sharia law. By contrast, esoteric Islam preserves the tradition deriving from Plato, Plotinus and Hellenic Neoplatonism.19 If the Platonic ‘cassure’ presents us with the ‘enigmatic topology’ of ‘the symbolic narrative of the Cave’, the gnostics maintain elements of that topology and, in doing so, not only provide a sumptuously elaborated thought of radical unworldliness, but also insist on a ‘duality of poles’ (LO: 151). Yet Jambet baldly states that ‘I take seriously that conjunction of the One, the real and the absolute which has been assumed by the various theologies’. The question for him is how, on the basis of the One, identity and conflict, unity and radical duality, might be arranged in a constantly reversible pattern that allows us to think, alternately, both ‘the nature of order and the process of tearing away from the world as it is’ (2003a: 38). If the ‘pattern’ is ‘constantly reversible’, then the One clearly has no essence and no defining qualities, but is rather the movement or process which makes essences and qualities possible. By the same token, Jambet’s dualism is clearly not a dualism like that of Manichaeanism, a determinate fixity dependent on categorical breaks. In his own phrase, his concern is not with a dualistic system but with a dualistic ‘sentiment of existence’ reconcilable with a unitary insistence (LO: 161). To quote the title of La Grande résurrection 2.1, the One at stake here is a ‘paradoxical One’.20 It is the principle of alternation itself, of intermittency, contradictorily understood as a unity. Here we should distinguish the One as Al-Haqq and Haqiqa. In doing so, we may understand exactly what Jambet means by a break between two ontologically distinct realms. The One as Al-Haqq is absconditus, does not belong to the world. It ‘imposes itself as true and authentic beyond all representation and manifestation’, but also ‘gives a power of truth to all revelation’ (AE: 11). It is a groundless ground, scintillating ‘beyond all nomination’, apart from all notions, determinations, concepts (GR: 144; Jambet 1993: 175). It is indistinct, and therefore exceeds the universe of existents and is a rebel to all signs or names, ‘all determined knowledge and practice’ (GR: 127). It is not the Being of beings, since it does not allow itself to be grasped in the register of being. It is ontologically prior to Being but not present in it. As al-Haqq the One is absent: it has ‘too little being to be present’ (GR: 159). It lacks the absolute reality which is the condition of the ‘existentiated’ world. Al-Haqq is not the creative principle but, since it has no existence in itself, is rather the condition of that principle. Haqiqa, the creative principle, is ‘the pure and infinite act of ‘l’événementialité créatrice’ (GR: 129).21 It is the ‘effective reality of being’, the work of

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‘existentiation’, that which produces ‘the concrete truth of existence’ (AE: 34). As Haqiqa, the One ‘liberates itself from itself’, from inexistence, and in doing so becomes ‘the infinite cause of its [own infinite] manifestation’ (GR: 144; LO: 136). Paradoxically, al-Haqq is evident only in Haqiqa, which both ‘irradiates from and veils’ al-Haqq as ‘its source’ (GR: 381). Crucially, the paradoxical One is not a whole: Jambet’s project is partly to dissolve any equation of the One with wholeness.22 For there to be a whole, there must be a boundary or limit that determines it as such.23 But no world is closed, homogeneous; it is always possible to pose another degree of existentiation beyond the limit of a world. The One thus opens all worlds on to a truth which they cannot reach. The condition of existence is infinite extension, and the One is exterior to any whole: there is no supreme genre or abstract totality. Here ‘the affirmation of the One’ and ‘a dualist concern’ become properly inseparable (GR: 225). The One includes a pure alterity, is unconditionally open to the Other. This conception of alterity is specifically Nizari and bears absolutely no relation to ‘the analyses of Emmanuel Levinas’ (AE: 83, fn1; cf. Jambet on Levinas in 1991c; 2001: 200; 2007: 35). The very condition of the paradoxical One is the possibility of its dehiscence, its submission to the power of division, splitting. The One is not a whole but a One-multiple. It is the putative sum of an infinite number of existences, a sum which can never be totalled up, because the world goes on adding to itself, infinitely, because the One exists as the Neoplatonists understood it to, as a ‘super-abundance’ (AE: 83). The One ceaselessly passes into the multiple, is indistinguishable from the multiple, since, as al-Haqq, it does not exist in itself. It opens itself up to an infinite series with no return to an enclosed whole: the 1x1x1x1x1 . . ., again. Exoteric Islam seeks to abolish this infinity in the whole of the law. But the exoteric whole is a dead universal into which differences disappear, thus annihilating the multiple. If the One ceaselessly passes into the multiple, however, this leaves the distinction between ‘existentiation’ and the ‘existentiated world’ looking very fine, for ‘the engendering of the universe is not a movement whose origin can be situated outside the world’ (in a creator-God, GR: 177).24 But if ‘existentiation’ cannot be known apart from the ‘existentiated world’, the ‘existentiated world’ is a matter of forms where ‘existentiation’ cannot be. For if the creative principle had a form, it would depend on a power beyond its own, where there is only the absconditus. Haqiqa is or performs what Mulla Sadra calls ‘the act of being’. Sadra revolutionizes the gnostic tradition through the idea of the act of being and, in doing so, devises ‘the constitutive ontology of Islam’

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as an ontology, not of forms, but of light (AE: 13). For Sadra, Islamic ontology rests on the assumption that reality is grasped, not as essences or stable qualities supposedly underlying appearances, but in its appearance itself, which is that of light in obscurity. Everything is appearance: to be real is to appear. What we clumsily call transcendence is precisely this ‘radical immanence of being in beings’ (AE: 101). The fulfilment of Islamic ontology, then, lies, ‘not in the synthesis of the concept’, but in the knowledge of the light by which all things appear (AE: 149). But light is not a vehicle or medium; appearances are not entities ‘bathed’ in light. This would imply an essence of light, where light is act. Suhrawardi supposes such an essence, says Sadra. But he can only do so by abstracting, and this abstraction makes him miss the act of being itself, which precedes all reflection, all predication, and is rather apprehended in an ‘immediate perception’ or sensation (AE: 109). This pushes Jambet closer to Heidegger and further widens the gap between him and Hegel (though he also holds himself and Sadra apart from existentialism: unlike Heidegger and indeed Sartre, Mulla Sadra thinks the real, not existence; see AE: 64, fn2).The concept of the act of being takes us beyond all the modes of empirical existence, beyond law, and the principle of rational harmony which it supports, and beyond any conception of reality in terms of oppositions (being/not-being, thinking/not-thinking, etc.). Contraries or contradictions are produced by concepts, significations, language, and suppose a ‘common substrate’ (AE: 76). But no such substrate links two separate and unique manifestations of the act of being (the 1 of the 1x1x1x1x1 . . . is not a substrate). What matters is not relations between things but their singular actualization, their pure difference, difference irreducible to ‘kinds’ (AE: 77). The act of being is therefore anti-dialectical. Sadra’s thought is not a dialectics, but an ‘energetics’ in which the real is thinkable only in its effectivity, and ‘movement is one with essence’ (AE: 14, 16, 252). The act of being is donation, its condition original generosity, and its ‘logic’ one of ‘extension’ or infinite proliferation (AE: 90). Whatever the dualisms of esoteric thought elsewhere, the act of being in itself is not thinkable in dualistic terms. Yet it nonetheless has two ‘modalities’, the concrete and mental, and the two are equally real (AE: 64). We should not think the act of being as simply exterior or spectacular; it is also ‘the experience of mind itself’, and is therefore intimate with us, graspable not in signification or representation but in contemplation, contemplation as a relationship of closeness not distance, ‘unity’ with the object that includes inward contemplation (AE: 71–2). The act of being is strenuous, even ardent. ‘Existentiation’ is an incessant victory of being over non-being. As we have just seen, it suffers no

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determinations (like substrates and kinds). Above all, it is not describable in terms of quiddities, the ‘whatness’ of things. The absolute separation of the act of being from all conceptions of quiddity is central to both Jambet and Sadra, and a function of their Neoplatonic as opposed to Aristotelean allegiances. Aristotle and Avicenna give priority to the concept of quiddity, but this priority is abstract and illusory, veiling the real in its infinite singularization (AE: 70). By contrast, Sadra puts the Aristotelean work of abstraction radically back into question. He strips the act of being of all qualification borrowed from the Aristotelean vocabulary of quiddities, all understanding of singularities in terms of properties they share with others. In Aristotle, quiddity is substance and the act of being always secondary; being is an accident that happens to essence. But Sadra here reverses the transcendental illusion, the notion that the thing has to have a quiddity to exist: quiddity does not precede emergence. For Aristotle and the Aristotelean tradition in Islam, there is a stable, ‘substantial substrate’ which underlies becoming or the world of appearances (AE: 187). But for Sadra the substrate is ‘the shadow of the act of being’ (AE: 190). Genera, species, kinds and quiddities are all imposed ‘by the finitude of the world’ (Jambet 2000a: 28). If, as Aristotle and Avicenna have it, quiddity is not caught up in movement except by accident, then it cannot increase or diminish. This excludes negativity; the thing is complete in itself, lacks nothing. But for Sadra, quiddity is caught up in movement by the act of being, and there is therefore a negativity within it. This negativity, however, is not Hegelian, but a function of ‘essential movement’ (AE: 193). Sadra is intent on escaping Avicenna’s terrain: he abandons the logic of essence and existence for that of being as effectivity, and the movement of this effectivity according to ‘the intensive liberty of the real’ (AE: 146). Reality is never stable in any existent. Being is permanent metamorphosis, never static, unamenable to definition. But if the act of being precedes quiddity, this does not mean that we escape a world of quiddities, and here the argument of my chapter starts to bend in a different direction. For Sadra, the privilege that Aristotle accords to quiddity is an illusion, but quiddity itself is not. Everything has a quiddity, and the act of being must actualize it: ‘there is nothing which does not display [déploie] its act of being in an essence whose formal content is defined by and in quiddity’ (AE: 64). Effectivity and quiddity are just distinct qualities of an existent. The act of being is ‘the immediate, luminous presence of the thing itself’, quiddity its necessary but limiting shadow (AE: 65). If the act of being is anterior to the quiddity in concreto, however, it is also posterior to it in the intellect. The two are grasped quite differently. The act of being is known in a

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‘connaissance présentielle [presential knowledge]’, quiddity in a formal, abstract knowledge. Abstract knowledge is the foundation of the transcendental illusion. Here the intellect opposes itself to sensation, and does so unceasingly and ‘inexorably’.25 Yet at the same time sensation is amorphous or muddled, offers only ‘a veiled, confused and obscure apprehension’. It needs intellect, requires it as its necessary supplement, the faculty that will make clear to it what it cannot clarify for itself (AE: 100). Here the subject cannot but lapse back into ‘the inexhaustible metaphysical quest’ and the unending ‘disclosure of meaning’ (AE: 101). This is a necessary consequence of immediate, gnostic knowledge; but it spells also an evolving declension from it, an inexorable movement away from light to the world of shadow, at the end of which lies exoteric Islam and the law. Thus, in the last analysis, esotericism sets its face against exoteric knowledge, but must also subside into it; though exotericism can equally never achieve final closure, never declare that the law has definitively usurped the space of the event. Neither can abolish the other (Jambet 1992a: 11). Thus ‘rendre la lumière / Suppose d’ombre une morne moitié’ (Valéry 1942: 148): to ‘render light’ is also to assume its desolate corollary. The separation internal to the paradoxical One necessarily has its melancholic dimension. Etymologies even present the ‘significant root’ of the name of Allah as meaning an ‘unfathomable sadness’ (Jambet 1993a: 20; cf. GR: 219). The existent appears as ‘limited light’ (AE: 149, emphasis mine), that is, it has a part in shadow, light and shadow being finally inseparable. The messianic subject temporarily breaks their entanglement, as the philosopher thinks the meaning both of messianic truth and its imbrication in paradox. But it is nonetheless not hard to think of the philosopher and messianic subject together as two dwarf figures, to whom a vast world of power and submission, jurisdiction, repeatedly proves at best indifferent if not actually hostile. A submerged consciousness of this stalks esoteric Islam, at least, in Jambet’s and indeed Corbin’s account of it.26 Sadra himself quickly fell foul of the authorities, the Ulama or jurists, the arbiters of Sharia law, and subsequently cut an isolated Ovidian or Dantean figure in the village of Kahak. It is therefore not surprising to find Jambet following Corbin in proposing ‘un schème étoilé’, a concept of esoteric revelation as stellar, distributed here and there against a background of obscurity (LO: 222). Like Françoise Proust’s use of the same image, this makes events seem scattered and rarefied. Epiphanies are ‘déchirures éthiques’, ‘ethical tears’ that the mobility of Being makes in the fixity of quiddity (AE: 84). They lift or reverse the ‘intellectual primacy of quiddity over existence’

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(AE: 148), and make possible the sensory apprehension of the act of being. But as a revelation of that act, epiphany is always occasional and destined to occultation, if also always destined to return. The creative and productive liberty of the One as Haqiqa ‘exceeds the universe of existents by virtue of its indistinction’ (as contrasted with their distinctness, GR: 154, my italics). This ensures both the return of the messianic event and the repeated extinction of messianic truth. Thus the gulf between the One and the One-multiple leaves open the space for the event, but equally the space for a ‘fall [from] and degradation’ of messianic truth, for a persuasion of ‘the deficiency of reality in its entirety’ (GR: 192; cf. Jambet 1981: 101). In Jambet’s very striking reading of them, Christ’s words on the Cross – ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27: 46) – are exactly about this. Christ founders into a knowledge of an inescapable deficiency both immediate and radical. Here the One is no longer ‘perceived in the flaring out [flamboiement] of its revelation, but in the retreat and irremediable loss of its reality’. The mind is ‘struck by distress’ at its own impotence, a failure to sustain its knowledge (GR: 217), which is the very price of manifestation and endemic to messianic enthusiasm, for the site of the event and of the experience of degradation are the same. Degradation is only possible, can only be known for what it is, in the wake of an event. This melancholic–ecstatic double-bind is intrinsic to Ismailism as it was to Neoplatonism, but is extremely problematic under Sharia jurisdiction. As we have seen, the One is revealed but unknowable in and as itself, but we also can put this differently: there is always a void at the heart of being, towards which it declines, but from which it also actively springs, which it must also indefinitely surmount. The epiphanic structure of being, then, associates it with an experience of desire and fugitive lights, with both an ecstatic and a melancholic kind of experience. Esoteric Islam is ‘always threatened by melancholy’ (Jambet 2005: 218). The paradoxical One grants the world ‘two antagonistic colorations’ (GR: 220). It catches it up in a circle that passes ‘from melancholic prostration to messianic exaltation, then falls back into the terrible sentiment of exile’ or ‘ineffaceable loss’ (GR: 221; 1992b: 127), plunging the subject into an ‘inexplicable opacity’ (GR: 241). In hiding in Kahak, Sadra speaks of his age with great melancholy, as one in which the enemies of truth have triumphed (AE: 22). Its real is absolutely withdrawn from ‘its own manifestations’, from ‘all positive terms [énonciation positive]’ (AE: 175). The historical life of being can never rejoin its supreme principle, and must always carry within it ‘the melancholy of its loss’ along with the joy of its revelation (AE: 178). Indeed, we may at times suppose that ‘being

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begins in shadow and not in light, in the darkness [noirceur] of a loss whose object is eclipsed [s’est éclipsé]’. Seen from this vantage-point, the universe seems like a ‘sombre lament . . . punctuated by successive emanations of the One’ (GR: 220). THE DARK EVENT The Great Resurrection of Alamut is a manifestation of ‘the divine imperative in reality’ (GR: 229). Such manifestations occur but seldom. They leave a remainder. Ironically, this is evident only by virtue of manifestation itself: without epiphany, no remainder. The One in both its auspices, melancholic and ecstatic, appears in the Imam, and he is, in the end, a paradoxical figure. He may have ‘nothing of the “human, all too human” ’ about him (Jambet 1983a: 127), and yet also seem a man of slight consequence, and this perhaps has to do with the fact that he bears witness to, indeed instals both orders, together, in their interdependence, that he even predetermines the failure of gnosis with gnosis itself. The resurrection and melancholy ‘correspond to each other’ (GR: 289). Ismaili ontology is even describable as fundamentally if not comprehensively melancholic. For if the One is both al-Haqq and Haqiqa, both an absconditus and a revelatus, this means that it is caught up in a movement of coming and going and is perceived in its absence or loss as well as its emergence. The One is lost in its own division, and the knowledge that this is so is both baffling and disconsolate. This sense of the One is even ‘necessary to the gnostic vision of the world’, and the gnostic subject must maintain it in its paradox, ‘in a simultaneous vision’ from which a ‘pathetic’ concept of the One is inseparable (GR: 218). The pathos is that of a universal reality powerless wholly to seize its own liberty. The One itself is only desirable because it is forever the lost object: hence the reliance on the indefinite repetition of the resurrection, events, messianic acts, and equally the indefinite wait for a future. For everything that arrives is destined to be overturned; there is no final marriage of the Spirit and the world, but an unending process of conjunction and divorce. Here, again, Ismaili gnosticism points in a significantly different direction to Hegel, whose system (for Jambet) remains heavily overdetermined by Christianity and incarnationism. The melancholic–ecstatic paradox works its way right down through the Ismaili system of thought. As we have abundantly seen, both in the introduction and this chapter, it is endemic to the Ismaili conception of historical time. History must have a double aspect, occultation and manifestation, ‘the time of stupor and that of redemption’ (GR: 64). Within the gnostic scheme, infinity intersects – irregularly – with

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finitude; duration ‘not yet organized as history’ intersects with history itself. This gives history a ‘scansion événementielle’ (GR: 55). There is only a history of event and remainder. So, too, since the act of being takes place as 1x1x1x1x1 . . ., there is no dialectical principle of Being, only an opposition ‘of Being to obscurity’, to ‘the fundamental inexpressivity of the world’ (LO: 155; GR: 220; cf. Jambet 2000a: 33, 37, 51). The gnostic subject must hope to redeem Spirit from this obscure condition. But the work of redemption is an unending task. The repetition of messianic acts is interminable. The subject of the event exists in ‘a heterogeneity of appearances’ of varying intensity (LO: 139) and experiences both ‘colorations’ of the world (GR: 220), knows both illumination and the relapse from it. It is characteristic of the subtle discriminations within the gnostic scheme, however, that we miss something about it if we merely insist on the polar terms of the melancholic–ecstatic dualism. The failure or decline of illumination is a source of often intense pain, disappointment, longing, but it does not of itself send the subject crashing to spiritual disaster. If the paradoxical One has two sides, there is also a dualism that is not of the One. In the first instance, says Jambet, we may grasp it as the dualism of good and evil. But this is not an ontological dualism: to suppose that would mean attributing the active creation of evil to the One-multiple, granting as real a foundation to evil as to good, and therefore falling into the Manichaean trap. Neither the One nor the One-multiple nor the act of being is the productive origin of evil. Evil rather appears as the One-multiple undoes itself; that is, it appears as a kind of ineluctable but secondary function of the act of being. The One-multiple engenders evil through its very super-abundance, which reaches a limit-point at which its power reverses into impotence. In effect, generative force and entropic dissipation of it go hand in hand. Furthermore, the concepts of good and evil at stake here are extremely specific ones. More than one kind of loss is at stake in Ismaili thought. Personal and material losses of course take place, and they cause (sometimes great) unhappiness. Jambet cites Albertine’s death in Proust’s Recherche and, above all, Oulipo poet Jacques Roubaud’s collection of poems on his wife’s death, Quelque chose noir, as relevant European examples (see Roubaud 1986). He chooses these examples for a reason: for what also matters to Proust and Roubaud, as it does to the Beethoven of the arioso dolente of Piano Sonata no. 31, is the manner in which the one form of loss may be mixed with or subside into another one. This second form is loss as ‘indetermination’, absolute ‘privation’, the ‘distraught movement [mouvement éperdu]’ in which one collapses from grief into the condition of sheer matter (GR:

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257; Jambet 2005: 205–6). Here unhappiness is indistinguishable from evil (or injustice, Jambet 2005: 209); indeed, according to Tusi, unhappiness itself ‘is the name that simple people give to evil’ (GR: 244). Evil appears as fixity. Where the act of being is movement, existence ‘in effusion’, evil is an obstacle to both. So, too, where existence in its effusion is characterized by its intensity, evil ‘coagulates’ it (LO: 163). Evil is the twilight or terrifying ‘assombrissement [clouding over]’ of Being (LO: 163). This is very close to a Neoplatonic conception of evil as above all the absence of good, and a Neoplatonic anthropology founding a notably ‘dark vision’ of ‘humanity left to itself’ (GR: 71). In fact, the ‘only real death’ is ‘the death of the spirit’. In the face of an ‘imperative subjectivity’, death can have no meaning (GR: 131). But the death of the spirit is extremely real and takes place everywhere and all the time, assuming different forms. The major vision of it in the Western tradition is perhaps the great, dark, even twisted Schopenhauerian version of the sublime, in which forces seemingly incomparably superior to the subject provoke, not a resurgence of the Idea of Reason, as in the Kantian sublime, but of the body as sheer ‘ “vouloir-vivre” ’, which exceeds Ideas, into which all Ideas and inspirations collapse. There where one had imagined an ‘ever-new flux, productive forces deploying themselves, liberations succeeding other liberations’, one hears, after all, only ‘the demented music of life . . . an insupportable real’ (Jambet 1987: 127–30, 133–4). In this respect, the death of the spirit is not loss, but rather the loss of loss, the failure of the belief that there was ever anything to lose. We might indeed think of representing it as the capture of the subject by the body, if we recognize that this has various associations for the Ismailis quite foreign to the modern West. Firstly, the capture at issue is material in a way that means that the body – ‘heavy, solid, massive, impossible to circumvent [incontournable]’(LO: 163) – is not dissociated from the inorganic world. One knows evil by and as this leadenness of the body. Moreover, the spirit is fascinated by the body, which makes it actually desire its own powerlessness. But the spirit in decline does not choose its abandonment to the body, nor even fall into it. It rather ‘darkens’ into the body (Jambet’s word, again, is assombrir). At this point, the most significant dualism is ‘not that of good and evil’ but rather of ‘intensity’ and ‘weakness’ or the process of weakening (GR: 246). The death of the spirit is therefore not a question of the failure of subjective will. The abandoned subject finds itself caught in universal matter, snared by ‘a paradoxical presence of non-being . . . the worst of abstractions’ (Jambet 2000a: 56). He or she falls prey to the death of the spirit as what Jambet calls the ‘dark event’ (GR: 252). The luminous and the dark event are exactly symmetrical

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as epiphany and melancholy are not, or not exactly. For as a mode of self-loss – again, the thought is subtle – the foundering of the subject into matter is a ‘demoniac becoming’, and therefore an experience not very different from that of liberty (Jambet 2000a: 99). Crucially, however, as in the ending of Sonata no. 31 or of the Recherche, the Libera Me of Britten’s War Requiem27 or Plotinus and Neoplatonism, so too in Islamic gnosticism there is a concept of the possibility of anamnesis, of a reawakening from the death of the spirit. There are available forms of resistance to loss and the loss of loss, modes of withstanding them, accommodating to or treating them. This is very important: melancholy and the death of the spirit are not the same. The problem lies in ensuring that the first does not become a forecast, harbinger or cause of the second. Certainly, it is futile for the subject to set itself up in opposition to evil. The Stoic ethics of struggle with adversity is inadequate, since the body with which the Stoic struggles dictates the terms of the struggle from the start, and therefore ensnares him or her in irony. But the subject may nonetheless sustain itself precisely in understanding its pain as the consequence of the loss of the event, and therefore as equally a testimony to its power. In other words, the subject must not surrender to and reproduce the principle of loss. In this context as in others, as for Badiou and (Françoise) Proust, the work of transmission is crucial. Historically, what matters are spiritual events and the continuations that arise from them. The esoteric imperative repeatedly asserts a metahistorical or suprasensible time as opposed to the time of historical determinations. But the knowledge of metahistorical time does not automatically survive a period of obscurity. In ‘the time of darkness [le temps d’occultation]’, it requires particular forms of transmission (GR: 66). How can the messianic act be more than just an instant? How does the truth of the resurrection persist in the absence of the Imam? How does it determine its own history, a history proper to itself, without collapsing into mere chronos? These are questions for the prophets, Imams and messianic subjects in general, for it is they who have delegates or leave legacies, who constitute (meta)historical coherence and of whom the relevant principle of subjective innovation is required. The work of transmission is part of hierohistory (see 8–10), the history of the occasions of Spirit and the series of subjects of messianic truths, and offers the messianic subject a measure of protection from the threat of the dark event. The Mongol invasion and the dispersion and dissolution of Alamut raise precisely the questions appropriate to the development of a hierohistory. What is left of fidelity to the event, in times of darkness? How

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can one continue as a subject, when ‘it is apparently no longer possible’ to do so (GR: 333)? What is the ethics of a dissolved community? How is it possible to produce such an ethics without falling back into the legalistic mindset? How to find principles, methods and a system of conduits for a messianic thought? These and other such questions necessarily force the subject back into the melancholic–ecstatic paradox, the paradox of the Imam, which here becomes a paradoxical thought of continuity and dispersion together. The appearance of the Resurrector seemed to obviate any need to think in terms of forms of transmission (like education), since he promised liberty at once. But the community must renounce the idea of the definitive presence of immediate and imperative liberty, because it will inevitably encounter forces threatening to destroy it from without and erode it from within, inevitably decline, fragment and disperse. Esoteric Islam must therefore ensure the persistence of tradition and underwrite the commitment of the faithful in the twilit or melancholic phases of the messianic story. Messianic subjects will therefore learn to compose with law, even whilst not believing in it. They know that, where laws are fugitive, truth endures, that ‘the eternal Imamate’ always returns in the singular Imam. But they also recognize the force, not of a dialectic of historical progress, but of what Jambet calls ‘a dialectic of duration’ (GR: 350): that is, they recognize the irrepressible persistence of the Imamate but also foresee the worst, deeply anticipate defeat and failure, and incorporate senselessness and fortuitousness at the core of their thought (though never as its final word). The faithful subject must keep the transhistorical scheme in mind and await a new event (though, evidently enough, the new event may not involve him or her). Faithful subjects must dispose themselves as ‘subjects in waiting’.28 The sadness of the faithful subject in a time of distress has to do with the experience of a historical project not accomplished. But the messianic imperative remains immanent in the world. The faithful at least have the ‘separate hypostases’ (Allah, the prophet, the Imam), even if they no longer have a vision of unity (GR: 336). If their ‘multiple theophanies’ cannot be unified, they are nonetheless reflections of the One (LO: 40). The subject should therefore continue to attend to the obligations of messianic knowledge, even when the real of liberty is veiled. Thus the home of faithful subjects in times of distress becomes an invisible secret and an inner territory. The messianic subject now asserts the imperative of a turn inward, to an inward sense. This interior space is ‘a Platonic good’ (GR: 335), a world of the Spirit become more real than the real world, one constituted of a thousand spiritual perceptions. Here Corbin and Jambet’s articulation of the concept of the mundus

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imaginalis (imaginal world) is cardinal: at one point, Jambet actually describes the resort to the imaginal world precisely as a response to the loss of the Imam (Jambet 1992b: 127). ‘Imaginal world’ is Corbin’s translation of alam al-mithal. The term originates in Suhrawardi – Suhrawardi and Sadra’s Neoplatonic allegiances allow them to have knowledge of this world, where Avicenna’s Aristoteleanism debars him from it – and has a precise function within a systematic discourse. The concept of an imaginal world is likely to seem preposterous to a Western modernity that can understand possession only in terms of tangible property and the imagination only in terms of ‘unreality, myth, fiction’, fantasy (LO: 41). But in the gnostic conception of them, fiction and fantasy are ‘phantasmata’, products of the imagination as a lower formative power (AE: 304). If, from Aristotle to Kant, Western thought takes imagination to be a source of error, inducing belief in things that are not, and therefore a poor faculty,29 this is a particular and finally limited notion of imagination. The gnostics do not share it. We may crystallize the limits at stake with reference to Kant. Kant might seem to gesture towards a modern redemption of the imagination. After all, since the thing-in-itself cannot be represented, for Kant, there is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ representation of reality. Representation is nothing more than the ‘phenomenon itself in its truth, related to the act of transcendental subjectivity which gives birth to it’ (LO: 57). This might appear to liberate the imagination into full creativity. But for Kant, that the thing-in-itself is neither apprehensible nor knowable does not in the least call it into question – precisely because that would deliver thought over to imagination. ‘To think would be to imagine, to imagine would be to know, to know would be to create’ (LO: 64): there would then be no unconditioned moral reason, that cornerstone of Kantian thought. For Kant, an unconditioned imagination could have no epistemological or ethical status, because the relation between the thing and the freedom of Reason would then disappear. Thus what Kant offers up to doubt he also retains for certainty. There is always one given, foundational space and time, rather than a heterogeneity of times and spaces which exclude one another, but which the imagination can postulate. Only with Heidegger does the question of the foundation itself properly open up. It is Heidegger who understands that imagination provides the foundation which reality definitively lacks, that there is no foundation beyond the unfounded foundation that is the imagination. By contrast, Kant is afraid of the full scope of the imagination. He therefore boxes it in, lest it should imperil Reason and challenge its controlling power. The gnostics are close to Kant: for Sadra, the

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imagination is in effect habitually Kantian in that it remains at the service of the thinking mind, which rejects images not coinciding with exteriority. It is also capable of its own proper work, but this only begins when the thinking mind is at rest. In supposedly marginal states of mind – delirium, fear, childhood reverie, madness, sickness, dotage, sleep, vision, prophetic trance – a suspension of thought liberates the imagination. On this basis, whilst proceeding from the same traits as Aristotle, Islamic gnosticism constructs a different theory of the imagination to that of Western tradition (though it helps us understand certain Western writers, like Blake, Jambet 1994a: 103). In gnostic discourse, ‘imaginal’ means something quite distinct from what we mean by ‘imaginary’. Here imagination is not a capricious power of invention. It ‘produces a certain mode of knowledge’ – prophetic knowledge (AE: 279). In an ‘imaginal’ as opposed to an ‘imaginary’ world, the imagination is prophetic. For Kant, moral freedom legitimates a world which should be, but we cannot see it. By contrast, the gnostic imagination permits us to ‘see’ this world, thus reconciling nature and liberty. The creative imagination allows us to grant validity to ideas which, ‘submitted to critique, would be deprived of noetic power’ (LO: 69). But we should distinguish this use of the imagination from its aesthetic use. Certainly, art gives rights to something which, ordinarily, does not pass into language. But if the aesthetic idea provides us with rich material for thought, it does not supply us with any knowledge. In art, the thing is present only in the imagination, as another nature, though one linked to ours. The imagination ‘borrows its material’ for this other nature within the Kantian constraints; that is, it borrows from reality (LO: 70). But in the mundus imaginalis, the creative imagination itself produces the matter for this other world. The creative act is a prophetic act. Certainly, there is a reproductive imagination. But there is also a creative imagination in which the mental image affirms a world in an ‘imaginal epiphany’ (LO: 55). Imaginative creation is not representation: there is no exterior object for it to represent. It is rather noetic, an act of immediate apprehension, its object inseparable from the consciousness that grasps it: imaginative creation and noesis are one. The messianic subject understands that knowledge begins in the ‘blinding evidence’ of illumination, which has nothing to do with the separation involved in a subject ‘knowing’ an object (LO: 38, 40). This becomes the very condition of intellection as it is repeated in the mundus imaginalis. So, too, in contrast with all the psychologies, which grant priority to a founding subjectivity with an object as its correlate, here all reality is imaginal and involves the simultaneous co-birth of ‘subject

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and object’ (LO: 41–2). Insofar as the imagination is a worldly faculty, its forms can always be dissipated by the intellect. But the imagination can also take charge of both the intellect and the sensorium. In this mode, imagination privileges limitless perception, an infinite movement beyond determinate space and time, because it is intimately linked to the creative power itself, the act of being. From Suhrawardi to Sadra, the imaginal is a median world between spirit and matter. Jambet describes it as composed of ‘spiritual matter’, ‘phenomenal substances’ not subject to the dense time and space of our material world, existing in a temporality and spatiality subtler than those of which we are most conscious, or to which we are most accustomed (GR: 210). It abounds in imaginative forms that Suhrawardi called ‘suspended citadels’, citadels ‘without substrate’ (AE: 310).30 These forms have a distinct ontological status, that of the semblance: like mirror-images, they exist, but not in reality. They have the pure strangeness of the mirror-image, which is that of an existence resembling our own, but which we must forever lack. The condition of the imaginal world is ‘immaterial particularity’, as Sadra in particular conveys (AE: 300). The simple illustration of the meaning of this concept is memory. Memory is always imagination. It preserves senseimpressions, prevents them from dispersing, guards them as a treasuretrove, but cannot succeed in doing so without the supplement of the imagination. The object of recollection is thus particular – it happened nowhere else, to no one else, at no other time – but also immaterial, in that it does not merely inhere in the sensorium (or nervous system), as in Freudian Nachträglichkeit. Thus Sadra decisively separates immateriality from universality, a separation the more important given some of the more significant, visionary aspects of the imaginal world, like dreams and premonitions. These too are particular. They could not conceivably be otherwise: it is because the soul is responsive to the act of being, to successive births, to effusion, that it ‘raises itself’ at length in forms, and raises them to another level, that of the imaginal world (AE: 334). If the act of being has two modes, a mental as well as a concrete existence, then, since it is always singular, so too are the forms of imaginative life. Visions and prophecies are therefore not of any truth, save insofar as they are imaginal equivalents of the ‘initiation’ (Jambet 2004: 38) concretely apparent in the Imam at the time of the messianic event. For the gnostics, meaning is paradoxically both a totality and incomplete. In the end, it is this that ensures the distinctiveness of their conception of the function of the image. The image does not mediate between the particular and the universal, but between the particular and the incomplete

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whole. The world disappears as unity but is present in or as ‘degrees of existence’ (LO: 46). Reality and the different modes of imagination exist, not in opposition to one another, but as differing intensities along a continuum. Imagination breaks the unity of the world, dividing it between that which appears, and that which fails to appear though it is not nothing. In a time of distress, the imaginal world is the necessary supplement to the absconditus, to the hiddenness of the One, and is in this respect a function of gnostic anti-incarnationism (LO: 224). It is an expression, not of the whole or the One, but of lack. It is a world not of representations or archetypes, but of bodies whose composition is specifically adequate to the projections of desire; the imaginal world is woven of our desires. However, in yet another paradox, it also holds out the possibility of fulfilment, jouissance pleine – but under one sole condition, that all jouissance is imaginary. The object whereby fulfilment is procured is not real, and therefore not available for possession. The Sadrean subject experiences ‘the full ontic autonomy of psychic reality’ (Morris 1981: 37), but only in relation to a categorical lack. What is at stake in the imaginal world is the object of one’s desire, but as a phantom. This actually constitutes happiness itself, and the concept of the mundus imaginalis therefore involves ‘a theory of happiness’ (AE: 314). Such is Suhrawardi’s version of Plato’s world of ideas. Once again, Jambet opposes it to Avicenna, who ruins that world and destroys ‘psychic man’ and his singular inner life (AE: 346). Western minds are likely to respond to this aspect of Suhrawardi’s thought with incredulity. Surely the world of ideas cannot conceivably be identified with the gnostic ‘paradise’ (AE: 337)? But the question fails to grasp the crucial distinction between the two respective worlds. The mundus imaginalis is ineffectual not abstract. Its forms are produced by the imagination and have no existence in this world, but that does not mean they are abstractions from concrete existents, still less that they are non-existent. The mundus imaginalis is a haven in which ideas of justice and the good shelter in times of distress. The powerful unendingly ‘efface’ the weak (AE: 329): that is the law of the world. It is essential that one know this fully, that one properly integrate it into one’s knowledge, that one understand the seemingly endless and unstoppable work of power, which includes the repetitive, apparently inexorable closure of the messianic trajectory. But as the event abruptly reverses the effects of this work, so too the freedom of the imagination also makes them reversible in the mundus imaginalis. Of course, the mundus imaginalis offers only immaterial gains: as Suhrawardi says, ‘ “the psychic fire does not burn” ’ (AE: 329). But the lack of concrete existence does not make

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imaginal forms nugatory. It is rather their ‘sole defect’ (AE: 335). It indicates their limit, but is also what stipulates the need for an ethics of the imagination, of ‘resolution, concentration, self-intensification’ (AE: 333). For it is in the mundus imaginalis that the truth of illumination is sustained, nourished, developed and transmitted, as a memory or trace of an experience or knowledge, in the periods – centuries long, notably for those persuaded of the Great Occultation after the disappearance of the twelfth Imam in ad 94131 – when all such experience and knowledge seems impossible and even delusive. THE EXAMPLE OF RIMBAUD Readers familiar with a range of Jambet’s work may find my account selective, for he also dwells on other aspects of Islamic gnosticism that do not coincide with the ones I have emphasized. Given that he writes about a theological tradition, that is hardly surprising. Even in the case of Alamut, for example, the gnostics clearly emphasize historical repetitions and indeed cycles (which the interminable return of the event need not imply). They are also much concerned with hierarchical modes of esoteric thought (ideas of ‘gradated order’) which do not fit happily with what Jambet tells us of the levelling effects of the messianic event.32 There is a gnostic concept of predestination, too, of God’s providential knowledge. It is hard to conceive of the liberty of the act of being as ‘the realization of [divine] decree and predestination’. Yet Jambet tells us that this is central to the ‘completed ontology [ontologie achevée] of Islam’ (AE: 136). Most contradictorily of all, he has become increasingly concerned with what he describes as Islamic eschatology, which hardly squares with the meaning of his historical narrative of Alamut. Jambet has even recently pitted eschatology against ‘laicized theologies and messianisms transformed into promises of emancipation’ (Jambet 2008: 157); his Nietzschean–Foucauldian project seems to run out here.33 Indeed, he tells us that, for Sadra, the act of being is a less important theme than eschatology and salvation (AE: 104; cf. Jambet 2000a: 13–15). But if there is an eschatology, revealed truth in its totality at the ‘end of the world’ (AE: 181), how is that reconcilable with the One as incomplete whole? When Jambet tries to open up a gulf between such aspects of gnosticism and Western philosophical and theological tradition, far from exemplifying a radical dissonance with Western thinkers, he and his gnostics are more likely to call some of them immediately to mind, Calvin and Spinoza, for example. If indeed Jambet’s work as a whole constitutes a ‘phenomenology of the spiritual fact’, then certain aspects

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of gnosticism are obviously pertinent to it where others are less so, if at all. Insofar as Jambet has increasingly become inclined to provide an extraordinarily rich and full account of gnostic philosophical tradition per se, that project may be thoroughly laudable: though he may readily admit the deep ambivalence of his materials (see Jambet 2001: 196, for instance), however, it is not clear how far his specifically philosophical stake in them survives that admission. I have excised and focused chiefly on what emerges specifically from Jambet’s genealogy and his ‘phenomenology of the spiritual fact’: his counter-phenomenology of Spirit and his anti-schematics of historical reason. This is the larger part of what matters in Jambet. Other aspects of his work sometimes seem close to sliding into academicism, particularly lately.34 This is not the case, however, with Jambet’s accounts and uses of literature. These are not very considerable, which is a pity, because in them the terms of gnostic reference become vividly apprehensible, sometimes to a haunting degree, in a manner that philosophical discourse almost invariably mutes. Jambet places, say, Proust or Borges in Eastern philosophical contexts in a way that abruptly restores in transforming their power.35 Or take T. S. Eliot: . . . the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Dessication of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit . . . (‘Burnt Norton’, Eliot 1936: 188; GR: 220)

This is an account of the death of the spirit, which Jambet’s reframing allows us to experience apart from the hint of pompous Christian and conservative orthodoxy which otherwise tends to mute it. Literature fleshes out the structure of messianic truth and its declension, of historiality and its occlusion, of the melancholic–ecstatic understanding of historical time. Literature tells us of their concrete meaning for and in our own histories. But what also becomes clear is the weight that the melancholic dimension of the messianic structure assumes in literature – the epic Seven Portraits by the great Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi (1141?–1209), for example (Jambet 2000b: 341) – relative to philosophy’s abstraction from it. It is in literature that we will learn immediately of the agony of the subject cruelly deceived by history. In two essays on very different Persian poets of widely different epochs, Jambet writes in detail about the poet and historical melancholy. In the case of Forough Farrokhzad, he suggests that is precisely art that allows

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her to express an ‘ineffaceable surfeit of pain, exile, loss and separation’ (Jambet 2005a: 10). Art, that is, as opposed to the work of theologians and philosophers: Farrokhzad’s resolute insistence on loss effectively pushes her into a break with the theologies and their insistence on the eternity of the creative act. This is doubly unsurprising, since she is a modern Iranian woman and a poet. Abandonment is the lot of woman. Marriage is a prison. No one pays any attention to her beauty any more. The world of epiphanies is dead. All that remains is ‘la loi d’airain’, the brass law of possession and worldly power (Jambet 2005a: 13). The paradox, however, for Jambet, is that the more Farrokhzad pleads her cause, the more she despairs of the theologies, the more profoundly she subscribes to their underside, and rejoins the tradition once more, since it has itself already marked out the space in which the dark flower of her desolation can bloom. In the case of Rumi, Jambet asserts that the poet begins at the opposite starting-point to the philosophers: ‘here everything begins in loss’ (Jambet 1999: 7). It does indeed, but in a very specific sense, one which corresponds to the melancholic–ecstatic paradox. There is more than one kind of ‘loss’ in Rumi’s poetry. If Hegel himself cites Rumi as exemplifying the Islamic consciousness of the One, Jambet coincides with him. Where he no longer coincides with Hegel, however, is in thinking of that consciousness as having the plenitude and finality of dialectical synthesis. For loss is integral to Rumi’s poetry: self-loss, the subject’s loss of self in the ‘primordial theophany’ (Jambet 1999: 14), a priceless and very unHegelian surrender to mastery, to being mastered. But Rumi also writes of the loss of this loss, the loss of epiphanic truth and prophetic inspiration. Strange as it may sound to us, the truly significant loss for Rumi is the loss of the cogitor, the end of being thought. This spells a return to ‘the thorns of existence’ (Jambet 1999: 35), and the profound melancholy that that return induces. Hegel is right: Rumi is a proponent of the One par excellence. But for Rumi, to think the One is precisely to think it as intrinsically paradoxical, to think the two inseparable faces of loss, together. If the melancholic–ecstatic structure of thought remains anywhere in modern Europe after Ficino or Cudworth, Whichcote and Henry More, then it remains in its imaginative literature, above all its poetry. There could scarcely be a greater example of this than Rimbaud. In a mere three years, the fabulous boy-poet traverses a whole gamut of intensities attached to the melancholic–ecstatic structure, effectively burning it out of him, and poetry with it. I shall take my bearings here from two compelling accounts of Rimbaud, both of which tie his art to history and politics, Kristin Ross’s and Badiou’s. As a book that seeks to think

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poetry and politics together, Ross’s powerful, erudite, extremely sensitive, very detailed account of Rimbaud’s relation to the Paris Commune and its immediate historical context is practically incomparable. But it also misses a crucial aspect of Rimbaud’s mind, which Badiou sees very clearly. If he sees it, however, it also serves him as the basis for a judgement on Rimbaud that we may not finally wish exactly to share. The Commune was both ‘an exceptional event’ and ‘a revolt against deep forms of social regimentation’ (Ross 2008 [1988]: 4–5). ‘I’m in a state of enchantment’, wrote Courbet. ‘Paris is a true paradise’.36 In Rimbaud’s famous phrase, for many ordinary Parisians, like Courbet and himself, ‘I’ became ‘another’.37 The Commune was their Alamut, and the subject of the Commune knew him- or herself as a cogitor: ‘I think’, wrote Rimbaud. ‘One should say, I am thought’ (Rimbaud 1975: 113). The Commune represented a (‘rigorously forward-looking’) historical moment for ‘inventions of the unknown’ which ‘require[d] new forms’, according to one of the two Lettres du voyant of May 1871 (Ross 2008 [1988]: 103; Rimbaud 1975: 143). Rimbaud’s art would be such an invention, ‘a true invitation au voyage’, an invention of or a call to invent an unheralded world, ‘a completely new historical creation’, in Marx’s phrase for the Commune (Marx and Engels 1971: 196; Ross 2008 [1988]: 22, 35). Like the Commune, poetry would be a working practice and a work in progress: Rimbaud writes, not of being a voyant, a seer, but of making himself one. In intent, his poetry would be ‘an agent as well as an effect of historical change’ (Ross 2008 [1988]: 27), an extraordinary eruption of the spirit of the Commune into language, not least via a massive injection of the demotic and vernacular into Parnassianism. Indeed, the brilliant evanescence of the phenomenon of Rimbaud itself replicates that of the Commune. It is not hard to read Rimbaud like this. One might start with that great revolutionary poem ‘Le Forgeron’. The blacksmith’s huge rage and pride, his identification with the ‘great cry’ of the mob in ‘its markets and slums’ and with the moment of elation, freedom and terror, his peremptory demand for the people’s share, is inseparable from a sense of ‘great new times’ ahead for knowledge (Rimbaud 2001: 11–21). The blacksmith’s will to social transformation matches the spirit of the poet who, as ‘a child touched by the muse’,38 dares to say ‘ “Splendid is your beauty” ’ to the ‘stinking ulcer’ of Paris and sees, ‘fair and square, a mosque in the place of a factory’. This poet sets the ‘perfumes of hysterias’ playing amongst the ‘torpors’ of the ‘Century of hell’. ‘Knowing nothing of what one should know, resolute to do nothing that one ought to do’, Rimbaud is capable of turning a state of affairs inside out, and in this resembles the people.39 In Badiou’s terms,

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he brings inexistents radically to the fore; not surprisingly, Rimbaud declares that ‘every honest instinct comes from the powerless people’ (2001: 84, 111, 113, 147, 236). Ross is passionately concerned to reverse the common view of Rimbaud as ‘an immature or adolescent taste’ (not least by analysing the absorbing complexity and density of his linguistic practices, in large part inaccessible to those without a grasp of historically precise registers of French).40 But there is also an aspect of Rimbaud’s poetry to which she is deaf: the moment when Rimbaud abruptly inverts the élan of voyance. The classic instance perhaps comes at the end of ‘Le Bateau ivre’. After all the grandeurs of the visionary spectacle, the hymn to the ‘poem of the Sea’, the vision of the sky ‘rent by shafts of lightning [éclairs]’ and the ‘cataracts of distances collapsing into gulfs’, the boat is suddenly stricken: Mais, vrai, J’ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer . . . (Rimbaud 2001: 130) But it’s true, I’ve cried too much. Dawns break my heart, Every moon is atrocious, every sun bitter . . .

There follows the chilling evocation of Europe as a ‘dark cold pond’ with a child ‘full of sadness’ crouched beside it, launching a ‘frail small boat’ on its waters; then, finally, the ‘horrible eyes’ of the convict-ships loom up over the boat. These lines hardly square with Ross’s academic positivity, her evocation of a resistlessly upbeat, innovative, futureoriented Rimbaud. But the poem ends with them. It will not do simply to brush them off as a consequence of the defeat of the Commune. As Badiou is aware, such brusque volte-faces are repeatedly evident in earlier poems, from ‘Soleil et chair’ (May 1870) onwards. In contrast to Ross, Badiou is very alert to these moments in Rimbaud, what for Rimbaud himself were the strikings of ‘the sterile hour’ (Rimbaud 2001: 160), and their significance, noting that the most common indicator of the kind of shift in question is a ‘non’, ‘mais’ or ‘assez’. The point, however, is not merely that Rimbaud is given to changes in mood, sudden slides into despondency, black failures of conviction. For Badiou, what is in question is his very method, which is a method of interruption or caesura: the poem is a promise which not only cannot but ‘must not be sustained’ (CS: 130). In some ways, Badiou’s Rimbaud is close to Ross’s. For Badiou, Rimbaud is concerned with the possibilities for subjectivity and truth within a specific set of historical and political circumstances. Hence the Rimbaudian dérèglement de tous les sens, which involves ‘the distortion [torsion]

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characteristic of a truth-procedure’ (CS: 130). To say that, however, is not exactly to make of Rimbaud the subject of a political truth, as Ross does. Badiou’s Rimbaud is rather the subject of a poetic truth which balances itself on the edge of a political sequence. The Rimbaud of the ‘non’ or ‘mais’, then, is a poet of selfinterruption. The poem ‘is its own interruption’ (CS: 130). It finds its truth in the moment of interruption itself. Rimbaud’s self-interruptions are brutal and explicit, not because he is overtaken by a mood, but because he is obeying what he takes to be an imperative, the acknowledgement of the power of ‘being, what is there, the fixity of Dasein’ to capture what arrives as a supplement to it (the event, CS: 131). One does not escape, says ‘Une saison en enfer’: ‘reprenons les chemins d’ici’, ‘let us turn back to the roads we know’ (Rimbaud 2001: 214). We might object that ‘Une saison en enfer’ comes at a specific point in Rimbaud’s development, and has something very specific to say relative to it. But even a poem full of apocalyptic fury like ‘Qu’est-ce pour nous’ can finally take us no further than a closing aporia: Oh! mes amis! . . . Ô malheur! Je me sens frémir, la vieille terre, Sur moi de plus en plus à vous! la terre fond, Ce n’est rien! j’y suis! j’y suis toujours! (Rimbaud 2001: 162) Oh! my friends! . . . O malheur! I feel myself tremble, the old earth, On me more and more yours! earth melts, This is nothing! I’m here! I’m still here!

Pronouns, syntax, punctuation are all slippery to a degree that makes it impossible to tell whether what is at finally at stake in the poem is a principle of electrifying volatility, or one of ancient inertia. At such moments, Rimbaud defects or seems on the edge of defecting from the very vision or sense of grace that he appears to be about to confirm, and of lapsing into its opposite, ennui, nullity, a rhetoric of ‘abolition’ expressing the revenge of ‘a degree zero of desire’ (CS: 131). In Badiou’s terms, again, this makes of Rimbaud, as he says, a poet of undecidability (recalling that Badiou uses the word in a precise mathematical sense, as indicating a statement that is neither demonstrable nor refutable). Rimbaud suspends his poems on the very point at which two incompatible figures of Being are divided from one another and suspend each other’s truth-claims. He is fascinated by the ‘enigma’ of this point (CS: 135). This is not to say that his poems ultimately kill off the visionary drive. The point is rather that, again and again, they trace the

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fault-line (‘faille’, CS: 133) between what the world can promise in the way of present redemption, and the fear of what may be its immitigable recidivism. They keep on saying ‘this is possible’ and ‘this is impossible’ at the same time. Rimbaud takes the condition of Being itself to be ‘scission’, and the result is that ‘radical doubt’, a ‘non-dialectical negation’ which ‘sublates nothing’, constantly afflicts the Rimbaudian epiphany (CS: 132–4). Badiou presents the Rimbaudian interruption as ‘a brusque rising to the surface of the poem of the always possible prose it harbours within it’. There is always a ‘reserve of disappointment’ in Rimbaud that has to do with the potential in any given poem for its interruption by prose (CS: 133). Rimbaud’s disappointments are quick and vivid. But this is a reflection of the ardour of his desire. In fact, Rimbaud wants a world without prose. He wants his ‘completely new historical creation’ (Marx 1933 [1871]: 42) decisively and at once, free of all immersion in what already exists. Thus, though his poetry hinges on undecidability, he is also impatient with it. His most imperious desire is for the immediate, spontaneous and complete embodiment of truth. For Badiou, this is problematic and ultimately reveals Rimbaud’s limits. Rimbaud is too impatient. The very urgency with which he yearns for transformation also makes him give up on it, often with the most peremptory of gestures. Within a very short time, of course, Rimbaud also gave up on it in actual life, deserting poetry for trade, if in exotic locales. But in the confrontation with undecidability, says Badiou, patience is crucial. Fidelity to the event is a process of slow and painstaking deduction, a protracted and meticulous working-out of solutions to problems for which, as far as Badiou is concerned, the model is clearly the mathematical proof. Rimbaud was not capable of this kind of intellectual discipline, for which the model is Mallarmé.41 There is however a different way of thinking about this issue which becomes apparent if we put Rimbaud together with Jambet. It is no doubt the case – some of Mallarmé would serve as an example – that poetry and the question of decision can coincide. But to think that they must or ought to is surely to translate a mathematico-political model of thought to aesthetics per se. Much great poetry works in the opposite manner, moving in the direction of increasing complication, of irresolution. Badiou is a Platonist, rationalist and political moralist. He cannot afford to see poetry in this way; indeed, one suspects that, were he to do so, poetry would begin to look dangerously close to sophistry. But to think of Rimbaud above all in terms of decisions is arguably to betray him, fundamentally to misrepresent the activity of mind in which he is engaged and engages us. Choice (or the impossibility of choice) is not

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what is at issue at the end of ‘Le Bateau ivre’. The poem is not a meditation on but a dramatization of a predicament. It does not tell us that it is impossible to decide between two contradictory ways of seeing. It tells us that they are inextricably bound up in each other. Rimbaud is much closer to Jambet’s conception of the subject than to Badiou’s, though it is Badiou who helps us see that. Rimbaud is very much preoccupied with the epiphanic structure of Being; one might even claim that it is his dominant theme. He has an intimate knowledge of the two ‘colorations’ of the world (GR: 220), the melancholic and the ecstatic. This knowledge is in some degree a historical knowledge, a knowledge rooted in the context Ross so well evokes.42 But one should not conflate Jambet and Rimbaud. Messianism and Rimbaudian voyance are clearly distinct. As the concepts of the dérèglement de tous les sens and of the self-fashioning voyant make clear, Rimbaud never really quite believes in vision (here Badiou is exactly right). Not surprisingly, therefore, where Jambet tells us about the melancholic–ecstatic historical experience arduously lived out, expressible as a sequence, Rimbaud presents it as a theorem. It is important to note, here, that, whilst it is in some degree possible to narrativize Rimbaud’s development as following a melancholic–ecstatic trajectory from first one persuasion to the other, as Badiou suggests that the theorem was there from the start, so recent research shows that it was also still there at the end of the poetic career, at least, in that ‘Une saison en enfer’, the great rejection of the Rimbaudian project, and ‘Illuminations’, which to some extent rescues it, partly coincide; the composition of the two works overlapped.43 The Rimbaudian poem is most typically a melancholic– ecstatic theorem taken to an ultimate point of conviction which, unlike that of Alamut on the one hand or Badiou or the other, is always a conviction of ambivalence. Badiou, being a philosopher (or being the kind of philosopher he is) cannot but turn this the other way round, relegating ambivalence to secondary status and seeing it from the point of view of the necessity of a decision. Yet Badiou is too vigorous a thinker about poets and poetry and spawns too many ideas about them for his account of Rimbaud to be smartly dismissed. There is another feature of Rimbaud’s writings that he gets to in a way that Ross does not, and here again, at least implicitly, he seems close to Jambet. Beyond the Rimbaud capable of bleak disappointment, there is another Rimbaud, a Rimbaud who responds to the failure of vision by pursuing its opposite, degradation. This Rimbaud cultivates a ‘dark Eden . . . of decay and stagnant water, mud and urine’, shit and filth, the dark event or what Badiou calls the poet’s ‘abject sublime’ (CS: 144–5). The syndrome, here, is familiar enough.

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The defeat of expectation breeds a strange identification with the victorious forces and their structures of value, whose power is confirmed hyperbolically, with a kind of perverse relish. This is the Rimbaud who snuffs up ‘la fraîcheur des latrines’ and (in ‘Le Cœur supplicié’) conveys what appears to have been his own multiple rape in Pierrot tints and tones (Rimbaud 2001: 70, 96). In a slightly different mode, it is the Rimbaud for whom the poet becomes the conduit for the tears of the ‘infâmes’, the convicts and the damned (‘L’Orgie parisienne’, Rimbaud 2001: 84). Better the dark event, it would seem, than join the ‘vegetable French’ and give one’s assent to the values of a ‘tapioca age [époque de sagous]’ (Rimbaud 2001: 102–3, 107). These are the moments, beyond melancholy, of the death of the spirit in Rimbaud, the moments when the material world thickens and drags downward, when the subject passes into eclipse. As Jambet insists that the luminous and the dark event are symmetrical, so, too, Badiou asserts that Rimbaud’s abject sublime exactly balances the ‘aerial purities’ of the visionary Rimbaud (CS: 144).44 But why? What, finally is the logic of the Rimbaudian collapse, of disappointment and self-interruption, and the resultant embrace of the abject sublime? As I have already said, it is not merely the defeat of the Commune that is at stake, here. Disappointment and collapse are recurrent throughout Rimbaud’s work and amount to an intellectual method. One of the great nineteenth-century lyrics, whose reverberations shudder on long into twentieth-century poetry, ‘Les Corbeaux’ suggests an answer: Les Corbeaux Seigneur, quand froide est la prairie, Quand dans les hameaux abattus, Les longs angélus se sont tus . . . Sur la nature défleurie Faites s’abattre des grands cieux Les chers corbeaux délicieux. Armée étrange aux cris sévères, Les vents froids attaquent vos nids! Vous, le long des fleuves jaunis, Sur les routes aux vieux calvaires, Sur les fossés et sur les trous Dispersez-vous, ralliez-vous! Par milliers, sur les champs de France, Où dorment des morts d’avant-hier, Tournoyez, n’est-ce pas, l’hiver, Pour que chaque passant repense!

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Sois donc le crieur du devoir, Ô notre funèbre oiseau noir! Mais, saints du ciel, en haut du chêne, Mât perdu dans le soir charmé, Laissez les fauvettes de mai Pour ceux qu’au fond du bois enchaîne, Dans l’herbe d’où l’on ne peut fuir, La défaite sans avenir. (Rimbaud 2001: 64–5) * Lord, when the meadows are cold, When in the beaten hamlets The long angelus have grown silent . . . Send the dear delicious crows Plummeting down from the great skies On to nature stripped bare. Strange army, harshly crying, Cold winds attack your nests! Along yellowed rivers, On the routes of the old calvaries, On the ditches and the holes, Disperse and rally! Wheel in your thousands Over France’s wintry fields Where the dead of yesteryear lie sleeping, So passers-by may think again! Cry our duty, then, O our dark funereal bird! But, saints of heaven, high in the oak, Mast lost in the charmed evening, Leave the warblers of May For those chained in the wood, In the grass they cannot escape, By defeat without a future.

Interestingly, the poem is significant for Badiou. He takes it to identify one end of the spectrum of Rimbaudian thought, at the opposite end of which is ‘Génie’. ‘Génie’ is a poem which sustains what he calls the ‘breath and movement’ of ‘pure presence’, right to the end, without interruption or second thoughts. ‘Les Corbeaux’ is a poem of ‘captivity, defeat and the suppression of any opening up of time’ (CS: 134–5). Few works could better demonstrate what this book means by the remainder. ‘Les Corbeaux’ is about the terror of history and the historical lesson. Badiou takes as its determining context the blood-boltered

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fields of 1870–1 (the Franco-Prussian War). But the ‘hameaux abattus’, the ‘longs angelus’, the ‘vieux calvaires’ suggest that Rimbaud is also aiming at a much larger if more diffuse historical resonance. Why should these particularly summon up the landscapes of Second Empire France, and why should we give those landscapes pre-eminence? Why not the wholesale depradations visited on the French peasantry in the tenth century by the robber warlords (soon to become the aristocracy)? Or the massacres in the Midi throughout much of the thirteenth, the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth and fifteenth, the Armagnac– Burgundian Civil War of the fifteenth, the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth . . . one can of course keep going. This is a landscape which a full historical consciousness reveals as so burdened with historical catastrophe as to make all thought of the historical event seem epiphenomenal if not trivial. The poem is steeped in the logic of historical melancholy. ‘Les Corbeaux’ is the only poem truly of its kind in Rimbaud. Having said what it said, he obviously felt no need to repeat the statement. Equally, and partly because of that, self-evidently, it does not offer the whole story or a final word. But if ‘Les Corbeaux’ opens up a particular form of historical consciousness, for all its long historical reach, it is as extraordinarily dramatic as it is because that consciousness is itself modern, and as modern as is the thought of the event. The consciousness and the thought are coeval and cannot escape each other. Not that Rimbaud was otherwise incapable of the historical lament: in poems like ‘Morts de Quatre-vingt-douze’, ‘Le Mal’ and ‘Le Dormeur du val’, he comes back repeatedly to the catastrophic scene. But the focus in such poems is always on catastrophe immediately to hand. By contrast, ‘Les Corbeaux’ shows a young man who is a genius but also from the people in their obscurity, in that his background is nondescript and provincial, awakening in and through a present catastrophe to a historical truth of France. This historical truth, however, could not have been available before 1789, to the likes of Rimbaud, but also indeed in itself. It is only in ‘Les Corbeaux’ that, in his modernity, Rimbaud breaks through to a vision of the larger historical catastrophe as, whilst not in principle ‘eternal’, not in principle remediable either, not least because the many and various shadows history continues to cast are so forbiddingly long. In the end, it is perhaps only art and above all literature that can fully carry the weight of historical catastrophe, not as any final description, but as evocation of the melancholic side of the melancholic–ecstatic condition. Academic history commonly mutes it in the interests of knowledge and explanation. Philosophy almost invariably turns from

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it to affirmation. Science plays various instrumental roles, both in the catastrophe and the treatment of its consequences, but does not address its existence as catastrophe per se. Above all, by refusing integrally to think the catastrophe, politics continues endlessly to prolong it. But literature may also serve as a reservoir of usable forms. Indeed, one may wonder how far Rimbaud’s poetry – certainly in ‘Illuminations’, that strange final continuation of his vision in adapted mode – might not be thought of as offering a Rimbaudian equivalent of the ‘imaginal world’. Of course, one runs up against the gnostic insistence on not identifying that world with aesthetic ones. But the gnostics were certainly not thinking of modern European art. Here and there, from Blake to certain surrealists, modern art bordered on prophetic knowledge, a knowledge determined by a persuasion of the absolute openness of the world, and the responsibility of the imagination towards both that persuasion and the world at hand, nature and liberty together. Rimbaud is a supreme figure within that tradition. ‘Illuminations’ is concerned with an interior landscape – hence the assertion that ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’; this is no longer a time of shared endeavour – at a time of defeat (the defeat of the Commune): ‘le rêve fraîchit’, writes Rimbaud, ‘the dream grows cold’ (Rimbaud 2001: 264, 284). We will not be able to grasp ‘eternity here and now’. But time and space remain extraordinarily provisional in ‘Illuminations’. ‘Un souffle ouvre des brèches opéradiques dans les cloisons’, a single breath suffices to open ‘operatic breaches in the walls’ (Rimbaud 2001: 288). The deliria of ‘Illuminations’, however, are no longer exactly those of ‘Une saison en enfer’ (where the word ‘délires’ serves as a subtitle). The image of the extreme transformation of Sainte-Chapelle in ‘Cités I’, for example, no longer has quite the same texture as the hallucination of mosques replacing factories. It is not an expression of a hope or prayer still close to a sense of historical possibility. It is rather a record of what it was possible to see in thought, the imperative that does not come to pass, made visible. Thus Rimbaud obstinately sustains a principle of absolute liberty within an image of the given world. (There is noticeably more reference to concrete historical actualities in ‘Illuminations’ than in ‘Une saison en enfer’). Indeed, given how far ‘Illuminations’ is concerned with fantastical cityscapes, it might seem that Suhrawardi’s concept of ‘suspended citadels’ here takes on a literal force. Finally, one may ask how far, if ‘Une saison en enfer’ is Rimbaud’s great statement of disappointment – ‘The true life is absent’ (Rimbaud 2001: 228) – ‘Illuminations’ constitutes an ‘imaginal archive’, indeed how far this is what is involved in the concept of the ‘parade’ in its

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many nuances.45 The principle of the ‘parade’ is that of the ‘Chinese, Hottentots, bohemians, simpletons, hyenas, Molochs, old madnesses, sinister demons’, all the ‘master-jugglers’ who ‘transform place and people’, but only within the limits of ‘magnetic pretence [comédie magnétique]’ (Rimbaud 2001: 264). At the very end of her book, Ross describes Rimbaud, poet of the Commune and its legacy par excellence, as confronting the question of ‘interpellation across generations . . . How is a contestatory text transmitted?’ This is the more problematic in that what is at stake is a monument to ‘a posture in the world . . . the invention or dream of new social relations’ (Ross 2008 [1988]: 152). We might also add that the model of transmission must seek to balance or at least offset that of ‘Les Corbeaux’. As Jambet puts the point, in ‘the times of darkness [occultation]’, the metahistorical truth requires particular forms of transmission (GR: 66). Before he chose to leave the poetic domain – and after all, in a certain way, his extension of it was practically without parallel – in ‘Illuminations’, Rimbaud offered something like a résumé, a poetic synopsis of what his work had been about, distilled to a set of very concrete forms for a very abstract idea, like the features of an ‘imaginal world’. NOTES 1. There have been numerous different histories of Alamut. I take my narrative of it principally from Jambet. 2. The word ‘Assassins’ is particularly unhelpful as a description of the Ismaili community at Alamut. Firstly, assassination was not a uniquely Nizari practice. Secondly, conflating the Alamut community with the assassins is rather like collectively referring to the monks of Cluny as gardeners. The Nizari assassins were an elite strike force who understood that the only way of defeating an incomparably more powerful enemy was to assassinate princes and key commanders, since the enemy forces could not function without them. They never targeted people en masse. Contrast the views of Bernard Lewis (2001), ‘Preface’: viii–x. For Jambet’s refutations of Lewis, see GR: 27–30; (2003b): 97–8; (2007a): 7–11. See also Daftary (1990). 3. Not surprisingly, Jambet claims to have no interest in the history of Shi’ite Islam. See GR: 75. 4. 1164 not 1167, as Jambet gives it elsewhere (GR: 75). 5. I deal with ‘the Resurrector’ only in the immediate context of Alamut. For a more detailed account, see GR: 311–12, 319–20. 6. For Jambet and Corbin on Docetism, see LO: 284–7; Jambet (2005): 226–7. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, both Docetism and Islamic gnosticism were accused of indifference to human suffering. 7. For a fascinating account of one aspect of the limitations of juridico-political Islam, see Jambet’s dialogue with Abdelwahab Meddeb (Jambet 2009) on the subtle (historical) signification of the veil apparent to philosophers and

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

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Intermittency scholars, and its crass redefinition in the current stand-off between juridicopolitical Islam and Western liberal democrats. I avoid the terms ‘instaurateur’ and ‘instauré’, which Jambet employs at least as often as he does ‘existentiation’ and ‘existentié’. They are hard to translate well. In Jambet’s account of them, some strains in esoteric Islam come very close indeed to Manichaeanism. See for instance GR: 81, 193; LO: 167. The young Jambet was not afraid to conceive of his thought as Manichaean and indeed announced his refusal to give up on it, accusing Marx of an ‘uncompleted Manichaeanism’. However, he also described the Manichaean identification of Being with lack as an error or madness. See LA: 125, 253, my italics. See for instance LO: 160–71 on the threat that Manichaeanism posed to Islam, where Judaism and Christianity did not. This is not to say that there is no Manichaean conception of intermittency. Like Ismailism, Mani opposes the exoteric religion, law, order, not least because it denies all new, liberating revelations opening on a dramatic future. See LO: 166–7. Cf. the Maoist Jambet of the seventies. I give some account of his and Lardreau’s Maoist careers in the next chapter. As Jambet notes, the first term is Corbin’s, the second Trotsky’s. Contrast Toscano (2007). On the figure of Adam and the Resurrection, see ‘Théologie de l’Imâm’, GR: 295–353. Like Badiou, on this point, Jambet runs counter to Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz et al. But the term does not have the same sense for Jambet as for Badiou, who derives it from set theory; on which connection see Gibson 2006: 6–18. Jambet means an infinity in act, action and actuality together. A ‘philosophy of the spiritual fact’ chooses ‘another phenomenology of spirit’ distinct from Hegel’s and running ‘counter’ to it (LO: 288). There is both an esoteric and an exoteric Avicenna, a Neoplatonist and an Aristotelean, and Jambet deals amply with both in LO and AE. Cf. Lardreau on the tradition of radical dualism in Christianity from Origen and apocatastasis – the sudden outbreak of salvation – to the Cathars, with whom it ends (LA: 92–128). Cf. the account of the theme in relation to Tusi in Jambet (2005): 180. I leave the phrase in French, because ‘événementialité’ is a notoriously difficult word to translate. It means ‘the condition of a world in which events happen’. Cf. Plato in the Parmenides: the One is not a whole, neither mobile nor immobile, self-identical or self-different, equal or unequal, nor temporal. It does not participate in Being (GR: 166–7). The logic here is Lacanian as well as gnostic. Jambet quotes Milner on Lacan’s L’Étourdit. See LO: 198; Milner (1978): 75n. This chapter hardly begins to capture the subtleties at stake. A more detailed account of the relation between the two would insert a number of nicely different terms between them, including imperative, intelligence and cause. See for example GR 2.2, ‘L’Impérative et l’intelligence’: 175–200. ‘[F]ormal abstract knowledge can only pose quiddity, and inexorably attribute existence to it’ (AE: 100).

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26. In Corbin’s case, insofar as he repeatedly raises the question of how ‘an ultimate principle of all things’ can exist at all, given the ‘radical independence’ of the world of shadow (Jambet 1993a: 22). 27. For a specific significance of which, see Jambet (1983a): 127. If the extraordinary plangency of the War Requiem requires a philosophical commentary, this study would hope to be it. 28. The term ‘subjectivité en attente’ is Badiou’s not Jambet’s. See for instance LS: 39 and my own development of the concept, Gibson 2006: 90–116, 164–5, 263–4. See also this study, at 273–4. Jambet is clearly concerned with a very similar concept, for instance at GR: 334. 29. This is the case not least politically: hence all our endless, wearisome diatribes against ‘utopian imaginings’. But political thought has repeatedly exemplified this notion of imagination, not least in the Marxist tradition, whose historical ‘science’ was disablingly founded on an imaginative completion of the form of history, rather than an understanding of historical events that were ‘pure’ in that their consequences were quite unforeseeable (Jambet 1976: 34). 30. Jambet is quoting from Suhrawardi, Kitab Hikmat al-Ishraq, Book IV, Chapter 8. 31. On this, and the question of an ethics of the Occultation, see inter alia Jambet (2004): 77, 115–19. 32. On the hierarchical principle in esoteric Islam, see for instance Jambet (2005): 190–5; GR: 106ff., 261–91. 33. Insofar as the specificity of Islam was crucial to it, and the very concept of resurrection at stake in his most recent work, if it differs in many details from that made available by Christian eschatologies, does not do so in its structure. See for example ‘The Resurrection’, in Jambet (2008): 150–203. 34. As in the case of Jambet (2008). 35. For a fuller account of this, see Gibson (2010): 99–100. 36. Quoted Boudry (1951): 125; Ross (2008 [1988]): 17. 37. See letters to Georges Izambard, May 1871, and to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, Rimbaud (1975): 113, 135. All translations from Rimbaud’s poetry and prose are mine. I ignore the vexed question of whether Rimbaud actually participated in the Commune, which merely reveals ‘the anxiety of the empiricist working in the service of reductivism’ (Ross 2008 [1988]: 32). It is abundantly evident from Rimbaud’s poems and letters that he was swept up in and by the Commune as intellectual force. 38. Letter to Theodor de Banville, 24 May 1870, Rimbaud (1990 [1965]): 13. 39. Letter to Paul Demeny, 17 April 1871, Rimbaud (1990 [1965]): 33. 40. Ross (2008 [1988]): 25; cf. 12–33 and passim. Ross is wholly convincing in her demonstration that, without a recognition of Rimbaud as always conscious of a particular society and its future as ‘firmly anchored’ in history, his poetry is almost incomprehensible. 41. Badiou asserts elsewhere that, where Rimbaud says that ‘the true life is absent’, he himself maintains that it is present, in a life lived ‘under the sign of the Idea’ (PE: 131–2). My argument partly reflects the fact that two separate conceptions of life and transmission are at stake here. 42. For another substantial account of a similar kind, see Murphy (1991). 43. See Sorrell, ‘Introduction’, Rimbaud (2001): xx–xxiv. 44. We might contrast both Badiou and Jambet, here, with the absence of any

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Platonic recoil in Rancière’s account of misery in Hugo – the worlds of the ‘bas-fonds’, the gutter – as neither sentimental nor heart-warmingly philanthropic, but an image of the equality underlying social distinctions (CH: 142). 45. These ‘nuances’ are not entirely separate from the moods of ‘Une saison en enfer’, for example an ‘atroce scepticisme’ (Rimbaud 2001: 268).

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4. Alternances Indépassables: Guy Lardreau

THE REMAINS OF HISTORY A concept of the messianic event and the historical remainder is crucial to Jambet, as exemplified above all in his narrative of Alamut. The early volumes that Jambet co-wrote with Guy Lardreau, L’Ange (1976) and Le Monde (1978), anticipate this narrative. In one sense, this is unsurprising. Jambet and Lardreau began their career together as French Maoists or, more precisely, members of the Gauche Prolétarienne (1968–73), as contrasted with other Maoist organizations like the Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste (including Badiou, Judith Balso, Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel) and the Gauche Ouvrière et Paysanne (1969–72; see Badiou 2008a: 125–6). The Gauche Prolétarienne eventually became particularly notorious for those adherents who, disillusioned when the revolution no longer seemed imminent, not only withdrew from revolutionary thought but, to a greater or lesser degree, swung to the opposite pole: Benny Lévy, Jacques-Alain Miller, Olivier Rolin, André Glucksmann (see Badiou 2008a: passim). Neither Jambet nor Lardreau remained Maoist or politically active, though, to Badiou at least, they appeared to be ‘honest renegades’ (Badiou 2008a: 128). But having noted the connection between Jambet and Lardreau, we also need to separate them. It is Lardreau who provides the chapter in L’Ange that most evidently develops a thought of event and remainder. His account of early Christian sects is a version of Jambet’s tale of intermittency (LA: 3.1; cf. Lardreau 1983). There are always two worlds, in that history as we commonly know it is always haunted by its other, if only in obscure, muted or disintegrated form. Thought thus requires a concept of historical oscillation or discreteness. To anyone principally familiar with Lardreau’s later work, this theme may in fact seem rather curious. Where Jambet’s expertise was 157

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originally in Islamic, Lardreau’s was in Syriac and Coptic studies. If, however, the intensity of Jambet’s feeling for historical Islamic cultures gives them extraordinary weight and purchase relative to the contemporary West, the same cannot be said of Lardreau and Syriac Christianity. Indeed, Lardreau remained much closer to the contemporary world and its preoccupations than Jambet, not least, in writing books on contemporary popular culture (science fiction, detective fiction). There might seem to be virtually no concept of historical intermittency per se in Lardreau’s thought after Le Monde. We must therefore partly read Lardreau against the grain, recognizing that a rather different thought is at stake in his work to that in our four other philosophers, though its growth can nonetheless be articulated precisely around the changes in his attitude to history. In fact, the ‘two worlds’ concept runs right the way through Lardreau’s œuvre, but translated into various different forms. In the first instance, it is important to grasp his early development (1973–80), which means disconnecting his contributions to L’Ange and Le Monde from Jambet’s, and connecting them up to earlier and later works of his own. The place to start is his critique of the Marxist-Leninist theory of history in Le Singe d’or (1973), sufficiently ferocious for BernardHenri Lévy to think of him as the founder of the nouvelle philosophie.1 As François Châtelet pointed out in his ‘letter-preface’,2 Le Singe d’or provides a very early and indeed prescient indictment, not of Marxism per se but of Marxist ‘science’. From Lenin to Althusser, a grand tradition within Marxism assumed that Marx and Engels had founded a historical science rooted in a superior form of knowledge rather than an articulation of an imperious demand for justice. Thus historical science became the ‘privileged superstructure’ of Marxism, and licensed a whole new elite of arrogant savants, who both fetishized it and assumed the ignorance of ordinary people, the ‘moutons attendant [la parole]’,3 above all, in the case of Althusserianism. The ‘science’, however, proved false, and ‘the revolutionary intellectual’ suffered an appropriate demise (SO: 21). But the defeat of Marxism lay above all in its having itself increasingly dictated the terms (those of science) according to which neo-liberalism was able to defeat it. Having required victory to prove its case, Marxism lost, and thereby failed, though there was no intrinsic reason why defeat should have spelt failure. Lardreau understood this as early as 1973. Lardreau chiefly took to task the concept of the ‘étape’, the historical ‘stage’, and, with it, the assumption of a political temporality ‘proper to’ historical development (SO: 23). As his 1981 essay on Corbin makes extremely clear, he by no means abandoned the principle of the

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epistemological ‘coupure’.4 But historical knowledge cannot be a question of understanding any linked succession or progression of historical ‘deposits’ (SO: 25). This ruins any conception of a ‘historical science’; but precisely because it is not a science, Marxism can expose or pay particular attention to the laws determining all sciences (SO: 83). This attention above all involves responsiveness or alertness to the possibility of ‘irruptions’, breaks, events. One of Lardreau’s most striking objections to Marxist tradition is that it was altogether too intent on a philosophy of materialist ‘good sense’, and too little inclined to entertain a more venerable intuition, that philosophy might be very close to folly, and that that precisely constitutes its power (SO: 154). Politics must always take place on the basis of a wager, not of knowledge, or ‘science’. We will watch this assertion mutate through Lardreau’s work. Châtelet however objected that Lardreau’s critique of Marxism was not so much radical-sceptical as ultra-leftist, and therefore assumed that ‘the masses are never in error’, that they had no need of Marx, Lenin or Althusser to think. But this principle itself assumed a form of positive knowledge ‘immanent’ in the masses themselves that it inherited from Marxist science, and which salvaged the confidence threatened by interrogations of the concept of the historical process.5 Indeed, said Châtelet, there was more than a small dose of a residual Hegelianism in the Lardreau of Le Singe d’or. Note for example his declaration that ‘[t]he spirit is never lost, and always works for the best’ (SO: 29). Châtelet also astutely remarked that the Hegelian Lardreau sat ill alongside Lardreau the ironist or ‘malin’ (the ‘mischievous devil’) who gleefully described the Hegelian Marx as presenting history as a ‘gigogne’ of modes of production, a gigogne being a ‘nest’ (tables, Russian dolls, SO: 84).6 The tension between Hegel and irony will recast itself in Lardreau’s later thought, as any remaining Hegelian optimism regarding the historical process dramatically corrodes. The corrosion is already quite markedly evident in L’Ange and Le Monde. As an ‘offertoire’ to L’Ange, Jambet and Lardreau quote the first line of Beckett’s Enough: ‘All that goes before forget’ (LA: 9; see Beckett 1995: 186). This appears to restate the principle of the Cultural Revolution in China, beginning from the tabula rasa, according to the power of a radical break whereby a new world shatters an old one. However, L’Ange is fully aware of the failure of Maoism both Chinese and French. Lardreau admitted defeat, and also error, not least, the error of any spontaneous and uncritical belief in the masses. The Maoist apotheosis of the uneducated – the assertion that the workers always knew – had turned out to be as problematic as Marxist condescension to them. In its coercion of intellectuals into self-criticism and

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penitence, its assimilation of intellectuals to the masses, the Cultural Revolution spelt an instinctive hatred of heresy, hatred of thought and, at length, an abject submission to authority in which the proletariat became another figure for the Master, a ‘master-signifier’ (LA: 145, 149). L’Ange emerged, then, in the wake of both the Cultural Revolution and its ‘échec’ or demise, and its Beckett quotation was therefore (Beckettianly) ironical, since, by 1976, ‘all that went before’ included the Cultural Revolution itself. L’Ange starts out from the event, but as recollected from within a temporality of decline. The Cultural Revolution exemplifies the historical possibility of the grand transformation, but the eclipse of the transformative sequence is always prescribed in its logic from the start, for the absolute break with the given world infallibly merely generates another order of semblance. The reappearance of the semblance inexorably extinguishes the event itself, which the logic of the break insistently if intermittently counters in its turn. Both mutually and reciprocally imply each other, though according to no fixed rhythm, regularity, structure of repetition or foreordained design; there is no predictability to their respective occurrences and no inevitability to their succession, cyclical or other. The Lardreau of Le Monde therefore bids a decisive farewell to the ‘powerful historical optimism’ of the militant (LeM: 95). In L’Ange, he was still concerned to rescue an idea of historical reason via a concept of the event. But if L’Ange continues to insist on the possibility, however rare and unpredictable, of a world transformed in the teeth of what Lardreau calls the Sékommça (that-is-absurdly-how-it-is), the militant can only wager on the victory of the event: he or she can neither anticipate it, theorize it, or argue its case. At best, he or she can declare it in disintegrated form. Lardreau cites Baudelaire’s aphasia before his death, notably his inspired repetition of the expletive ‘Crénom!’, which nicely combines poiesis with blasphemy and nonsense (LA: 166–8).7 For the Lardreau of L’Ange, the political dreamer has become an aphasiac whose fierce but incoherent mumblings assert no more than the recognition of the ineradicable truth: there are two historical worlds, not one. If, then, the gap that opens up between L’Ange and Le Monde (‘[la] béance qui les sépare’, LeM: 19) lies in the death of the figure of the militant, Lardreau turns to the moralist instead. If, as he remarks, morality is an unfashionable term, and sounds charmless to many contemporary ears, even as early as 1978, he clearly wishes both to sustain a concept of ethics as care of the self,8 and to avoid what, with striking prescience, he foresees as the historical corruption of the term ethics. Lardreau’s

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conception of morality is key to his subsequent work, but, from the start, hardly commonplace. In the first instance, the condition of the moralist is precisely his or her repudiation of the militant’s blithe conviction that any privileged knowledge of the historical process is possible. The moralist is at sea in history, above all, the history of misery, since, as Lardreau now insists, contra all militant optimism, misery is not only insupportable but also finally unquantifiable, inexplicable and irreducible.9 The failure of the modern political projects only confirms the irreducibility of misery. Paradoxically, however, morality itself becomes a form of ‘conscience rebelle’ (LeM: 24). As such, however, it takes its bearings, not from Marx and Mao, but from, say, Baudelaire and Artaud; or, to put the point differently, as Châtelet had already noted, for Lardreau, Marx says one thing alone – ‘one is right to revolt’ (SO: 9) – which is also what Baudelaire and Artaud say, making Marx their equal, perhaps their confederate, but no more. If it is always right to revolt, that is because there is always misery, but also always a structure of semblance, a Lacanian term of great importance to Lardreau, and that we must now gloss in his terms. The Lacanian semblant is an object of enjoyment that deceives as it pleases. In the first instance, this is because of primordial hazard and lack (‘parce que la contingence est à l’origine, parce qu’il y a du manque’, FP: 71), according to which the desired object not only is not obtainable, but cannot conceivably be so.10 The lack is the case: therefore ‘on fait semblant’ (‘one makes believe’). The pleasure of the semblant is substitutive, but also necessary if the subject is not to encounter the lack on which the logic of semblance is founded. Thus semblance is not appearance in the classical sense, not one term in a dyad (appearance and reality, appearance and essence). For there is no Other of semblance. Thus the question of serious faith in the semblant can never properly arise. ‘[L]e semblant le plus vraisemblable’, the pure form of the semblant, emerges in psychoanalysis (Lacan 2005: 122), notably as the objet a. But the objet a is also located exactly at a point at which the analysand may recognize his or her deception. For there is always a flaw in the machinery of deception, what Lacan called the faille, the gap from which the demand endlessly stems. The Lacanian concept of the faille is of major importance to Lardreau.11 The later Lacan in particular grants the concept of semblance increasing significance and markedly extends its scope, recognizing that semblance is never just a question for the subject, that all orders of semblance are not only discursive but social and historical, too. As Badiou puts the point, Lacan increasingly understands the work of semblance as generating a ‘subject-effect’ (effet-sujet) not only as an

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effect of language, but of language as it is inextricable from the social process (PT: 14). If ‘what makes what we call “human relations” bearable is not thinking about them’ (Lacan 2005: 105), conversely, to interrogate the order of semblance, to seek in some measure to suspend or bracket it off, to have done with the ‘annihilating signifier’,12 is to risk being rudely thrust up against ‘l’intolérable pur’, the pure intolerability of the world (LeM: 29–30), the existence within it of radical injustice and incontrovertible, senseless and unending distress. Philosophy has seldom been willing seriously to admit or to contemplate the intolerable, rather incessantly foreclosing it by giving it point and purpose or delimiting its scope or its significance for philosophy, notably in the case of the optimistic historicisms (Marx, Rousseau; LeM: 75). But this foreclosure is a lure and a delusion: the existence of l’intolérable pur is not to be thought away. It rather requires interminable restatement (‘il faut [le] ressasser avec endurance’, LeM: 30). For a desire that runs counter to semblance and l’intolérable pur alike continues to insist, sporadically, irregularly, here and there. Here Kantian thought has an ‘irreplaceable virtue’ (LeM: 30), and the question that emerges is how Lardreau recasts his early historical thought – and his concept of intermittency with it – along an axis between Lacan and Kant. K A N T O - L A C A N I A N I S M 13 Lacan puts paid to the philosophical foreclosure of l’intolérable pur; indeed, the Lacanian Real is that ‘against which the political illusion precisely [and definitively] shatter[s]’ (LeM: 15). In that he starts out from irremediable and constitutive lack – ‘the only possible foundation for wisdom’ (Lacan 2005: 128) – Lacan seems ‘wiser’ for the times than Marx or Lenin. This is the knowledge that inspires the moralist Lardreau’s thought from Le Monde onwards. Lardreau would surely have shared the reverence implicit in Badiou’s declaration that Lacan was his ‘master’ (CS: 85), and we may compare his Lacanianism with Badiou’s. Both share a particular interest in and debt to Lacan’s late seminars.14 Whilst Badiou read the late Lacan in Ornicar?,15 however, Lardreau apparently attended some of the seminars themselves, and Lacan himself briefly refers to Lardreau and Le Singe d’or in Seminar XXI. Both Badiou and Lardreau are concerned with Lacan principally as a thinker or in relation to philosophy, neither has any interest in psychoanalytical practice as such, and both ignore the extent to which the seminars refer to the analytical context, specific analytical terms that are key to the later seminars, and key figures in them, notably Joyce.

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That Badiou and Lardreau have little or no interest in the Joycean practice so important to the late Lacan finally gives the measure of their distance from the ‘master’. Like Badiou’s, Lardreau’s Lacan is above all a great anti-philosopher, the Lacan who says that his project ‘breaks with anything whatsoever that is enunciated qua philosophy’, constituting itself rather as ‘folisophie’ (Lacan 1998: 11).16 Where, however, Badiou’s ‘contemporary philosopher’ is intent on overcoming Lacan and seems half-convinced of imminent victory from the start, Lardreau stays much closer to Lacan. This not only dictates a practically exemplary caution; implicitly if seldom explicitly, Lardreau’s later philosophy thrives off a persistent question as to whether Lacan can be overcome or not (a Lacanian question in itself).17 This means that it operates at the very limit of philosophy, a point where the philosophical project itself is almost inextricable from its own incipient failure. If, for Badiou, in the wake of the demise of the political subject that followed on from the fiasco of State communism, Lacan reopens a dialectic, the possibility of ‘a radical interrogation’ of the ‘essence’ of the political subject and its re-emergence from its current ‘impasse’ (PT: 14), Lardreau is also concerned with a post-Lacanian dialectic, but of a very different and considerably more tentative kind. In the later seminars (XX–XXVI), Lacan increasingly seeks to bring closure to the interpretative method in psychoanalysis insofar as interpretation itself relentlessly inhabits the world of semblance which it ostensibly seeks to deconstruct in the discourse of the analysand. This correspondingly leads to an increasing emphasis on the status of the Real, since the Real escapes all symbolization and imaginarization. Lardreau takes this emphasis extremely seriously, not least, because it appears to him to explain the failure of modern transformative politics. Indeed, the later Lacan was himself explicit about the political implications of psychoanalysis. There is no plus without a minus: the concept of a ‘political gain’ arises only in an unconsciousness of an accompanying political loss. For its part, psychoanalysis itself ‘cannot in any way subvert anything whatsoever’ (Lacan 1998: 42). In late Lacan, above all, in Seminars XXII and XXIII, the logic of this unsubversive thought is that of RSI, the Borromean knot and the sinthome. The Borromean knot is a figure for the inter-involvement of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. These domains are (in some sense) initially distinct, and the Borromean knot threatens to come undone. What ties it together and ensures its indissolubility is the sinthome (see Lacan 2005: 19, 94), a fourth strand beyond meaning (which is already figured in the knot itself), and therefore not an interpretable symptom but rather a point

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at which subjectivity, the unconscious and jouissance are inseparably bound together. Sinthome plays with various different meanings, notably symptom and saint homme (holy man). In Seminar XXIII, Lacan’s ‘holy man’ is, cardinally, Joyce. Joyce understands, takes command of, refashions in reidentifying with his sinthome. But this affirmative dimension in the late Lacan is of little interest to Lardreau. He is rather gripped by the irreducible knottiness of RSI itself. The Real is the other of language which language itself seeks to articulate, but forever in vain, since, in seeking to catch hold of the Real, the act of signification incessantly produces it.18 The Real exists insofar as it encounters its ‘limit’ in the Symbolic (which ‘ciphers’ it) and the Imaginary (which puts an end to the work of ‘ciphering’, Lacan 1974–5: 3; 2005: 50). One can think the Real in itself only as unintelligibility or pure dispersal: thus all intelligibility must have a residue which limits it. ‘I do not have the least “conception of the world” ’, said Lacan (1976: 47). He was rather preoccupied with the limit-point to any such conception. If there is ‘one sole way in which a system of the world can exist . . . that is, if we make suppositions about it’ (1973: 85), it is the ‘suppositional’ base of any ‘system’ that Lacan exposes, thereby raising a question for philosophical and political projects alike. Lacan appears comprehensively to demonstrate the futility of the philosophical enterprise, in that he insists that the very structure of any given philosophical system is a function of the Imaginary. Indeed, psychoanalysis inexorably demonstrates that the notion that one thinks or can think, in the sense in which philosophers assume it to be the case, is a delusion at the very heart of philosophy. For the thinker cannot know what is thinking within his or her thought (see Lacan 1976: 12). Yet almost perversely, a residue of the Real inheres, for example, within Aristotelean discourse, as Lacan shows in his deconstruction of Aristotelean logic in Seminar XXI. This conviction of residual inherence will be crucial for Lardreau. If the Real attacks both the philosophical and political projects, it is also the root of the moral question in late Lacan. Language bars the subject from itself and others. If the subject seeks to take hold of its own subjectivity, it must do so through language; but this is a ‘barred’ subjectivity which the subject in language insistently produces as the other of language, and therefore a subjectivity from which it is peremptorily excluded from the start. Once again, the subject in language cannot state the Real. It rather produces the object of its desire as the imaginary result of its failure to do so. The consequence of this, Lardreau austerely suggests, is that desires and desiring subjects endlessly ‘intersect, ignorant of themselves and each other’ and unrelated to

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either authentic subjects or objects (LeM: 62). For Lacan, of course, this is cardinally the case with the sexual relation, which he famously tells us does not exist.19 There is no sexual relation: that is, the sexual connection does not establish a relation between two previous unrelated subjects, since there were no independent subjects there from the start, and they approach each other from within what is already an imaginary system of relations. Lardreau boldly extrapolates from this: there is no sexual relationship; there is no relationship (LeM: 59).20 This is not to say, however, that men and women exist as entirely discrete monads or atoms, but rather the reverse: it is because relation is everywhere that there is no authentic relation. Men and women are linked without relationship in that they are never sole and single, for they are always determined beforehand (there is always the Master, as Lardreau puts it).21 They cannot be mutually identified, either, since they are separated by the Imaginary or misrecognition. There is commonly no individual, interiority, identity or subject, other than as a surface effect of social operations. Equally, since the master is always there from the start, there is no free play of desire. Repression is at the origin, and desire is absolute lack and never attains to an object. Furthermore, this condition is seemingly inescapable: ‘les non-dupes errent’, as the title to Seminar XXI has it. The ‘non-dupes’ imagine that they are strangers to this lowly world (‘ce bas monde’), that they can evade capture in the space determined as that of the ‘speaking being’. But they are duped by a fantasy of a ‘place of the other’ which in fact merely replicates the space and structure it claims to resist (Lacan 1973: 9; cf. 11). Desire can only ever misunderstand itself and its object. It drives subjects at each other, constantly, within structures of misrecognition. This seemingly dooms us to the ‘filthy truth of the world [monde]’, its ‘vérité d’immondice’ (Lacan 1998: 107),22 to endless conflict and the death-drive, which is what becomes of desire in a speaking being. For if desire can have no object and there is no relationship, this knowledge is not available to the subject in experience: language makes the illusion of relationship ‘absolutely necessary’ (LeM: 64). Thus desire must repeatedly convert itself into aggressivity, since the subject endlessly desires and endlessly fails to reach the object of its desire. Nonetheless, Seminar XXI proposes, as the only feasible ethics, one of deeper immersion in and consent to the duperie of the unconscious, to the Ebenbild, the indefinitely repeated image which everywhere ‘accompanies the subject structuring his desire’ (Lacan 1973: 15). But is there not a blatant contradiction between this assertion and the Lacanian critique of semblance and insistence on the faille? Surely if we are everywhere duped and cannot be otherwise, we are dupes

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above all of semblance? The two insistences are indeed both present in late Lacan, but as an equivocation not a contradiction. The late Lacan is obsessed with equivocation, not only in the form of the lapsus, slip, ambiguity or play on words, but methodologically: ‘you always work from ambiguity’, he tells his fellow analysts (Lacan 1974–5: n.p.). Lacan comes close to evoking a human world infernally paralysed by the growth of a ‘cancer’, language (Lacan 2005: 95). But of course, in a wholly paralysed world, there would be no use for psychoanalysis. The strange, difficult obliquity of Lacan’s late discourse is precisely a reflection of his arduous struggle to find some kind of vantage-point from which play within the ensnarement in RSI might seem thinkable. Indeed, as he appeared to the members of his last seminars, constantly playing with variant forms of the Borromean knot, Lacan was repeatedly signalling his predicament, ‘the type of problem’ that ‘I rediscover at every turn’ (1974–5: n.p.). Here equivocation becomes a crucial instrument. If, as the late Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, truth can only be ‘mi-dit’, half-said, the vérité d’immondice is uncompletable, though equivocation is our ‘sole weapon’ against it (2005: 17). Thus there is a Lacan who tells us of a structure that is radically constant. There is no enlightenment, ‘movement on’ or prospect of any successful or enduring revolution. The Lacan of the last seminars tells us the same of history, politics, culture and the subject alike: we have and can have no idea as to what could point the way to our own Good. The texture of ‘life lived as such’ is that of ‘nightmare’ (Lacan 1973: 70). But Lacan also points towards a certain means of rescue, if faintly, vestigially and in a carefully qualified and exactly specified form. This has to do with the possibility of announcing an end and thereby anticipating a new beginning (Lacan 1973: 139). There is always the possibility that someone will make the appropriate effort, speak the truth and ‘disturb [dérange]’ the world (Lacan 1973: 85). Indeed, as Žižek has argued with the Lacan-Badiou connection in mind,23 this Lacan thinks the possibility of the event, chiefly as and in the act of saying and as the beginning of love. Lardreau inherits from this thought and, in characteristically minimalist fashion, finally incorporates a trace of what Lacan proposes through Joyce into his version of Lacan, whilst avoiding reference to Joyce himself. The event is the point at which the Real turns back on the discourse that has produced and ‘barred’ it and punctures that discourse. Here we may catch ‘a scrap of the Real’ in its ‘little historical emergences’, as did Newton (Lacan 1973: 148; 2005: 123). This is a recurrent concept in late Lacan, and as close as he gets to evoking the possibility of a break with semblance and with interminable repetition.24 Hence his charac-

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teristic late manner, a work of ambiguity, nuance, delicate velleity in which the équivoque is crucial as an équivalence matérielle, abruptly thrusting a seeming irrelevance to the fore and creating an upheaval in the order of signification, but also suspending utterance between desire and its blockage. Lardreau, however, is largely uninterested in material (verbal) equivocation, focusing rather on Lacan’s double insistence as encouraging a twofold philosophical practice, dividing philosophy into two activities. For Lardreau’s Lacan, the Real is what it is impossible to say, but also what it is impossible not to say, since language both engenders and effaces it (LV: 51). Truth therefore has the structure of a fiction, specifically, in that it passes through language, which itself has such a structure (see Lacan 1976: 35). Again, Lardreau takes this very seriously. The eternal return is that of the resistance of the Real, which also disappears in returning. Philosophy is required to think what resists thought, to think thought in relation to what resists it. No philosophy has value save that which grants the Real its rights, which is to commit oneself to half-saying. Hence one of Lardreau’s strategies is a hyperproduction of concepts, for, if thought cannot master what resists it, if, even as it half-says the truth, another half falls away, then it always presses forward only necessarily to encounter its limit and lack, not least in the principle of historicity, and must admit its inadequacy. However, there are two different ways of proceeding on this basis. The first is to some extent Lacanian, in that philosophy becomes playful, toys with its own ungroundedness, ironizes the concept itself, engages in a ‘light and lively thought of differences and names’ (LeM: 73): here Lardreau sounds very close to Derrida and post-Derridean traditions. But at the same time, the inadequacy of thought licenses another, more obscure activity, in that it legitimizes ‘a thought effectively poor and gross’ in which a corner or residual inherence of the Real may make itself recognized precisely insofar as it lacks language (LeM: 74). Here philosophy risks stupidity, falters, stumbles, looks cack-handed, but also declares, in its very clownishness or ineptitude, such intimacy as it is able to establish with truth. The oscillation between a radical scepticism resigned to leaving truth at a distance, and a fierce struggle to say a truth through and in its unreachability, turns philosophy into an ‘alternance indépassable [insurmountable alternation]’ (LeM: 74). Lardreau gets the word alternance from Lacan, who writes for example of ‘this half-saying, alternating half-saying, contrasting, alternating chant [ce mi-dire, mi-dire alterné, contrasté, chant alterné] of that which leaves the speaking being separated into two halves’ (1974–5: 172). Philosophy articulates

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the non-coincidence of Reason with the Real and becomes a seemingly endless practice of alternance, an intermittency in discourse, or what Lardreau calls the syncope, an irregular ‘scansion’ of philosophy, an interweaving of strong and weak times bringing it closer to the world as syncopation, as caught up in a movement of eclipse and return (FP: 77–9). Here, certainly, we encounter a mutated version of Lardreau’s early concept of historical intermittency, the mutation being Lacanian, since Lacan himself writes of the ‘scansion’ of a ‘double time’ remote from linear time and counterposes it to the iron logics of historical materialism and providentialism, which he dismisses together as in effect the same form of thought (1974–5: 131–2). For Lacan, the thought of a double time is incipiently ironic. Lardreau will both sustain and depart from an ironic perspective on the theme. Not for nothing was one of Lardreau’s early works a play, La Mort de Joseph Staline, which he called a bouffonnerie. There is a marked strain of something like philosophical bouffonnerie in his work – Jean Birnbaum recalls him as the one member of the Gauche Prolétarienne to keep his sense of humour (Birnbaum 2008a) – as in his decision to write a book about empiricism which is chiefly about detective novels, and a book about philosophical fictions which refers above all to science fiction. Here it is tempting to see Lardreau as indeed an ironist, a tease, if not a philosophical joker. But though he may seem close to parody and even self-parody at such moments, to think of either book as a joke rather than a non-trivial jeu d’esprit would be to mistake his purposes. One of Lardreau’s philosophical heroes is Leibniz (see FP: 139–54), whom he admires above all for his concept of harmony (in the Monadology). Within this concept, all forms of thought are affirmative, no object, reference or knowledge is unworthy of thought, and no one thought need exclude others: there is no authority which would make such exclusions possible. Leibniz claims to scorn almost nothing, and the capaciousness and openness of his philosophy reflects that. This aspect of Lardreau’s work leads to his concepts of philosophization, negation and negative philosophy, and veracity. I summarize them briefly in an appendix. Here, however, I shall rather focus on one particular aspect of the second of Lardreau’s two philosophical practices in which the relation between history and intermittency is again both raised and displaced. For Lardreau also argues that there is an imperative need for a moral philosophy however precarious or tenuous, as a means, firstly, of decisively separating the subject from the world of semblance; and, secondly, as the only surety against the risk with which Lacan ultimately threatens us: indefinite surrender to the death-drive, the ‘bad tonality’ of desire (LeM: 65). At this point, we see why the

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Birnbaum who remembers Lardreau’s sense of humour also calls him a philosophe mélancolique (Birnbaum 2008). Lardreau cannot shirk what he takes to be the philosopher’s responsibility, and departs from and seeks to overcome Lacan the anti-philosopher. Here we must turn to Kant, the only figure in Lardreau’s thought to have a significance comparable to Lacan’s. Firstly, however, we must address Lardreau’s concept of the subject. Within Lardreau’s philosophy, there are various and complex regimes of the subject, but in effect they are reducible to five. For reasons of clarity, I have partly modified Lardreau’s terms. Firstly, there is the constituted subject, the subject as always already given. In the predestinatory theologies, for example, this is the whole subject. Secondly, there is the double subject, both constituted and constituting, as in the case of the empirical or the Marxist subject. Thirdly, there is the subject as Real, pure dispersion, inaccessible to the language which determines its absolute exteriority. Fourthly, there is the deconstituting subject, the perverted form taken by the Real subject insofar as it projects itself as a destructive force, reversing into ‘death to others’. Freud and Lacan exactly understand this, the demonic subject (as of course does Žižek: witness for example his great remarks on Jünger and Oshima, 2008b [1991]: lxxiii). In the first instance, the moral question for Lardreau is that of the subject’s possible resistance to its constitution by and confinement within historically determinate forms of representation and knowledge, in other words, semblance. This is morally necessary if it is not to be drastically complicit in the many and various sources of human misery, and therefore also in what I shall later call ontological mediocrity. Lardreau repeatedly insists on one particular perplexity: how is it that, whilst aiming for the best, human beings seem so capable of producing the worst (Lardreau 2003: 90)? This leads him to the question of whether and how far the subject can practically resist semblance without being captured by other duperies, in particular by the ‘barbaric angel’ (see LA: passim; LV: 230–45; ED: 93), the demonic and deconstituting subject that the radical break with a world of semblance repeatedly appears to release. The answer to this question integrally depends on the scope and possible operations of the fifth, morally cardinal regime of the subject, that of the constituting subject, whose condition is freedom, and of which the classic modern instance is the subject of Reason in Kant. It may be objected, here, that Lardreau’s morality sounds very like a politics. Actually, what the later Lardreau calls his politics is quite distinct from his moral thought, but at the same time helps illuminate

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it. The Real ensures the existence of liberty, but there is also always an already constituted and effective political reality outside which the Real falls. Any significant politics will logically concern itself with the intermittent modes in which the Real insists in an already constituted political reality. Practical reason tells us that no society can project a political life beyond its own conceptual horizons, nor can any society sanction revolt against its own structures. Yet theoretical reason equally tells us that freedom must exist, and this declaration gives birth to politics. Politics does not proceed from knowledge or understanding, rather originating in a judgement made on the basis of the freedom of an Idea, a call to the constituted subject to abandon its prior order. But if freedom gives itself a purpose or seeks to endure, it casts itself in forms that negate it. The only significant politics takes place in ‘a revolt for twopence’, for a seeming bagatelle. Politics can have no final end, and must take place in the absence of any overarching historical concept or design. Its force is that of an event, a limited, punctual interruption of a given world. Somewhere along the line (of political thought), there must be a moment of decision or stopping-point. But nothing will either determine the moment of one’s decision or extend and define its significance. It effectively amounts to ‘very little . . . almost nothing’.25 A similar formulation is present in Lardreau’s concept of morality. This derives from a ‘purification’ of Kant that – Lardreau claims – has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing Kant’s thought (LV: 148).26 It is not hard to see why Peter Hallward calls Lardreau’s Kantianism ‘perverse’.27 He has little or no interest in the great spine of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Deduction, and no interest in the major principle of the Deduction, transcendental apperception, or the transcendental schema.28 Nor is he much concerned with the Metaphysical Deduction, the Transcendental Aesthetic and its two pure intuitions, space and time, or the Dialectic of the second Critique and its two chief postulates, God and immortality.29 He does not share Jambet’s conception of Kant as making possible ‘the thought of a metahistory’ (Jambet 2002a: 12–13), and, unlike Françoise Proust, has little interest in Kant’s politics. Indeed, he reads Kant in contradistinction to historical optimisms and any ‘grandiose imperative’ seemingly ‘imposed by history’ (LeM: 13). The Lardreau who once thought that the masses were never in error is indifferent to the possible implications of the Kantian insistence that the most ordinary people possess reason or ‘common understanding’ (Kant 1997b [1785]: 16–17). Kantian morality has become the ‘sole protestation’ possible against the world as it is (LeM: 15). Indeed, Lardreau’s Kantianism might aptly be described as mini-

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malist.30 It is a notably modest Kantianism, as Kant’s own was selfevidently not. Apparently only a minimal Kantianism can conceivably hold good in the teeth of historical experience after Kant. Lardreau has little or no interest in the massive grandeur of Kantian architectonics or the Kantian proliferation of meticulous, subtle distinctions. In effect, his is a Kantianism in ruins. He trims Kant down to what he takes to be a few key concerns. Kantian morality makes sense chiefly as a negative thought without positive content: that is what a ‘purification’ of Kant involves (LV: 150): we should resist Kant’s attempt to endow the categorical imperative with historically specific and determined features. Lardreau’s Kant is at the other pole from, say, Roger J. Sullivan’s, with its emphasis on concrete applications and material embodiments of Kant’s thought (Sullivan 1997). Lardreau simply shears such practical concerns away. Here five familiar Kantian concepts provide a relevant context: transcendental idealism; the causa noumenon; freedom, will and autonomy together; the categorical imperative; and universalizability. We should briefly remind ourselves of what they mean, in order to understand Lardreau’s reworking of Kant. The doctrine of transcendental idealism constitutes Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy, the refusal of the philosophical assumption that ‘it is the nature of the thing known that determines our knowledge’ (Dicker 2004: 32). Knowers themselves contribute to the content of knowledge, and the Ding an sich (thing-initself) is therefore unavailable, the noumenon inaccessible and unknowable apart from the structural features which the knowing subject contributes to knowledge of the object, notably spatial and temporal features: . . . if the subject, or even only the subjective condition of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. (Kant 2007 [1787]: 80–2)

Only the phenomenon is available to knowledge: Appearances are the sole objects which can be given to us immediately . . . But these appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations . . . (Kant 2007 [1787]: 36–7)

Whilst the noumenal world is not to be conflated with the Lacanian Real, it should be clear why a philosopher who finds in Lacan a major obstacle to philosophical thought should consider turning to transcendental idealism for inspiration. Causality is a feature of the phenomenal not the noumenal world, yet, if the Kantian categories are of no help in gaining knowledge of

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noumena, they can be applied to them for practical purposes. If it is impossible to deduce a causa noumenon, ‘no theoretical impossibility or contradiction can be exhibited in it or its presuppositions’, and it may thus ‘be taken as an inescapable fact [of Reason]’ for the subject (Kemp 1968: 62). Indeed, Kant extends the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal to the subject in itself and the subject as it appears. Man exists both as homo noumenon and as homo phaenomenon: there is a noumenal self beyond our knowledge that is nonetheless an originator of certain human actions and bears responsibility for them. At this point, however, the subject is independent of the causal laws of the phenomenal world of sense experience, and must be at the service of the only possible causal law remaining, that of freedom. Freedom is a purely rational spontaneity from an intelligible world which we can conceive of but not experience. It cannot be located in empirical circumstance, but derives from man’s power to act in accordance not only with natural laws, like animals, but with his idea of them. If man can respond to the laws that govern him in two distinct ways, this opens up the space for freedom. Freedom structures itself according to two distinct concepts of will involving two different kinds of formulation, maxims and (moral) Law. It may manifest itself as the faculty of initiating series in the empirical world, producing maxims, personal and subjective rules that direct desire. These involve will as Willkür, which directly determines action, requires an incentive (Triebfeder) and may or may not come under the sway of the Law. But freedom may also take the form of Wille, autonomy, which requires no maxim or incentive, imposes an obligation to perform a specific action and dictates what ought to happen, where maxims determine what happens. Autonomy means self-legislation but is guided by the Law, which relates action objectively to what is desired, and is therefore rational as desire is not. It is indifferent to both prior law and experience: ‘Experience tells us, indeed, what is, but not that it must necessarily be so, and not otherwise’ (Kant 2007 [1787]: 42). What tells us that is a moral law independent of our desires and which appears when we ask what we ought to be or do, which is pure in that it is without empirical content. Here freedom becomes ‘a law given by reason to a nature to be made real, not one taken from a nature already realized’ (Beck 1996 [1960]: 179, my italics). We do not know that the ‘nature to be made’ can or will come to exist, but we know it ought to be brought into existence by our actions, because Reason demands this. For Reason declares that nature is wanting and does not contain our destiny. Autonomy insists that Reason is immediately self-determining, that it is not invariably subject to desire, ‘inclination’ or what Kant calls

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‘pathology’ (Kant 1997b [1785]: 12–14). Men and women are responsible for their actions because autonomy has its own causality, which is noumenal and can conceive of possibilities, which in turn makes men capable of turning Reason into practice (practical Reason). This, however, is only a negative autonomy; there is also a positive autonomy which consists in the ability to perform acts of will in accordance with the Law. Thus freedom and constraint are inseparable, since freedom is free – to constrain itself within the Law. Imperatives are the form in which practical Reason expresses its principles. The categorical imperative is the formula for the Law’s containment of the rational subject. It tells us that we must will our individual maxim for conduct in identification with an objective moral law of Reason and therefore an obligation (for example, ‘I ought never to make lying promises’). A categorical imperative is oblivious to consequences and as ungainsayable as a mathematical truth. It does not require any clear sense of whether one will succeed in the action or not, or even whether the action itself is possible. The subject’s direct interest is in the action not the consequences. It is a feature of Wille that it ‘can act merely in order to achieve universality’ (Acton 1970: 31). Universality is a formal property, and the moral character of willing is determined by its form not its content, in that the minimal requirement for rationality is non-contradiction: the categorical imperative itself prescribes that two contradictory judgements cannot be both true or both false. Thus certain moral laws must be universal, since not to will them as such would be contradictory: knowingly to make a lying promise, for example, cannot be a moral law in Reason, since its adoption would be inconsistent with the given end of promising in general, and would therefore involve a teleological contradiction. Hence there is finally only a single categorical imperative: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become universal law’ (Kant 1997b [1785]: 31). A Kant arranged around this cluster of ideas might already seem a sufficiently minimal figure, but Lardreau subjects Kantianism to what he calls a ‘negative’ reduction which is considerably more drastic than this. Transcendental idealism is very important to Lardreau. Where the proponents of a common-sense Kant, like Strawson, seek to write off or at least qualify the whole of Kant’s ‘transcendental psychology’ whilst maintaining an ‘analytic’ approach to his philosophy (Strawson 1990 [1966]: 11 and passim),31 Lardreau takes the opposite direction. His ‘purified Kant’ is precisely the Kant of transcendental idealism, the Kant that Strawson so distrusts. The limitation to Strawson’s kind of position is that it remains within the confines of an anthropocentric

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humanism, where Lardreau accepts the Foucauldian case: man is a recent invention. This invention demands that ‘the transcendental be collapsed into the empirical’, exactly Strawson’s manoeuvre. But the concept of man does not designate anything that philosophy has ever truly needed to ‘know, desire or realize’ (LV: 187). For all Kant’s humanism, Lardreau’s emphasis nonetheless seems faithful to him, in that Kant repeatedly insists that man is not the only rational being conceivable, that the idea of Reason is not to be confined to man, who is at best an imperfect instance of it. His argument is founded on a certain philosophical use of the speculative imagination which Strawson would proscribe, but of which Lardreau is an ardent defender, and which he wants to make explicit and take further in Kant.32 Lardreau’s move makes Kant resemble Lacan in recognizing a limit without content. Kant’s is a limit-thought because, like Lacan, he posits a limit (Grenze) beyond which it is impossible for the subject to proceed, and a way of thinking this limit. The Real and the Ding an sich are what respectively designate this limit: this is what Kant means when he refers to the Ding an sich as a Grenzbegriff, a limit-concept. The Real, the Ding an sich, are both impossible, yet also, in a certain manner, thinkable. In this respect, Kantian rigour is more like Lacan’s than Strawson’s.33 If the emphasis on limitation seems almost wilfully to strip Kantian thought of much of its scope and force, as such, it is typical of Lardreau’s Kantianism. Whilst he makes no exact mention of the concept of the causa noumenon, Lardreau asserts that the subject ‘founds its morality’ in relation to the noumenon (LV: 169). Here, precisely, he translates his preoccupation with the intermittency of ‘two worlds’ into a moral frame. For the early Lardreau, there is no ‘passage’ as such between the ‘two worlds’; they are not articulated on one another. One world rather interrupts the other, here and there or from time to time. So, too, the later, Kantian Lardreau thinks in terms of a cassure, the ‘noumenal subject’s’ intermittent ‘fracture’ of the phenomenal world. If freedom and Reason are properly thinkable only in relation to the ‘intelligible world’, this might appear to deliver the phenomenal world over to the rule of necessity. But since God is beyond knowledge and theology therefore has no purchase, phenomenal necessity must be ‘nonnecessary’: that is, it can be interrupted. Kantian Law appears to us in such an interruption, ‘as the mark of another world’ (LeM: 32–4). Once again, Lardreau sets out from an audaciously sceptical position, and this leads to some unusual conclusions. He poses a question which may more or less consciously trouble a reader of Kant: where does the obligation in ‘moral obligation’ come from, given that we are

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debarred from any form of metaphysical knowledge? Why should one feel obliged, why should moral judgements exist, why should there be a moral subject at all? Lardreau answers through ‘the affirmation of the universal’, by taking the ‘form’ of morality, the criterion of universalizability, for its very raison d’être (LeM: 43, 68). This does not mean that his work secretly harbours a vestigial nostalgia for either Aristoteleanism or a universal political good. Universalizability does not mean ‘practical universalization’ (LV: 164; cf. LeM: 43). In fact, Lardreau locates his ‘pure’ and therefore minimal Kant precisely at the point at which it is impossible any longer simply to live with a certain form of contradiction, when one must have done with it. To deconstructive, postmodern minds, this may sound like a ploddingly antiquated idea. But Lardreau means no more than that any comprehensive repudiation of the doctrine of non-contradiction ignores the kinds of complicity to which an undiscriminating acceptance of contradiction tout court may repeatedly lead. The crucial point about Kantian morality is that it ‘treats logical contradiction as a symptom of the destruction of the world’ (LV: 135). Take for example the key Kantian instance of false promise: if one treats the statements ‘I must not make lying promises’ and ‘It is permissible to make lying promises’ as equally valid, one is expressing a will to unreason, a will that the world collapse or come undone. For then language, the pact, the symbol within the human world, would no longer be susceptible of the slightest guarantee. Kant saw very clearly that a world in which a pledge and its betrayal, truth-telling and falsehood were morally equivalent would be uninhabitable, untenable and nonsensical. Morality therefore wills the survival of the world,34 and states that, however profound, any scepticism regarding language must not be absolute. This is where the categorical imperative exerts its power. As Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone makes clear, Kant had a conception of ‘radical evil’ (LV: 174). He was capable of a Hobbesian vision of universal hostility, the unending competition for goods, catastrophe in permanence. But the absolute form of the categorical imperative is a turn away from this evil, from destruction as such, a decision in favour of the world and its continuance. All instances of the imperative refer back to that unconditional decision and are unthinkable without it. The categorical imperative wills the world in an exceptional way, as one in which rationality is possible, in defiance of the danger that constantly threatens rational being. That is its sole authentic intervention: to represent to rational beings the (at least formal) impossibility of certain insane but ‘materially possible’ actions (LV: 136). Of course, we can always choose radical evil. Nothing prevents

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us from disobeying the Law. Kant had a certain confidence in moral character, even if he subordinated it to duty. But ‘moral character’ will certainly not defend us; as Lacan saw, Kant was captive of an Enlightenment ‘myth of good will’ which pre-ordains the subject to the good, and according to which knowing the good means surely choosing it (LV: 138).35 This Kant has already decided about the deciding mind before the deciding mind decides. But Sade and Dostoevsky – to cite only two – amply exhibit the possibility of choices very different to those stemming from ‘good will’. So, too, Kant’s long-term solution to the problem of evil – the development of an ethical society and the spread of a universal religion – merely shows how far, as history was to show, he never truly grasped the winding and drastic ways in which evil might menace the world. Yet there is a determined resistance to evil in Kant’s thought. At root, the categorical imperative simply means that the rational subject cannot formally choose evil, since it would then choose dissolution, its own or the world’s. Nothing requires that the subject choose Reason, for this is not all he or she is. Here yet again Lardreau’s Kantianism is minimalist and a limit-thought: no necessity ensures that the subject will side against destruction. Yet if rational being is precarious, chronically at risk, the capacity for it is always present in the subject, because it is an extrapolation from his or her continuing existence. In effect, then, the categorical imperative says, not ‘You must act . . .’ but ‘You must refrain from . . .’ It may seem that Lardreau’s negative Kantianism is finally so minimal as to be derisory. What status, one might ask, can one conceivably grant to a morality that contents itself with saying ‘I am responsible for ensuring that the world goes on’? Lardreau’s answer might seem to lie in his insistence on the continuing importance of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as the classic statement and explication of the recurrence of historical disaster. But leaving aside the measure his Kantianism gives us of the intensity with which he responds to psychoanalysis, even leaving aside the possible meaning of his Kantianism for a world incessantly caught up in nightmares, fantasies, forecasts, logics of its own annihilation, it is a significant response to his concept of the demonic subject. Here the themes of freedom and will come finally into play, if in a strictly delimited mode. Lardreau argues that Kantian freedom is not only not given in nature, but is not a given at all: the Kantian subject knows freedom only inasmuch as it is constrained as will. Freedom, in other words, is a postulate, one necessary if morality is to have a form. But nature is already constraining: why should Kant insist on a double constraint? If the moral subject experiences freedom only as a power

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to set itself limits, it does so in a specific relation that is of paramount importance, the relation of reason to madness, which crucially includes the madness of good intentions. Here, finally, Lardreau strikingly departs from the Lacan who, in Seminar VII, scoffs at Kantian morality. For the discoveries of psychoanalysis call for a negative morality, one that sets a limit to the ‘effects . . . of the death-drive’ (LeM: 67). The psychoanalytic conception of the subject and Kantian morality finally correspond to each other. For if psychoanalysis allows us to understand why – both subjectively and historically – the demonic or destructive drive may insistently prevail, a minimal Kantianism allows us to understand what may set a limit to it, if only in proclaiming – the most minimal of minima – a certain kind of limit to semblance, to the myths that are continually the alibi of the death-drive. This is what Lardreau means when he says that we require a concept of the deathdrive ‘disengaged’ from any empirical identification (LV: 141), one that he finds in the Lacanian vérité d’immondice, intimately related as it is to the power of language. Lacan tells us that the death-drive appears at the moment when the ‘Real subject’, forever dispersed, outside language, projects itself as demonic subject, in a will to bring death to others. The death-drive is thus the point at which desire holds to the Real. But paradoxically, in Kantian terms, this is also the point at which the moral subject may be constrained by the categorical imperative and ‘absolutely escap[e] the laws of the world’ (LV: 144). Here, again, Kant and Lacan recognize a ‘limit without content’ (LV: 150, 152). But they necessarily articulate it differently, the differences being themselves indicative of a decision for the subject. There is always the possibility of the reversion into aggressivity, the drive to destroy the world, but there is equally a Kantian freedom to think things otherwise, to pose a world that may be otherwise intelligible, a world existing only in the name of an Idea. Nothing however will instruct the subject in making the decision. A pure, minimal Kantian morality can never be other than intensely problematic. Indeed, this is intrinsic to its character as a morality. In a sense, says Lardreau, there is no significant Kantian morality. Kant himself stated that ‘Kantianism . . . was of no use’ (by which he did not mean that it was of no service to anyone, LV: 170), even that ‘a truly moral act could not be found’ (LV: 166). The most he permitted himself to hope was that certain moral subjects might achieve a deliberative clarity of thought. Lardreau makes much of the deliberative force of Kantianism; indeed, he sometimes appears to think that Kant is above all significant for the weight and sophistication he lends to moral deliberation. But it is not surprising that his claims for Kant should be

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so restricted, in that he asserts that any serious morality always finally fails to understand this world – it cannot do otherwise; ‘not understanding’ is the condition of morality – even though it is the only world of which the moral subject can claim to have experience (LeM: 13). Kant’s morality was serious in this sense; hence the significant Kant is concerned with ‘the conditions of the possibility of morality’, nothing more (LV: 149; cf. LeM: 39). A fortiori, Kant’s exemplary philosophical sobriety and caution emphatically separate his thought off from grand theories of history. He neither anticipates nor coincides with Hegelianism or the ‘theologies of history’ (LV: 169). If Kantian morality is concerned with the ‘simply subjective’ necessity of thinking a possible world, however, it also indicates the (moral) mode in which a thinkable world may occasionally intersect with the actual one. The traces of this intersection appear ‘en pointillé’, as stipplings or perforations (LV: 155), as they did for Proust. But such moral acts as are possible are ‘rare’. Most moral conduct is merely an abstention from evil (LV: 167). The concept of a Sovereign Good has no content, but states only that ‘the worst is not always certain’ (LV: 168, fn23), and is concerned to ensure that human life may not ‘turn to the worst’ (LV: 169). Lardreau’s treatment of all the Kantian concepts above is fastidiously and consistently negative and rigorously avoids any positive conversion. He does not argue that the moral power of pure Reason lies in its capacity to break with desire, being well aware that this makes no headway against the psychoanalytic case. His Kant, however, concludes that the moral subject cannot act save in determining certain conditions of possibility within which the Real will not insist in ‘the naked form of horror’ (LV: 168). But why, again, should I not choose demonism and horror, or let myself be swept up by them? That is, finally, a question of what Kant takes Reason to mean. The reasonable subject is a moral being, not by virtue of any values he or she has chosen to espouse, but by virtue of the freedom of homo noumenon. Moral subjectivity is at stake, not in the world, but in the constitution of a world or at its limit, the point at which one grasps oneself as a constituting subject, beyond all constitutions to which one may be prey. It is the point at which the subject grasps itself as void and the world needs to be made, and this point defines the meaning of Reason itself. But of course, here again, Lardreau is only Kantian in a particular way. If, in Kant, moral freedom might appear to be determined ‘by means of reason directed to objects’ (Kant 1997b [1785]: 50), Lardreau rather insists that what is crucial is the slender, liminal space between two selves. One self we can never know to be free of desire; the other is

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inseparable from the will to assert that a world be there. Crucially, Kant understood that not every intention need be tethered to desire, that there is a limit-point at which the mind poses the reality of the intelligible world. This point resists the grasp of Reason, but also impels it. Here the event of Reason may rupture what Kant took to be ‘the agreeableness of life’ as desire tirelessly seeks to claim it for itself ‘without interruption’ (Beck 1996 [1960]: 97, my italics), or cut dramatically across the demonic self, which only knows what it wants in relation to an already established world. It is here above all, via Kant, that Lardreau most successfully addresses the problem ‘obviously deficient modes of subjectivation’ raise for ‘great politics’ (Lardreau 2003).36 Lardreau also insists, however, that he remains a ‘historicist’ even in his engagements with Lacan and Kant (LeM: 74). In Kant, he detects an incipient modern thought of historical intermittency. Certainly, there was a Kant who saw history as at length harmonizing the laws of nature with those of freedom, reconciling the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds in the triumph of the Sovereign Good. But this was a grandiose Kant still a prisoner of theology and merely reformulating the Christian narrative in the terms of nineteenth-century humanism and progressivism. For Lardreau’s diminished, ‘negative’ Kant, the historical tale remains founded on the irreconcilability of the two worlds. A Kant-based conception of history in terms of intermittent relations between noumenal and empirical causality is in principle transformative, not least in that it defines the limits of history as an empirical study. In ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Standpoint’, Kant asserts that the causa noumenon repeatedly leaves its traces in history as appearances of free will, in which history itself becomes a field for laws ‘as stable as the unstable weather’ (Kant 2001 [1963]: 11), laws, that is, of a play of indeterminacy within a determinable structure which are simultaneously exact and inexact. History unfolds like the weather, and an understanding of it based on science, experience and likelihood may sometimes, even usually be right, but can also be wildly mistaken. Here, through Lardreau as through Proust, we glimpse a certain Kant who, with a certain Hume, stands at the beginning of a modernity subsequently obliterated by Hegel, Marx, liberalism, utilitarianism and the narratives of progress, not least those of Capital, but which is more and more borne in on us as progressivist narratives indefinitely fail to resolve or overcome the contradictions they as indefinitely spawn. Lardreau is acutely responsive to this Kant because, by the mid-seventies, his own historical experience had led him to exactly this modern conception of history.

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ART AND THE MOMENT OF SPIRIT Here we may recast the thesis that binds this chapter together according to Lardreau’s mode of Lacanian thought. A corner, trace or effect of the Real insists in any given order of semblance. Whilst, as Lacan says, the Real is the impossible – the subject cannot ‘take the point of view’ of the Real – its trace provokes a recognition of semblance for what it is. Inaccessible in itself, the Real stands in relation to any given order of semblance as that which it produces and cannot contain, but which also renders it phantasmal. The imminence of the Real gives meaning to any significant politics as it does to psychoanalytic practice. But, because it is only imminent, it repeatedly makes of both a form of blind persistence in a seeming cul-de-sac. We have seen this principle at work in Lardreau’s conception of history and, later, of politics and morality. It is also central to his aesthetics, chiefly in the third book of La Véracité and its four prolongements (LV: 281–368). Here the key terms are ‘constitution’ and ‘the unsayable’. Obviously, art ‘does not reproduce the visible, but renders visible’ (LV: 281). This is the very doxa of modern art: art sets before us a Real that has previously escaped constitution (as a ‘reality’). The task of the artist is to say what was previously unsayable, and thereby to breach the limits of a prior constitution. Art says what seemingly could not be said. It works to rescue singularities from inexistence, but in doing so also extends the horizons of constitution. A subject can say nothing of its sufferings, joys, loves except insofar as what it says coincides with a concept and a form, but here suffering, joy and love lose their colour, style and specific mode of difference and become exchangeable with other instances of the same, and therefore require the invention of other concepts, other forms, which is the task of art. But how can art even go so far, given that nothing that falls outside the order of constitution can properly be captured within it? By working on language, ‘symbolic forms or “modes of expression” ’ (LV: 286), deforming them so that they bear witness to what they expel, and thus submitting constitution itself to a practice which makes it knowable as such, by virtue of its being open to supplementation. If this argument is paradoxical, that is because constitution and the unsayable are themselves paradoxically connected, and call to one another in an indefinite alternance or process of oscillation. Lardreau develops the theme via the question of art and nature. Modern theory of art has wavered between conceptions of art as either concerned with an ineffable nature, reflecting on the barrier sealing it off from nature or collapsing nature into culture. What all these conceptions miss is that

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nature has two aspects. It is determinate, given, already constituted, but also inseparable from a larger conception of Spirit, productive in excess of itself, irreducible to any phenomenal reality. It therefore requires two complementary forms of thought and practice, both materialist, in Lardreau’s sense: ‘a loving fidelity to the sensible, an exaltation of mundane objects, realist figuration’; and a second thought and practice not obviously materialist at all (unless one has read Vive le matérialisme!), and which expresses the contingency of the ‘embodied form’ (‘forme engagée’) of ‘material objects’, the ‘insignificant detail of the occasions which have fashioned them as they are’ (LV: 297). Lardreau even makes a contemporary programme of a double practice in art, calling for a ‘figuration after abstraction’ (LV: 301) within which the mutability, disappearance, inexistence of objects would flicker in objects themselves, a figuration bearing the trace of abstraction but immune to any concept of the unity or ineffability of nature. It is via the two materialisms that art ‘saves reason’, though aesthetics alone can properly articulate this (VM: 59). For art bears witness to two worlds, the truth that ‘one divides [inexorably] into two’ (VM: 58). On the basis of this argument, Lardreau defends some notably unfashionable forms and concepts of art and unpromising and disregarded artworks. Though still life painting, for example, may involve a heavily ‘ “coded” ’ representation of objects (LV: 304, fn6), it nonetheless balances the object on the edge of its extinction (compare the French term nature morte). The doctrine of Ut pictura poesis proposes that the picture be summoned from its own impossibility, in what Poussin called ‘ “the creation of visible things” ’ (Poussin 1964: 219; LV: 337). Socialist realism negates without destroying a material donnée; it refuses the ‘simple negation’ of abstraction, any ‘simple rupture with matter’ (LV: 311). Indeed, socialist realism is perhaps the paradigm of mimesis. For mimesis always betokens an intervention or decision, a split with the world which sustains the trace of nature as Spirit, something that ‘must be presumed real’ (because rational in the Kantian sense), along with the constraints of a determinate reality (LV: 313). In other words, Lardreau’s concern is with forms and concepts of art which involve a ‘repetition [ressassement]’ of the ontic question, ‘ “Why this, and not something else?” ’ (LV: 314). Ultimately, beyond his ‘programme’ and his revivification of marginalized genres and theoretical positions, Lardreau also provides another historical articulation of his paradoxes. If it is possible to think abstraction and figuration in some degree together, that is because they have ‘the same goal’ (LV: 359): a rendering of matter as designated by the two materialisms. ‘ “The greatest negation of the object and its greatest

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affirmation are equivalent” ’ (Kandinsky 1974 [1911]: 156; LV: 360). But figuration proceeds by eliminating the abstract, abstraction by eliminating ‘reality’. Both thereby provoke the endless return of the other, and are equally powerful on their own and each other’s behalf. Thus if Lardreau thinks abstraction and figuration together, he also thinks them apart, as distinct, intermittently alternating aesthetic dominants prevailing in distinct historical moments and different historical cultures, interdependent, mutually determining but with separate and sustainable claims. Lardreau’s ‘negative aesthetics’ might thus appear chiefly to consist of an ironic rendition of the aesthetic concept, according to the insight that truths can only half-say themselves and call to others as their necessary complement. But it also doubles up the double thought, in that it also provides an intensely serious conception of art that wagers on a singular intervention similar to that proposed by his Kantianism. This emerges above all in his account of Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky is not making a case for a revival of the religious sensibility in the teeth of modern materialism, as is often supposed, but rather introduces a new thought of Spirit into modern aesthetics. His argument has nothing to do with any supernal value, but is rather historicist. Hegel asserts that the epoch of the apotheosis of the aesthetic realm is over, that art must refuse its quondam mission as the highest expression of Spirit, relinquishing it to history. But Hegel also left to art the possibility of taking up a demand of Spirit so singular that perhaps art alone can respond to it. In an epoch when the ‘mission of history’ appears to be defunct, art comes back into its own, not in support or as an expression of any grandiose programme, but, though Lardreau does not say exactly this, as the very paradigm of the ‘revolt for twopence’. Art takes Spirit to be its principle, but is not a moment in the life of the Spirit. The Hegelian and post-Hegelian narratives that might underpin it as such have collapsed. Art is Spirit as what Kandinsky calls an occasional ‘little point of light’, an event, an immediate and unsurpassable form of revelation amidst the misery (once again) of a specific epoch. It is a ‘power for the future’, even ‘contains the seed of the future’, to quote Kandinsky, but anticipates no future accomplishment (Kandinsky 2006 [1914]: 7, 11, 21). Endlessly if sporadically, however, it takes radical issue with worlds of semblance as they seal themselves around their own evolving contradictions in the interests of stabilization, normalization, complacency, security. This is what Kandinsky grasps, for example, in his extraordinary praise for Picasso, whose constantly changing art is concerned above all continually to outstrip the constant self-righting of semblance.

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THE EXAMPLE OF KLEIST Though Lardreau’s aesthetics occupies only a very limited space in his work, it may seem to sum up his thought. Like his ontology, morality and politics, it is intent on holding open a space beyond mere acquiescence in the world that is given us to think. The space in question is produced by a Real that will not be subsumed, and gives rise to events, occasional interruptions of the order of semblance. These interruptions are limited, singular, punctual. They do not represent, manifest or cohere into any scheme, historical, narrative, or other. They are intermittent. The logic of Lardreau’s ‘Kantian minimum’ can finally be inverted, for it is inseparable from that of a maximum.37 The minimum exists in relation to what we already know and understand as human being, whilst the maximum is the ‘supersensible vocation’ of humanity (LV: 188), which defines man by what is in excess of him. For what Reason demands is ‘that man admit another nature which is not nature at all, since unknowable’ (nature as Spirit, LV: 192). It may sound fleetingly as though Lardreau is adopting a classic Enlightenment position hardly reconcilable with his Lacanianism.38 But if humanity is defined by and as desire, as Lacan shows, desire includes the ‘tension towards’ reason in the feeling being (LV: 188). Here and there, sensibility is traversed by the Reason it traverses itself. This sporadic emergence of Reason is precisely what is represented in a (post-Enlightenment) concept of a ‘negative morality’ and a ‘negative politics’. There could scarcely be a literary figure who seems closer to Lardreau than Kleist (though, to my knowledge, Lardreau never mentions him). In March 1801, Kleist undergoes his famous ‘Kant crisis’, exclaiming despairingly, in a famous letter, that Kant has shown him that we are all like a man with green glasses who sees only green. Kleist registers the post-Kantian loss of the Ding an sich with an extraordinary intensity. If ‘things as they really are’ are not available to us, he declares, then ‘no truth is to be found here below’, and his ‘highest goal’ has therefore ‘sunk from sight’.39 This was a disaster: Kleist had been ‘sincerely striving’ for a truth subject only to ‘der Herrschaft der Vernunft’, the authority of Reason, devising in the process his ‘Lebensplan’, which stemmed from a ‘predisposition to every perfection’, was founded on a belief in a ‘great revolution of the soul’, and involved a project of endless (self-)education.40 Now the ‘very pillar’ that he had clung to ‘tottered’ and fell.41 ‘Painfully shattered’, Kleist underwent an intellectual collapse from which, in one sense, he would never recover.42

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Thus Kleist starts out from the Lacanian foundation for wisdom, definitive lack. His particular form of Kantian question lies behind a number of different aspects of his work. Take the vertigo induced by doubles in Amphitryon. In the opening scene, for example, in which Sosia is half-bullied, half-persuaded into surrendering his own identity – into believing that another possesses his own identity more plausibly than he does – the Thing-in-itself becomes a Thing-in-the-other, the Thing realized in its specular image. Similarly, Kleist tells us that the seed of Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug) was contemplating an engraving which provoked a sense of bewilderment, the question ‘What is this?’ or ‘What is happening here?’ (Kleist 1995: 220). The play simultaneously responds to, expresses and sustains the confusion of that inaugurating moment, in a procedure close to the ressassement of the ontic question Lardreau prizes in art. The answer within perplexity, the perplexity of the answer: this doubleness is everywhere in Kleist, as in the Kafka who so loved his work.43 The Kleistian riddle or enigma is an exact indication of the affliction that the idea of ‘things as they are’ suffers in his work. Did Graf Jakob in fact kill his brother in Der Zweikampf (The Duel)? Does Rosalie’s submission (in the same story) necessarily disqualify all other evidence? Are Lisbeth and the hag in Michael Kohlhaas the same person? Such unresolved questions not only have locally destabilizing effects on the stories in which they appear. Cumulatively, they confer an air of unreality on Kleist’s fictional world as a whole. There is no founding voice in Kleist’s stories, any more than there is in his plays, no authority that will guarantee a bedrock of truth. We have only versions, often those of accusers, plaintiffs and judges, as in Kafka, deriving our information from narrators whose reliability nothing underwrites. Such features of Kleist’s writings show him responding to the loss of the Ding an sich, not by affirming the transcendental structure of cognition, but by constructing a world whose principles are semblance and the faille, bracketing semblance and thereby sustaining the trace of nature as Spirit. But this is merely to register the most obvious shock-waves of the seismic upheaval of the ‘Kant crisis’. According to James Phillips, the established view of it is that Kleist misreads Kant and thereby leaves himself in a ‘psychopathological no-man’s-land’ between a dogmatic, eighteenth-century, metaphysical, conceptual apparatus and the experimentalism of modern art. Kleist’s ‘misunderstanding’ is very like the one impugned by Strawson. He is mesmerized by the premise of transcendental idealism and the Kantian doctrine of immanence, and simply ignores the Transcendental Deduction. He thus entirely misses the real force of the Kantian revolution, and is left in

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an insoluble predicament, inaugurating the separation of philosophical and literary modernity, but at the price of becoming ‘the lost sheep of modern epistemology’, failing to make the transition to a properly postKantian modernity, and crashing to psychic disaster (Phillips 2007: ix–x). Lardreau, however, allows us to see another post-Kantian modernity as at stake in the question of Kleist, apart from the ‘proper’ one. Phillips rightly insists on drilling literature into philosophy, asking what he takes to be the Kleistian question of Kant, not the Kantian question of Kleist. In effect, with a negligent grandeur that is the flipside of his abjection, Kleist waves away Strawson. He is loftily indifferent to the Transcendental Deduction, to the Kantian reassertion of the structures of science and knowledge, for what are, in the terms of a man despising his era, good reasons. For Kleist fears that the Transcendental Deduction will establish and confirm in place a rationalism that more or less secretly accommodates itself ‘to political, social and economic interests as the autonomous recognition of what is’ (Phillips 2007: xi). In Phillips’s terms, then, Kleist is the solitary conscience rebelle who repudiates a world of semblance and revolts for twopence. He is courageous enough to suppose that, if we cannot know the Ding an sich, that is because we have conceived of knowledge in a certain way, and not begun to imagine it as exposure ‘to the surprises of the non-identical, the resolutely phenomenal, the transitory and the abnormal’ (Phillips 2007: 14). The critical assumption that Kleist’s stories are reducible to common-sense logic is misguided. For commonsense logic insists on the absolute priority of a mundane causality that belongs with the Transcendental Deduction, and that Kleist continually tells us is not the only frame for understanding what goes on his work. One of his Anekdoten for the Berliner Abendblätter has the title ‘Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten’ (‘Improbable Veracities’). It might serve as a gloss on various of the Anekdoten insofar as they hinge on an instance of paradoxical or unlikely logic. Indeed, it might cover most if not all of Kleist’s œuvre (Kleist 1992: 42–6). Kleist was repeatedly gripped by implausible causalities. Consider his fascinated account, when merely fifteen, of the screeching, maniacal figure who leaps out on him and his fellow Prussian soldiers in the Harz mountains; surely a common ‘Straßenräuber’, a highwayman, says Kleist, but the more he insists on it whilst dwelling goggle-eyed on the sheerly lunatic proportions of the scene – ‘hier schrie dieser Mensch so fürchterlich’ (‘the man screamed so horribly’) – the more we wonder what the man was really about.44 So large is the Kleistian insistence on weird causes – ‘Also an ein Eselgeschrei hing ein Menschenleben’?

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(‘So a human life can hang on the braying of an ass?’)45 – that, at length, it constitutes its own kind of challenge to the Transcendental Deduction and the pure category of causality in the Critique of Pure Reason, which seeks daringly to lift the cause-and-effect chain clear of empiricism whilst tamely keeping it within the frame of common-sense knowledge. So, too, historical causality is finally mystifying: Ah, it is so hard to ascertain what is good in the world in terms of consequences. Even those deeds that are the marvels of history, were many of them truly good in [the] pure sense? Is not the benefactor of one nation often the ruin of ten others? 46

Kleist’s crisis of 1801 is the very paradigm and model of a classic modern crisis repeated, not least, in Lardreau’s crisis of 1973–8: if there ever was a reason in history, it has disappeared. One might localize the relevant problem by underlining a phrase in the letter of March 1801: ‘the truth that we acquire here’, says Kleist, mournfully, ‘is not truth after our death’ (Kleist 1996: 506, my italics); what counts as truth depends upon the passage of time. This recognition is not just a feature of the ‘Kant crisis’. Kleist keeps on coming back to the point, in partly Kantian terms: All about us are phenomena any one of which would require an eternity for us to estimate correctly, and hardly is one observed than another displaces it, which likewise ungrasped slips away in its turn.47

Truth is contingent, but also historical, even epochal, not randomly but historically contingent: . . . the philosophes may tell us what they will about the human race, in France each generation resembles neither the generation from which it descends nor that which follows it.48

Here Kleist sounds very like Lardreau on Corbin. Not surprisingly, Kleist’s narratives and plays repeatedly hinge on social constructions that are both inexorable and groundless, what the Kämmerer in Der Zweikampf calls ‘diese willkürlichen Gesetze der Menschen’ (‘these arbitrary laws of men’; note the Kantian echo, Kleist 1980: 214). Kleist’s crisis over the Ding an sich is not a modernist crisis in subject–object relations or a crisis in representation. Here the Ding an sich is not an object, and what is at stake is not a relationship with an object. The ‘Kant crisis’ is about metaphysics, including the metaphysics of the historical process. This is vividly figured in the elaborate image in Der zerbrochne Krug of the broken jug itself, and specifically the historical pageant that ornamented it: a bit of Philip of Spain here,

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of Charles V there, of Maximilian there: the names remind us that Kleist wrote and completed the play exactly during the last few years of the existence of the Holy Roman Empire (1801–6), and it is clearly the narrative of that ramshackle Empire that, practically, Kleist was thinking of as having disintegrated. All that goes before forget: history lies in shards. Kant throws Kleist into crisis because he had genuinely and even passionately believed that unchanging spiritual truths could in fact lie behind the shifting surfaces of the historical world and sustain themselves indefinitely. What now rears up abruptly and monstrously before him is the figment-ridden, spectral thought of unending historicity. As a whole, Kleist’s work constitutes a brilliant if fitful meditation on history after the ‘Kant crisis’. History has become catastrophic. It is indeterminately, incomprehensibly, insistently (but not invariably), horribly catastrophic. Kleist did not fall short of the philosophers; the philosophers turned away from Kleist. Far from Kleist floundering haplessly in a post-Kantian world, Hegel, Marx et many al. would take it upon themselves to return a post-Kleistian world to order, a project that was at length doomed to failure, as every one of the philosophers of intermittency testifies. In Kantian terms, then, Lardreau and Kleist both share an orientation that takes its bearings from transcendental idealism, and an indifference to the Transcendental Deduction. In both cases, the indifference is founded on a suspicion that the Transcendental Deduction finally justifies an order or orders of semblance. In this respect, Kleist and Lardreau together might be thought of as designating the historical beginning and latest stage of a modernity that, after the 1790s, persisted much more decisively within literature and the other arts than it did within philosophy, politics and other branches of culture, but was in large part occulted by the insistent narratives of modernity as progress. But this other tradition within modernity is not to be identified with the modern anti-modernity we remarked on in Chapter 2. There have been few minds more principled or intransigent in their hatred of anti-modernity than Kleist, not surprisingly, given that his principal experience of it was in turn-of-the-century Prussia. Indeed, he is exemplary because he so unerringly treads the very fine and subtle line between scepticism towards the dominant forms of modernity, and anti-modernity. In fact, Kleist inaugurates what for a long time remains a minor and even clandestine tradition within modernity, a tradition of which Lardreau and the other philosophers of intermittency are both a late example and expression and a summation. History is prey to chance breaths of air, sudden breezes, pockets of turbulence small and large.

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But it is also, as I said, catastrophic; that is, by the same token, it is interminably swept by the gusts of the death-drive, chiefly as death to others. Kleist says this above all in Penthesilea, a work par excellence that coincides with Lardreau’s thought. If he casts his thought in mythological form, this is hardly surprising, given how far, even in that form, the play horrified Goethe, and would have appalled a society that still worshipped the great man, if it had ever had an inkling of it. Penthesilea is a demonically brilliant evocation of the field of forces created by the clash of desires that cannot know themselves. It is so firstly as a titanic, phantasmagoric representation of the absence of the sexual relation. Penthesilea and Achilles wade and hurtle towards each other as majestic antagonists enthralled by each other’s mythic life. The other characters, too, are gripped by their mythic grandeur, an effect only enhanced by the classic status of the Troy story. That we should hear so much from the other characters about how they imagine Penthesilea and Achilles is important. Penthesilea and Achilles are nothing if not prisoners of imaginary relations and definitively beyond ‘authentic contact’. Phillips suggests that at the centre of the play is ‘the paradoxically determinate purity of desire’ (Phillips 2007: 50). But this holds good only if by ‘determinate purity’ we mean that here desire lacks any determinate object. For neither Penthesilea nor Achilles knows what it is they desire, each other, each other’s death, or indeed their own. Perhaps Kleist’s greatest technical achievement, in speech after speech, scene after scene, is, precisely, the astonishing consistency of the équivoque, a sustained ambivalence of language which articulates the indeterminate character of desire; neither Penthesilea nor Achilles nor we ourselves can ascertain exactly what is at stake in their speech. Lardreau’s post-Lacanian terms help us fully understand this, Kleist’s own particular form of post-Kantian triumph. The key scene, here, is XV, where the virtuoso dramatist plays a variation on his theme: Penthesilea and Achilles edge towards a condition that begins to look like intimacy, only to be ripped apart again by an abrupt return of will to power. Certainly, Kleist underscores the priority of the masculine drive as foundational, both in having Penthesilea recount Amazon history, notably the violation perpetrated by Vexoris and his Ethiopian warriors, and in having the break in Scene XV depend above all on a resurgence of Achilles’s will to domination: True, through the power of love, I am yours, Eternally must bear these bonds, and yet By the fortunes of war, you are mine. (XV, 2244–6; Kleist 1992a: 134)

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But that changes nothing, merely dictating that, after a wistful flirtation with what Phillips nicely calls the old ‘dogmatism of the immediate’ (2007: 13), there will necessarily be a resumption of open warfare. To suggest that, like Lardreau, Kleist extrapolates from the sexual relation to relationship tout court would be too glib. But in Penthesilea, sexual warfare is nonetheless both a figure for and inextricably bound up in the vérité d’immondice, a world given over to the death-drive. Hence the power of the opening evocations of the battlefield as a great swirl of savage lines of force, as though it were possible to read the motions of haplessly displaced desire in the shifting dispositions of the armies themselves. Phillips asserts that Kleist’s works ‘flicker with haecceities, singularities and contingencies’, that Kleist ‘says the contingency that philosophy cannot say’ (Phillips 2007: 14, 58). But this makes the play postmodern-academic, and strips it of the extraordinary power of Kleistian angst. Phillips thinks Kleist’s war machine is Deleuzean, when Kleist himself had plenty of first-hand experience of the actual, historical, first great modern war machine, Frederick the Great’s bequest to his people, the Prussian army. Kleist also had first-hand experience of the consequences of the Napoleonic conquests: ‘Destroyed fields, trampled vineyards, whole villages in ashes, fortresses, that had appeared invincible, crashed into the Rhine’.49 He condensed this experience and injected it straight into Penthesilea. On the battlefield, desire expresses itself as force pursuing an imaginary end, only to smash into another force, reimagine its end, and so on. ‘Who obtains victory as he wished to?’, asks Diomedes (IV, 546; Kleist 1992a: 36). The displacement of desire evident from the outset at all levels of Penthesilea repeatedly begs the same question. The relation between desire and language as Lardreau conceives of it is everywhere at stake in Penthesilea. Andreas Gailus has addressed this issue in Kleist, rightly beginning with ‘Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden’ (‘On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in Speech’, Kleist 1952: 2.321–7). For Gailus’s Kleist, the French Revolution unleashes a force apparently exterior to language but which motivates and works upon it. This produces a new and indeed revolutionary subjectivity in which the integrity of language is threatened and the subject ‘is divided between sense and force’, thus becoming futureoriented, since the ‘force’ is concerned with change. Kleist’s essay ‘takes aim at the progressivist model of history that dominates late eighteenthcentury German thought’. For according to this model, what is new is always incorporated into an already articulated narrative. But Kleist insists that, to the contrary, articulation itself generates the new, and identifies with the French Revolution as the ‘historical manifestation’ of

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both ‘the fundamental mechanism of political, conceptual and aesthetic innovation’, and a new subject given over to ‘the agonistic play of language and desire’ (Gailus 2006: xiv, 11). But powerfully though certain forces released by the French Revolution sweep through his work, Kleist’s actual attitudes to the Revolution itself were almost always at best ambivalent. For Gailus, the key figure in ‘Allmähliche Verfertigung’ is Mirabeau, in whom Kleist captures ‘the decisive discursive shift of the French revolution’ and promotes the new post-revolutionary form of political representation, in contrast to La Fontaine’s fable, which represents a conservative logic of sacrifice (Gailus 2006: 6, 11). But nothing in the essay tells us to choose Mirabeau over La Fontaine. Both appear merely as separate anecdotal examples in an unfolding series instancing the ‘dark notion’ that prods the intellect into unexpected language, as with those people who, silent and awkward at a social gathering, ‘suddenly, with a convulsive movement, flare up, grasp at language, and bring something incomprehensible into the world’. It is this abrupt flaring into language and its concomitant ‘knowledge’ to which Kleist is referring when he asserts that ‘it is not we who know; it is first and foremost a certain condition of ours, that knows’. Desire flares in language when, indifferently, ‘a fresh source of stupendous ideas’ suddenly opens up for Mirabeau or La Fontaine’s Fox abruptly happens upon his final felicitous thought. The ‘flaring’ functions as an electrical discharge, intermittently: after having ‘discharged himself’, Mirabeau becomes ‘neutral’ once again, like one of the marionettes in Kleist’s best-known essay (Kleist 1952: 2.323–6). In ‘Allmähliche Verfertigung’, the play of language and desire always takes place in a social context, and language is always closely related to offence and defence, antagonism, violence. Not surprisingly, the essay is scattered with military images. In Penthesilea, Kleist takes a similar conjunction of affects and effects and casts it as wholesale tragedy on the grandest of scales. Here, too, desire alternately flares into and escapes from language: hence the characters’ and especially Penthesilea’s bafflement by their own speech: ‘What am I saying?’, Penthesilea repeatedly asks (V, 644, 854; Kleist 1992a: 43, 51). No one in the play knows properly what they are saying or how to say it, and this is not so much a function of war as its intrinsic, even determining condition, in that any articulation of the logic of war is beyond the combatants. Odysseus declares this at the very start of the play: On these fields, you see The Greek and Amazonian armies

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Fighting with each other like two maddened wolves: By Jupiter! When they don’t know why? (I, 3–6; Kleist 1992a: 9)

Language is helpless: ‘You won’t flee, go?’ says Prothoe, amazed at Penthesilea’s deafness to her persuasions but promptly admitting that ‘every bosom that feels, is an enigma’ (IX, 1270–86; Kleist 1992a: 75–6). Language produces the reverse of what it seemed to intend: ‘These words, “Be calm!” now suddenly whip me up’, says Penthesilea, ‘as wind the open waters of the world’, XIV, 1589–90; Kleist 1992a: 100). But it is exactly because of this that language leaps into glorious extravagance, fleetingly getting close to but never quite getting desire. Desire intrudes into language but is not expressed by it, makes self-coincidence in language impossible. It seizes the subject and its language unbeknownst to it, shocking and astonishing it along the way: By Diana, it was just a slip of the tongue, For I am not master of my own rash mouth; And yet, I tell you clearly what I meant . . . (XXIV, 2986; Kleist 1992a: 137)

It is precisely because language has these features that the speaking subject cannot exclude the possibility of violence, since it can never be in possession of itself or its desire, can never wholly know what it is saying at the time of saying. Language cannot conceivably heal breaches, but seems only to produce and widen them. Feminist readings of Penthesilea abound, as do, say, anti-racist readings of Die Verlobung in St Domingo. The trouble is that it is not hard also to show masculinism in the first and racial bias in the second.50 The same goes with Catholicism and anti-Catholicism or Protestantism and anti-Protestantism elsewhere in Kleist. To attribute positions of this kind to Kleist’s works, or even a concern with such positionality, is comprehensively to mistake their mode. If Kleist had a horror of anything, it was cosy pieties: his discourse everywhere works to unhinge them, dramatically collapsing the comfortable distance on which they depend. He immerses us, instead, peremptorily, from the start, in the turbulent psychic logic of domination and resistance and the hectic, crazy violence it ceaselessly generates. He specifies very carefully where the violence originates (the Father, the Law, Lardreau’s Master), but this can make no difference to what grips him, which is the simultaneous groundlessness and unstoppability of the process itself. Here he altogether shares Lardreau and Lacan’s refusal of any illusion of a place decisively transcending the world as mayhem. Penthesilea fits in remarkably well with Lardreau’s thought. Firstly,

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it is an instance of what is, in both Lardreau and Kleist, a perverse (and bleak) version of transcendental idealism. The constitutive ambivalence of surfaces is what we get. The ‘thing’ is no longer there; we do not know what we are contemplating, nor does Penthesilea as she beholds herself, nor do others as they behold her. The play is irreducibly cryptic or enigmatic. Secondly, Penthesilea refuses to take the direction of the Transcendental Deduction, in that, in working with ambivalence, it simply brackets off ‘natural causality’, leaves causality as an open question. Thirdly, it precisely inhabits Lardreau’s border between constitution and unsayability. The characters are much concerned, even obsessed with how they and others say the world into being: And if your raptures exceed all limits, It goads me into uttering the very words That will abruptly clip your wings. (XIV, 1668–70; Kleist 1992a: 104)

Thus Prothoe to Penthesilea: it is styles of constitution that are at stake, of which we are made conscious. But Kleist’s creatures equally keep on returning to what they cannot say, seem unable to say, because of the nature of speech, but also the very fact of having spoken. The doubleness in question is intrinsic to most of Kleist’s work. At almost every level of his texts, Kleist is acutely aware of contingency, writing arbitrariness and transience into the figure, having them haunt it. In Lacan’s terms, he writes the ‘suppositional base’ of the system into the system itself. Kleist is committed to a negative aesthetics in which one constantly threatens to divide into two and truths can only ‘half-say’ themselves. Penthesilea is, ungainsayably, a paradigm of this. But to what end? Lardreau is interested above all in the possibility of a split mimetic world in which, intermittently, nature as Spirit insists within representation. The ontic question, ‘ “Why this, and not something else?” ’ (LV: 314), insists within this insistence. We may grasp this in its largest implications with reference again to still life and ‘coding’. There is a paradoxical bond between the constraint involved in the ‘coding’ of still life and its intense concern with an extreme form of mutability, evanescence or precariousness. So, too, Penthesilea is very heavily ‘coded’ in being saturated in tragic tradition. Yet Kleistian tragedy is also arrestingly unlike the tradition, above all, perhaps, in including no conception of fate; or rather, if the characters are subject to fate, it is because of ambivalence itself, a feigned necessity. If necessity in Kleist is feigned, it is because a trace of the Real will insist within any given order of semblance. The Real is beyond our reach, not thinkable, spun

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off by and from language, which catches it up only to spin it off again. This describes both the process by which Penthesilea unfolds and that whereby orders of semblance incessantly turn phantasmal. Thus, to Lardreau’s ontic question, Kleist answers, ‘For no absolute and final reason; and very probably no good one either’. Here Kleist promotes a logic of the moment of Spirit, and there are other respects in which he does so too. The most obvious is the great, fiery outbreak of Michael Kohlhaas’s will to justice, and his subsequent readiness to pursue it even at the cost of his own derangement and destruction, ‘for the sense of justice outweighs all else’, to quote the maxim for Die Familie Schroffenstein.51 The ‘deep feeling for justice [Recht]’52 looms very large in Kleist’s work, as does bewilderment at its rarity. The relevant ethics, again, is one of ‘revolt for twopence’, a revolt without end or goal, corresponding to no teleology, for a bagatelle. The bagatelle consists of Kohlhaas’s two black horses, which he wants returned in their original state. Kleist’s extraordinary achievement is to make us acutely aware of the disproportion between the cause of the rebellion and its trajectory, whilst also sweeping us up headlong in and keeping us inside it. The subhumanity of the Junker Wenzel von Tronka, his cronies and henchmen, the harshness, inflexibility and venality of law and power in Brandenburg and Saxony, the wanton maltreatment of Kohlhaas’s man Herse, Kohlhaas’s wife’s vain efforts on his behalf, her sufferings and death: these are all parts of an inexorable, steadily unfolding logic. There is no measured deliberation in the hectic early narrative, and no space for it – save in the case of Kohlhaas himself, who is a principal source of deliberation, as though he were trying above all to escape the imperative of justice, rather than hankering for revenge. So, too, Kohlhaas’s truly significant desire is not that evil should be overcome, but that he himself should not be overtaken by the logic of what Gailus calls ‘ontological despair’ (Gailus 2006: 120), or better, ontological disgust. The possible truth of ontological mediocrity is perhaps Kleist’s and indeed Lardreau’s great fear. It is thus crucial that Kohlhaas should find a means of resisting a growing conviction of the infinite mediocrity of the world. There is no reason to think that his pain at witnessing a world in such monstrous disorder (‘Schmerz, die Welt in einer so ungeheuren Unordnung zu erblicken’, Kleist 1980: 22) is misplaced or unjustified. Kleist rather leaves us in this world to the end, not least in all the political and legal complications in which the second half of the story increasingly bogs down. Thus Michael Kohlhaas does not exactly coincide with Lardreau’s concern with the will to justice as itself having invidious effects. Kohlhaas himself starts out from the worst, a categorical absence of

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justice: ‘dearest Lisbeth, I cannot remain in a Land in which no-one will protect my rights’ (Kleist 1980: 24). Kant argued that the power of spontaneity as freedom is borne out repeatedly in the unpredictability of human choices, and Kohlhaas’s initial decision seems Kantian in this respect. Gailus suggests that the irony at Kohlhaas’s expense underlines the failure or corruption of his originally Kantian impulse, as his effect on others becomes increasingly ruinous (Gailus 2006: 120). But why suppose that the story shows any particular concern for the good burghers of Wittenberg? Why not assume that they are just getting their come-uppance, as Kohlhaas also does? Yet Michael Kohlhaas does develop in striking ways. The extraordinary moment of Lisbeth’s death provides an early example: ‘ “May God never forgive me, as I forgive the Junker!” ’, says Kohlhaas (Kleist 1980: 27). This, spoken of a man that Kohlhaas is about to reduce to a trembling, terror-stricken wretch, may seem unconvincing. But Kohlhaas’s sublime rage is not personal but ontological: the world is out of joint and, even before he sets out on his war against it, he knows that ontological mediocrity will allow him no claim to innocence. Nonetheless, beginning with Luther’s Plakat, the story quite quickly starts to produce a series of objections or resistances to Kohlhaas, refusals to entertain his terms. Significantly, in Luther, for the first time, a character with a moral authority equal to Kohlhaas’s cuts right across him. Not only is Kohlhaas impious, says Luther; his ontology is wrong: ‘ “Dein Odem ist Pest und deine Nähe Verderben!” ’ (‘ “Your breath is plague and your proximity ruin!” ’, Kleist 1980: 39). It is Kohlhaas who is plague-ridden, not the world, Kohlhaas who spreads plague. Luther identifies a key flaw in Kohlhaas’s moral discourse. He talks in universals: he has come, he claims, as ‘a viceroy of Archangel Michael’, to administer punishment with ‘fire and sword’ to a world sunk in ‘malice’ (Kleist 1980: 36). But in the Kantian terms Lardreau foregrounds, Kohlhaas does not satisfy the founding condition of rationality, non-contradiction. This is the case, not so much in that justice is Kohlhaas’s imperative but injustice his maxim, as that it is irrational for him both to declare justice to be his imperative and, at the same time, to announce himself as ‘ejected’ from the ‘community of the State’ whose justice has ‘failed’ him (Kleist 1980: 39). This is why Luther can crow that Kohlhaas is mad. As Lardreau’s understanding of the non-universalizable judgement would suggest, Kohlhaas is finally not an apostle of universal justice, but of universal disintegration and destruction. Yet Kohlhaas capitulates to Luther with astounding promptitude. Indeed, the Plakat itself is enough to ‘disarm’ him before he confronts Luther (Kleist 1980: 38). Even at the start of the interview, he cautions

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Luther against betraying him, not by threatening to shoot him, but by threatening to shoot himself. By the end of it, he is asking nothing more for himself than to have his two black horses returned in their original state. This may amount to a legal settlement of his claim, but is hopelessly disproportionate to the sum total of the wrongs done to him. The trouble is that there are no loopholes in ontological disgust, and Kohlhaas has no interest in self-exemption. Thus he starts to make unpredictable choices that are very different in kind to those he initially made. The story increasingly suggests that we are returning to a version of the legalism on which Kohlhaas’s case originally foundered that may be marginally more ‘humane’ and ‘concerned’, but is nonetheless capable only of ‘a show of justice’ (Kleist 1980: 61). However, Kohlhaas’s response is one of growing quiescence or passivity. As his case bogs down in complication, so he himself settles for that, whilst also holding the complications at a distance. Luther is wrong about Kohlhaas, in that Kohlhaas recognizes as Luther cannot that implacable righteousness can indeed be and continue to be righteous and yet also become unrighteous, thereby requiring expiation; that only an ascetic logic of justice and expiation together can form an adequate response to ontological disgust. This logic does not mean retreating from the first imperative, justice, or apologizing for pursuing its consequences. But Kohlhaas comes profoundly to understand that obedience to the imperative of justice does not hoist one clear of complicity. He is, in truth, dupe and non-dupe together. Hence the importance of the later Kohlhaas’s indifference and acts of self-abnegation. Critics sometimes suggest that Kleist remains attached to a residue of Enlightenment humanism,53 or that his work exhibits a kind of beleaguered or cornered Kantianism, Kantianism against the odds. This is, certainly, what my reading of him through Lardreau suggests. Michael Kohlhaas does not begin with a Kantianism that Kohlhaas subsequently betrays, but rather with a familiar and conventional Kantianism which then cedes to another, less familiar kind, a minimal or negative Kantianism that is concerned less with action than holding back from it. If, as Lardreau says, the key Kantian assertion is that desire does not invariably have immediate and ungainsayable authority over all our intentions, because the intellect can also pose the question of the reality of the world immediately known to desire, this is what both incites Kohlhaas’s initial decision and motivates his later renunciations. Certainly, Kleist grasps the importance of the Kantian intermittency that Lardreau emphasizes, the break with ‘the agreeableness of life’ and desire’s concerns within it. But he grasps it twice over, in two separate but related functions, in which the will to justice fulfils

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itself only in an afterthought, by also directing itself inward and becoming self-reflexive. In that sense, it is dependent on the initial gesture of revolt, even whilst it delimits its claim. But there is a starker instance of a minimal Kantianism in Kleist, though asserting as much may sound perverse in Lardreau’s manner: the great Robert Guiskard. The immediate problem here is that Robert Guiskard is a fragment; furthermore that, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, by Friedrich Schlegel and the Athenaeum’s criteria, it is not a fragment that would qualify as a Romantic work of art, since it was not composed as such, merely left unfinished.54 However, Marjorie Levinson helpfully observes that, by contrast, in England, Romantic fragments (like ‘Kubla Khan’) were precisely incomplete leavings (Levinson 1986: 10). Kleist laboured extremely intensively on Robert Guiskard; it was a uniquely recalcitrant fragment, one altogether insistent on remaining so. In effect, it appears to have repeatedly declared its own completeness – as Maass says, ‘may we not conclude that this work did not want or need to be concluded’? (1983 [1957]: 164) – even if, for a long while, Kleist refused to accept that it was indeed complete. For there is a perfection to the radical imperfection of Robert Guiskard, its refusal to go anywhere, its hanging back from any development. In line with both ontological disgust and Kleist’s own intermittently suicidal temperament, Robert Guiskard says that it does not want to be, or does not want to be very much.55 It goes no further than a situation: a plague-stricken people camped outside an imperial city, Constantinople, subject to the will of an intransigent leader intent on conquest but who they are desperate to have take them home; his kindly smiling daughter, capable both of assuaging the people and pleading his cause; an abrasive son, contemptuous of the mob; an emollient nephew who sees (or plays) both sides; and finally, the great Norman Duke himself, Robert Guiskard, emerging from his tent, fighting with his own and others’ fears that he himself is now plague-sick; and, beyond them all, the cries of the abandoned, echoing Aus ferner Öde . . . Wo schauerliches Raubgeflügel flattert, Und den Gewolken gleich, den Tag verfinsternd, Auf die Hülf losen kämpfend niederrauscht! From the distant waste . . . Where ghastly birds of prey with flapping wings, Like clouds, darkening the day Swoop quarrelling down upon the helpless. (1.23–6; Kleist 2000: 10)

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Thomas Mann wrote that Robert Guiskard is ‘so superb’ that ‘it is impossible to imagine its continuation’ (1960: 10). Nothing remains possible save further corrosion, the dark spread of contagion. The plague was an important figure for Kleist: see for example Michael Kohlhaas, Der Findling and, above all, the young black woman in Die Verlobung in St Domingo with yellow fever who knowingly infects her former white master, then coldly and ferociously hisses, ‘ “Eine Pestkranke, die den Tod in der Brust trägt, hast du gekußt, geh und gib das gelbe Fieber allen denen, die dir gleichen!” ’ (Kleist 1980: 146; ‘ “You have kissed a plague victim with death in her heart; now go and give the yellow fever to all your like!” ’); by whom she just means whites. Disaster is not always simply disastrous: in Michael Kohlhaas and Das Erdbeben in Chili, for example, it and justice are interinvolved. Nonetheless, plague, disease running rampant, indifferent to social but, above all, moral distinction, passed on impartially, interminably and haplessly from one community to another, unbeknownst to them, when it is seemingly dormant: this is the great Kleistian figure. Robert Guiskard can proceed no further with the plague; Kleist refuses to coincide with an ontological disgust that verges on terror. Mann points out that the play ‘was to be proof that [the author], although déclassé, was worthy to bear the [noble] name of Kleist’.56 Somewhere lodged in Robert Guiskard, however, lies the obscure recognition, not only that noble names and pestilence may belong together, but that nobility can hold no meaning unless one has the means of setting a certain limit to ignominy. Here Kleist and Lardreau exactly coincide. Kleist set a limit to ignominy partly by refusing to compromise with it. If, for Lardreau, the work of art constitutes a ‘moment of Spirit’ in relation to the moral defeat of an epoch, Kleist is readily apprehensible in such terms, virtually the classic instance of them. The ‘pernicious age’ in which he lived spelt only inanition:57 his experience of Bonapartism, the Prussian army (a ‘lebendiges Monument der Tyrannei’, a living monument to tyranny, given over to immoral time-wasting),58 the sciences and religions (instruments of ‘servitude’; Nietzsche felicitously noted that Kleist had ‘no talent’ for religion);59 the life of the salons (where his stutter and oddities of manner let him down); of Parisian worldliness; of publishing, and journalism; the standard forms of employment in turnof-the-century Prussia (government posts, the bureaucracies, finance, business and trade, the universities), all of which Kleist rejected; the complacency and often philistinism of Prussian readerships and audiences, timidly clinging to the tenets of Weimar classicism: he turned away from all of this, ‘den ganzen Bettel der großen Welt’ (‘the whole trumpery of the great world’).60 It merely confirmed his youthful fear

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that ‘ich hier keinen Platz finden kann’, that he could find no place for himself on earth.61 He could only wish to turn the world inside out, to write works that would interrupt its business here and there. Not surprisingly, he was mocked, he thought, ‘wie man den Kolomb auslachte, weil er Ostindien in Westen suchte’ (‘as they laughed at Columbus for seeking the East Indies in the West’).62 But Kleist does not write directly about his era, rather plunging into the past. This follows on logically from ‘the Kant crisis’. Kleist assumes a world of semblance but drastically brackets it off. He is the utter obverse of a ‘presentist’. If one tries to think the present, there is nothing to think about (Flaubert said more or less the same): one thinks the past, writes the past, including the mythological past, but in a radically aporetic mode, exposing its ‘suppositional base’; only thus is it possible to think the present, in the context of a future, as what is not with us, what we do not have to bear with forever. Kleist thought that he was fated ‘to live in a place where I am not, and always in a time that is past and gone or not yet come’.63 He was well aware of the absurdity of his position: ‘It is my foolishly eccentric nature’, he wrote to Heinrich Lohse, ‘that it can gratify itself, not with what is, but only with what is not’.64 Kleist’s is a great early poetry of intermittency. It is definitive for the specific modernity that is still ours today. At one pole stands the rare event of Reason, or Lacan’s possible disturbance of the world, which interrupts the ‘agreeableness of life’ and has difficult consequences (Kohlhaas’s rebellion). At the other stands the fearful spectre of the vérité d’immondice (Penthesilea), ontological mediocrity or the remainder (Robert Guiskard), l’intolérable pur (both plays). This is the Kleistian version of alternance or syncopation and is as rigorously minimalist as Lardreau or Lacan’s. Kleist is indeed Lardreau’s moralist at sea in history. But he develops his moral project in a sphere, literature, with which Lardreau does not actually associate it – there is no concept in Lardreau of the work of art as an articulation of a negative morality. Here literature supplements philosophy and amplifies and enriches the philosophical case. The work of art is not only a ‘moment of Spirit’ in itself, but can testify to the occasional and unpredictable arrival of ‘moments of Spirit’, to breaks with the mediocrity of Being, ‘link[s] in the chain of human inventions’.65 Kleist was very certainly not a progressivist, however, as the fragment Betrachtungen über den Weltlauf makes clear, and any account of the ‘chain of human inventions’ would be a history of interruptions of Being. We may now turn to the philosopher who, of our five, comes closest to giving us a material description of at least certain features of that history.

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NOTES 1. Quoted Anon (2008). 2. Châtelet refused to write a full preface, but sent Lardreau a letter instead, leaving it to him as to whether it were published. 3. Châtelet, lettre-pref., SO: 7–12, especially at 9; SO: 124. Cf. SO: 103–5. 4. See Lardreau (1981), especially at 111–15, on abandoning ‘false continuities’ in historical thought and substituting a concept of historical epochs as Corbin’s ‘imaginal worlds’. 5. Châtelet, lettre-pref., SO: 10–11. 6. Lardreau’s mischief was presumably the reason for the refusal of a preface proper. 7. The word is a compression of ‘Sacré nom de Dieu’, but also suggests ‘create’, ‘name’, ‘first name’, ‘cretin’. For more details, see Dieguez and Bogousslavsky (2007). 8. As is clear from LV: 193–205. 9. See for instance LeM: 23–4. 10. On primordial lack as the condition of philosophy, see Lardreau (1993a), especially at 32–3. 11. For Lacan on the faille, see Lacan (1998): 8. 12. Of which the supreme instance is money, according to the seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. See Lacan (1966): 37. 13. I get the form of my heading from Jambet’s compelling account of ‘SadoLockeanism’ (in ‘Sade le semblant’, LA: 201–32). 14. Badiou, thinks of the later Lacan, contra his critics, as supremely important. See PT: 13. 15. According to a conversation with the author. 16. I quote Fink’s translation in the footnote not the text, as being more accurate, if clumsier. 17. In that Lacan suggests that his must not be the Name of the Father, but that any concept of overcoming the Lacanian orientation also risks returning to the Oedipus. I am grateful to Richard Klein for this refinement. 18. Cf. Lacan (2005): 65: ‘it appears that the real has foundation insofar as it has no sense, excludes sense; or, more exactly, that it forms a deposit in that it is excluded’. 19. Most notably in Seminar XX. 20. There are passages in Lacan that clearly justify this. See for example (1998): 126–7. 21. The concept of determination at stake here and below should be set in the context of Lardreau’s (partly Lacanian) critique of Marxist models of determination. See DI: 26–33. 22. Cf. a rather similar view and the same wordplay in Proust (1989): 111; (1994a): 35–7. 23. See for instance Žižek (2008b [1991]): lxxxiii; but his emphasis on sublimation and catachresis is not (or not exactly) mine. 24. This is clearly the Lacan from whom Badiou derives most. 25. I recycle the phrase, important for me, from Critchley (1997). 26. Hence the title of La Véracité 2.2, ‘Renforcer le Kantisme en l’épurant’.

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27. Specifically with reference to Lardreau’s version of the categorical imperative. See Hallward (2003): 88. 28 The schema makes it possible to subsume ‘the appearances [in experience] under the category’, Kant (2007 [1787]): 181. 29. Rightly: as postulates of practical reason, God and immortality become second-order concepts, and the Kantian critique of narcissism or philautia by implication undercuts them. 30. Lardreau also provides other critiques of Kant, restituting the emphasis on the pathological he elsewhere criticizes in Kant in an argument for a ‘pathological duty’ (LV: 172–86); offering a moral valuation of pity recalling the very sentimental, eighteenth-century ethics that Kant sought to leave behind (LV: 186, 190); insisting on a reason of the senses alongside the reason that intervenes in sense-experience (LV: 172–92); and pleading for Epicurus as moralist in the teeth of Kant’s own anti-Epicureanism (LV: 193–205, especially 202–5). Here a ‘purified Kant’ seems inseparable from anti-Kantianism; but the provocative reversals are characteristic of Lardreau. 31. See also for example Dicker (2004): 46–8, and his general account of criticisms of transcendental idealism, 43–8. 32. Notably and admirably in FP. Kant’s Anglo-American commentators frequently minimize the audacity of the speculative or imaginative leap implied in transcendental idealism. But the Ding an sich is inaccessible because the forms of knowledge are imaginable as infinite; as Lacan puts it, any historically specific conception of the universe always has a narrow base (1976): 31. 33. Though Lacan thought his rigour resembled the psychotic’s. See Lacan (1976): 9. 34. Even if only in the form of my personal happiness, says Lardreau. This is the link between his minimal Kantianism and his Epicureanism. 35. Lardreau no doubt partly gets this emphasis from Lacan. See Lacan (1999 [1986]): 76–8; Kant (1997b [1785]): 7–8. See also Lacan (1999 [1986]): 72–3, 108–9, 188–9. 36. This is truer of Lardreau’s work on Kant than the late essay quoted here, which asserts that ‘philosophy has nothing to say about Great Politics as such’ and does not even enquire into its failure, thus threatening a collapse even of Lardreau’s minimal Kantianism (Lardreau 2003: 93). 37. On ‘the law of maximum-minimum’ at the heart of all materialisms, see for example VM: 52. 38. Though we should recall Lacan on Newton and ‘historical emergence’ (2005): 123. 39. Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 22 March 1801; Kleist (1996): 506. 40. Letters to Christian Ernst Martini, 19 March 1799; Ulrike von Kleist, May 1799; and Wilhelmine von Zenge, 15 September 1800 and 11 January 1801; Kleist (1996): 48, 54, 58, 62, 298, 445. 41. Letter to Ulrike von Kleist, 5 February 1801; Kleist (1996): 490. 42. Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 22 March 1801; Kleist (1996): 509. 43. For an introductory account of the relationship, see Grandin (1987). 44. Letter to Auguste Helene von Massow, 13–18 March 1793; Kleist (1996): 12. 45. Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 21 July 1801; Kleist (1999): 64. 46. Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 10 October 1801; Kleist (1999): 115. 47. Letter to Marie von Kleist, June 1807; Kleist (1999): 504.

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48. Letter to Luise von Zenge, 16 August 1801; Kleist (1999): 100. 49. Letter to Alphonsine von Werdeck, 28–9 July 1801; Kleist (1999): 74. 50. Feminist, Lacanian and anti-racist readings of Kleist are increasingly varied and numerous. A few examples: feminist: Wolf (1987), Jacobs (1989); Lacanian-feminist: Gallas (1986), Kublitz-Kramer (1999; my Lardreauian and late-Lacanian reading turns in a different direction to theirs). For an anti-racist Kleist, see for example Gilman (1975). For a considerably more sceptical account of the same issues, see Uerlings (1997). 51. Quoted Maass (1983 [1957]): 108. 52. Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 31 January 1801; Kleist (1996): 468. 53. See for example Mehigan (2003), who argues that Kleist read Kant properly but responded most vividly to the Humean scepticism that Kant precisely wished to repudiate, tested Kant’s Enlightenment Reason against Hume and became a kind of inspired Humean. But the argument minimizes the ungainsayable residue of Kantian morality in Kleist. See also Stephens (1994): 99 and passim for a Kleist left mutely appealing to the remnants of the very Enlightenment humanism he destroys. 54. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1988 [1978]): 41. The terms of the discussion make the distinction exactly applicable to Robert Guiskard. 55. Cf. Huff (2009) on the strange relations between activity and passivity in Kleist’s thought and works, and his debt to Adam Müller. 56. Mann himself does not take Kleist’s ambition seriously: for all ‘the deeds of the majors and generals von Kleist’, without the writer, ‘the name of Kleist would be nothing’, Mann (1960): 10. 57. Letter to Ulrike von Kleist, August (?) 1808; Kleist (1952): 2.849. 58. Letter to Christian Ernst Martini, 19 March 1799; Kleist (1996): 42. 59. Both quoted Maass (1983 [1957]): 17, 221. 60. Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 13 November 1800; Kleist (1996): 367. 61. Letter to Ulrike von Kleist, 25 November 1800; Kleist (1996): 415. 62. Letter to Ulrike von Kleist, 12 November 1799; Kleist (1996): 89. 63. Letter to Alphonsine von Werdeck, 28–9 July 1801; Kleist (1999): 78. 64. Letter to Heinrich Lohse, 23–9 December 1801; Kleist (1999): 160. 65. Quoted Maass (1983 [1957]): 89.

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5. Intermittency and Melancholy: Jacques Rancière

EGALITARIAN AND DEMOCRATIC EVENTS In 1664, the impoverished Dutch peasant and practising shoemaker Dirk Rembrantsz leaves his village to go and consult Descartes. Rembrantsz’s knowledge of mathematics is extraordinary, and Descartes has a reputation for being easily approachable. The philosopher’s attendants take the shoemaker for an importunate beggar, and brusquely rebuff him. But Rembrantsz remains undeterred. He returns three months later, in the same poor suit that he wore the first time. The attendants inform Descartes of the beggar’s persistence. The philosopher is hard at work in his study, and too preoccupied to see the shoemaker, but obligingly tells the attendants to offer him money. However, poverty has not stripped Rembrantsz of his dignity. He refuses Descartes’s charity, and leaves. A few months later, however, he comes back yet again. Descartes finally grants him an audience. He quickly recognizes Rembrantsz’s competence and merit, and agrees to teach him. From that point onwards, Rembrantsz pays frequent visits, going on to become one of the foremost astronomers of the century. The story is taken from Adrien Baillet’s Vie de Monsieur Descartes (1691), and provides the epigraph to Rancière’s Le Philosophe et ses pauvres. As epigraph, however, its relation to the volume it precedes is curiously oblique if not ironical. For Le Philosophe et ses pauvres is preoccupied with a movement that is the reverse of the progress recounted by Baillet. ‘Despite the lowliness of Rembrantsz’s estate’, says Baillet, ‘M. Descartes did not regard him as beneath those of the first rank’ (PP: xxiii). The philosopher assures the shoemaker that he will make himself continuously available to him. By contrast, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres as a whole is repeatedly concerned with the denial, surrender or loss of the common ground that Descartes and Rembrantsz share. From 202

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Plato to Marx, Sartre, Bourdieu and modern sociology, Rancière shows that the philosophical tradition has everywhere refused or turned away from the Cartesian gesture. Le Philosophe et ses pauvres is about how philosophy defines itself ‘against its other, excluding those who work with their hands from the right to think’ (PP: 203). Rancière, then, is concerned to interrogate the distance the philosopher sets between himself and ‘his poor’. This interrogation expresses a principled mistrust of the classical philosophical space in itself. Whatever the philosopher’s identification with the disempowered and dispossessed, whatever his claim, even, to represent their interests, he has always been reluctant to grant them his own power, to put them in possession of his will to knowledge, to identify their interests with his own. As Peter Hallward has suggested (2005a), Rancière’s refusal of this self-distancing is a repudiation of the position of philosophical mastery. It is crucial to his immersion in empirical history, which is in turn crucial to his thought of intermittency. Rancière has been a dedicated researcher in working-class archives, and his intimate knowledge of the labours and sufferings of the historical worker in some degree serves as admonition against any occupation of the philosophical space itself. In his accounts of Marx and of Sartre, Rancière has a story to tell. This story hinges on a particular history internal to the philosophical project in question. Once again, it is a tale of the philosopher’s selfseparation from the shoemaker. The decisive shift in Marx’s thought is that in favour of the philosopher who is no longer a philosopher, the ideal figure of the scientist. The scientific subject finds his object in the worker who is no longer a worker, the proletarian.1 The work of the proletarian is no longer work; or rather, it is one kind of work, producing the revolution. Marx’s proletarian is not a worker, says Rancière. He is rather the negation of the worker. This is precisely reflected in the Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France: the worker himself, that is, the worker who is not yet a proletarian, is lumpen. In later Marx, as distinguished from the proletariat, the unredeemed and unregenerate vulgus, ‘the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass’, have become the lumpenproletariat (Marx 1984 [1852]: 65). Rancière makes great play with Marx’s ferocious antipathy to these ‘equivocal fauna’ (PP: 96). The brute, recidivist, troglodytic French peasantry of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France is a Marxian hallucination.2 Its roots are not in any concrete historical research, nor ‘in any sort of economic, sociological or political analysis’. They lie rather in an ancient philosophical trope, ‘the motley crowd of the Platonic polloi’ (PP: 98).

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Thus, in later Marx, ‘the barrier of the orders’ forms itself all over again within the materialist ‘ “reversal” ’ (PP: 80). Philosophers philosophize. Shoemakers make shoes. Equally, says Rancière, for Sartre, the formation of the ‘group-in-fusion’ is not the result of any collective spontaneity. It takes place because Louis XVI has himself constituted the group that will oppose him in ‘the negative order of the massacre’. The group emerges to its own astonishment, for it is an instance of the Sartrean version of Hegel’s ‘negation of a negation’:3 ‘caught in . . . the king’s praxis, the Parisian gathering is surprised to find itself existing as a group’. Thus the revolution ‘is conceivable only as the negation of a counterrevolution’. The group is threatened once the look of the king is withdrawn. But this very logic itself conceals another. For Sartre puts up ‘a barrier [the barrier of the orders] to stop the expansions of ordinary technique and freedom’ (PP: 156). In the interests of ‘the only true freedom, that of the philosopher’, he rejects the ‘uncertain light of demi-knowledges and demi-cultures’. These belong to ‘the disoriented space of pathways and dead ends’ frequented by those for whom a dream of self-emancipation is still alive, in whom something of Rembrantsz’s fire still flickers (PP: 147). The derision to which Sartre subjects the Autodidact in La Nausée is just one obvious example of the Sartrean gesture of rejection. Here again, for Sartre as for Plato, and in contradistinction to the Descartes who goes to meet Rembrantsz, the ‘free choice’ of souls is in fact only the philosopher’s freedom. Once again, the philosopher locks the door on the shoemaker. But if Rancière establishes himself at a distance from Marx and Sartre, he also profoundly coincides with them. Even as it separates itself from the two philosophers, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres also confirms their historical thought and extends a principle which underlies it. For Rancière, after the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx gives up trying ‘to find the force of Hegelian negativity in labour’. He gives up on the Reason in history. He turns rather to a thought of the sudden leap or decisive historical transformation, the break in two. On the one hand, there is ‘the labour of generations, on the other, the revolutionary justice that “gets rid of” labour, a justice executed by a class that is no longer a class’ (PP: 79–80). The corollary of this is that Marxist science itself occupies a ‘waiting time’, the time that separates ‘moments of revolutionary irruption’ (PP: 126). So, too, in the case of Sartre, Rancière argues that, particularly in the later part of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, a grim Sartrean sense of irony can get no further than playing off the contingent and occasional flarings of an active principle against a ‘tonality of gray on gray’. This is the tonality appropriate to the dominance of the desert tracts of series,

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as in the case of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which is no more than a ‘bastard compromise’ between the ‘group-in-fusion’ and ‘passive seriality’ (PP: 151–2). In fact, Rancière reads Marx and Sartre as philosophers of intermittency. At a certain stage of their development, they articulate a theory of political truth or reason as taking the form of a contingent and occasional break with inertia. This break is necessarily followed by a relapse. Indeed, not only does Marx and Sartre’s later work express a theory of intermittency; that theory is duplicated in Rancière’s conception of the two philosophical biographies. The direction of Marx’s biography in particular is away from the ardour and clarity of an originary philosophical break. If Rancière tells a story of Marx and Sartre, this story hinges on the turn towards intermittency itself. Rancière erects his great critique of the later Marx and Sartre on the foundation of something very like their own understanding of the arrhythmic punctualities of historical time. It is precisely here that we can understand the curiously oblique relation of the epigraph from Baillet to Le Philosophe et ses pauvres as a whole. The epigraph does not exactly sum up or encapsulate a strain of thought central to the book. It rather marks a structure of value that subtends it, but does not appear within the material it discusses. What Rancière calls Rembrantsz’s ‘stubborn belief in the impossible’ may indeed contain ‘the idea of a certain Cartesianism as a philosophy of the Third Estate’ (PP: 207). As such, however, it is nonetheless quite literally held at the edge of the book itself. In effect, the encounter of Rembrantsz and Descartes represents what I shall call ‘the egalitarian moment’ in Rancière. The rest of the book, however, is not only an account of declensions from such a moment. In one respect, it follows the structure of the declension itself. One might even think of the substantial content of Le Philosophe et ses pauvres as post-epiphanic. The classic instance of the ‘egalitarian moment’ in Rancière is the events on the Aventine Hill in 503 bc as recounted by Livy. Rancière even calls this moment ‘the beginning of our history’.4 In the version he provides in La Mésentente, the Roman plebeians rebel against their lack of representation in the Senate, protesting their status as the ‘sanspart’, those without a stake, the non-stakeholders. They flee the city, camp on the Aventine Hill and declare the intention of founding their own city. Consul Menenius Agrippa serves as negotiator for the Senate, eventually reconciling the plebeians to it by telling them the famous tale of the Belly and the Limbs. For Rancière, what is chiefly involved here is not the revolt of misery against senseless power, but the symbolic order of the city. The plebeians have previously had no life within it, but now force power into dispute and dialogue. In doing so, they not

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only make it admit that it is less than absolute. They also find a voice and begin to involve themselves in the discursive life of the res publica. This life takes on new dimensions precisely as a result of their involvement. The excluded contrive, not only their own inclusion, but also the transformation of the order within which they are included. Above all, they force power into a dialogue whose terms they decide on and whose condition is therefore equality. The account of the Aventine Hill, however, does not exactly correspond to Christian Ruby’s version of Rancière’s thought as an energetically affirmative, voluntarist doctrine of frequent ‘interruption’ (Ruby 2009), nor to Todd May’s conflation of Rancière with contemporary ‘progressivisms’ (in effect, with postmodern American liberalism, May 2008), still less to efforts to close the gap between him and orthodox Marxist or Althusserian tradition.5 Indeed, the Aventine Hill points us in quite a different direction to all of them. Rancière’s story of 503 BC is characteristic in that it presents equality as an event, one that does not happen often and, in its rarity, pace Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, is incipiently melancholic.6 The judgement attached to the story hangs over Rancière’s whole presentation of ‘the egalitarian moment’: 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 than a political ethics exists that can make the existence of politics solely an object of will. (ME: 188)

The Aventine Hill is an image specifically of the rare occurrence of politics, ‘true politics’, that is, as opposed to what commonly passes for it.7 This is particularly clear in Rancière’s earlier account of it in ‘La parole sur l’Aventin’ (MI: 162–6): . . . the worst is not always certain, since, in every social order, it is possible for all individuals to be reasonable. Society will never be so, but it can none the less know the miracle of moments of reason which are those, not of a coincidence of intelligences . . . but of the reciprocal acknowledgement of reasonable wills. (MI: 162)

The principle of ‘true politics’ is equality, which is always inextricable from a concept of reason arising out of ‘la mésentente’, disagreement. A ‘mésentente’ is a disagreement over what constitutes rationality itself which means that the parties in question cannot agree on the meaning of words. Disagreement is fundamental and ineradicable. Yet those who disagree with a dominant logic are easily condemned to inexistence, muteness, inaudibility, the life of the ‘sans-part’, those without a stake.8 The events in 503 BC constitute what Françoise Proust calls

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the ‘scene common to both the “parts” and the “sans-parts” ’ (Proust 1997c: 84). As Proust says, this ‘scene’ is, in its rarity, particularly dear to Rancière. In it, the system of signification that underwrites a particular order of reason is called radically into question. Rancière calls this politics ‘in its purity’, an egalitarian politics that a local, irrecoverable, inexplicable event releases from the ‘ambiguities’ of social existence (ME: 9). Intermittency, then, would appear to define itself as a relationship between a seeming impasse and an alterity which interrupts it. This alterity is not already given, everywhere accessible, available at once, cannot be described before it appears, but happens, here and there, from time to time. Its arrival is unpredictable. There may be means of establishing connections between its occurrences, but they cannot be forecast, and no logic of hindsight can account for their taking place. The event must be understood as the rare traversal of ‘the supposedly “natural” logic of domination’ by the equality it masks, but which founds it (ME: 37). However, Rancière does not expressly make the question of intermittency central to his thought. If he is largely concerned with politics as a local and occasional event, this is a logical consequence of his materialist concern with ‘politics in its specificity’. Unlike Badiou, he treats intermittency almost exclusively as a political theme, though with subtle shadings of ‘the political’. If the principle of intermittency also has large implications for art, that is seldom because Rancière understands art as either an event or rare. In various ways, Rancière’s particular conception of intermittency is most acutely conveyed in his thought about the contemporary predicament. Immediately after his assertion that ‘politics in its specificity is rare’, he adds that ‘the manner in which a new politics might break the current round of happy consensus and humanity denied is, at the present time, neither predictable nor decidable’ (ME: 188). Rancière’s logic of intermittency stands in opposition to the conviction of plenitude, primarily in its contemporary form. Ours is the (self-deemed) age of ‘the end of political divisions, of social antagonisms and utopian projects’. It rejoices in its ‘common productive effort and free circulation’, in ‘national consensus and international competition’ (SP: 3). It is an age of plenitude in that it supposes that everything can in principle be available to everyone at their pleasure, according to ‘the adjustment of narcissistic satisfactions’ (CH: 7). It therefore chooses both to separate itself from the ‘ “archaic” spaces’ still inhabited by the ‘cripples [éclopés] of modernity, the incurable utopians’ (CH: 8), and to abandon any (‘senseless’) future promise. It replaces the drive towards such a promise with the management of the present, and utopian hopes

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with gradualism. Contemporary politics forsakes the power of the Idea, rather identifying with the buzz of things. Its space is ‘the Centre’, in which there is supposedly ‘a free development of a consensual force’ (SP: 6). The space of consensus is that of a self-pacified multiplicity in which reason ‘is supposed to flower . . . as a rationality produced by development itself’ (SP: 23). It is full, whole, and complete: that is, it is without gaps, abysses, brinks or precipices, an instance of plenitude not intermittency. Alas, certain evils continue to haunt us: but their persistence is (only) a question of time. This time, the time to which the contemporary meliorist narrative subscribes, is quite distinct from that of any revolutionary or utopian logic. It is a curious, ambivalent time. It is both a gradual time, involving small changes and minor gains, which in hope are cumulative, and a frenzied rush into the future. This double time is our dominant, our ideological time; but it is not what is all too often the time of people’s lives, the time of our ‘sad economic reality’, which is one of interruptions, breaks, halts, layings-off, closures, discontinuations (CH: 22–3). By the same token, it is a time without events (SP: 25). But the contemporary culture of consensus and plenitude together is that of a privileged enclave. At moments, Rancière can be as savage as Badiou about the duplicities that result from this – as when he denounces ‘the nihilist horror of today’s petty-bourgeois lifestyle’ (SE: 29) – and certainly no one is more alert to the philosophical consequences of ‘enclave culture’ than he. ‘Ethics’ thrives in this culture precisely because the latter is so well dug in. In ‘L’Inadmissible’, Rancière captures its spirit exactly, by way of 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. Significantly, this Rome has duly incorporated its own plebeians. Political and cultural consensus always thrives on its own modes of exclusion. Those who must be excluded constitute, precisely, the Latin proletarii, the pure alterity and superabundant, unnameable multiplicity of the ‘inadmissible’. This multiplicity must be held outside the city walls in the interests of a ‘saturated society’ (AU: 118–47). Intermittency is the very truth of proletarian life in its aleatory, erratic, insecure character, not least in an era of subcontracting, the casualization of labour and migrant workforces. The world of the proletarii is an intermittent one, now as always. Unsurprisingly, Rancière insists on a different understanding of equality to the unreal one promoted by the ‘restricted community’ of consensus. Equality is rare, ‘an exception . . . transgressive’ (SP: 88), ‘fundamental and absent, current and untimely’ (PP: 223), ‘a

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continually renewed dream repeatedly reproduced in response to the tension generated by the vain attempt to suppress it’ (SP: 88). If there is an ‘egalitarian moment’, there is also a ‘democratic moment’ (my term, again). Rancière seldom if ever attaches to the term democracy its meaning in contemporary circulation. Firstly, democracy is a matter of the clash and conflict of free and equal intelligences, as within the Greek agora. But do not we ourselves live in an era of unparalleled freedom of expression of opinion? Opinion remains what it was for Plato and inveterately has been, the doxa from which free thought must actually break in order to constitute itself as thought. In its present form, opinion takes as an indisputable given the normative limit of consensus, protecting the unassailable principle of economic growth and defending us against another onset of what it defines – speciously enough, given all the ‘new racisms and ethnic cleansings’, the ‘ “humanitarian” wars and “war on terror” ’ (CH: 8) – as the otherness of political horror. Democracy is not represented in consensus, and does not aim at it. Consensus is the death of democracy. Democracy is not about agreement, but the infinity of disagreement, has as its only telos a non-telos. Secondly, democracy can only institute itself on the basis of equality or a level ground, as in the agora; equality always precedes democracy. Democracy cannot be instituted on the basis of a founding inequality, with equality accordingly resituated or redefined, as contemporary political doxa would have it. Not surprisingly, our only historical experiences of democracy have been specific and local. If equality is rare, then democracy must be so too. As both philosopher and historian, Rancière is convinced of the intermittency of democracy. ‘The demos is intermittent’ (SP: 15). It appears in the ‘singular moment’ in which ‘the principle of necessity and economy begins to vacillate’ (SP: 79). There is only ‘democratic exceptionality’ (PP: 226). This insistence is worth stressing, because a superficial reading of some of Rancière’s most recent writings might encourage the suspicion that he has shifted towards a defence of contemporary democracy. The second chapter of Le Spectateur émancipé, for example, seems caught up, not only in a derogation of intellectuals, but in a will to rescue the people from critique at all costs, the argument at points seeming almost indistinguishable from social-democratic automatism. But if Hewlett’s worry about populist strains in the late Rancière is legitimate (Hewlett 2007: 84–115), it is finally not crucial. The important text, here, is La Haine de la démocratie. Rancière defends the principle of democracy with a passion against those who use the features from which the contemporary democratic will seems inextricable – mass ‘individualism’, unbridled neo-liberalism, rampant consumerism, mediatization, the

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destruction of education, ‘humane’ and ‘enlightened’ neo-colonialism – to call the democratic principle itself into question. However, he also wryly inserts one clause into his understanding of democracy which comprehensively subverts any identification of it with the contemporary scene. That clause involves chance, or the event. In the third book of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian supplies us with ‘a census of the [seven] titles’ that are required for citizens to occupy the position of either governor or governed (HD: 39). The seventh of these turns out to be ‘a strange object . . . a title that is not a title, and that, the Athenian tells us, is nevertheless considered to be the most just’.9 It is the title to authority of the person who has ‘the favour of heaven and fortune’. Here a democratic people of equals ‘decides the distribution of places’ in government by appealing to the god of chance (HD: 40). In other words, they draw lots. True democracy is immitigably scandalous, in that it makes all those privileged by birth, wealth, age or learning bow again before the law of chance which granted them their advantages in the first place. It categorically refuses any superior right to the property owner, allowing the anonymous ‘whoever’, the person with no competence in government nor any taste for it, the dispossessed, the undistinguished, the unqualified and marginal suddenly to leap to power at the expense of the governing classes. For one particular tendency within democracy must always be moderated. Hunger for power is what most threatens the democratic community. Power will always tend to fall into the hands of the men and women who are driven to secure it. But those ‘skilled at taking power through cunning’ are not necessarily those best equipped to use it (HD: 42). Any assumption to the contrary merely perpetuates the succession of ruling elites, without any serious disruption of the principle that elites are the true custodians of democracy. This is precisely where contemporary political culture falls short. Yet how, one might object, could our modern societies, made of so many delicately interlocking cogs, be governed by individuals chosen by drawing lots, individuals who know nothing of the science of such fragile equilibria? We have found more fitting principles and means for democracy: representation of the sovereign people by elected members; and a symbiosis between the elite, elected representatives of the people, and the elites educated in our schools about the mechanisms by which our societies function. (HD: 41–2)

But it is only very recently that democracy became associated with the idea that the will to power was a sufficient qualification for achieving it. The good democracy is that which puts into question any assumption that the governors are (naturally or otherwise) intrinsically qualified to

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rule the governed. This putting into question will necessarily serve as ‘the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body’ (HD: 45). Here Rancière’s irony becomes subtler, to the point of inscrutability. He is well aware, of course, that what he calls ‘divine chance’ has very seldom been granted any significant role in democratic government. ‘Societies are usually governed’ according to superiority of birth or wealth, with force and science lending their support. The ‘anarchic title’ of democracy is its true one, and is the very foundation of the common forms of government in their injustice and inequality. Yet it appears in itself only rarely, and its exposure of the sheer contingency of government is at best infrequent. In this respect, ‘true’ politics is very seldom manifest within our forms of political organization. Or, to put the point the other way round, democracy can seldom be instituted on the basis of equality, yet equality is nonetheless itself the prior condition of inequality. ‘Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations’ (HD: 48). Those relations, however, customarily remain latent or inapparent. Democracy is the power of the people, but as the power ‘of anyone at all’, not of the population or the majority. As such, however, it is ‘the extraordinary exception’ (HD: 49) which scarcely appears, yet continually founds the rule. Thus if, as he says, Rancière remains committed to a republican universalism, it is in a vestigial and paradoxical form, a commitment to universals that manifest themselves only in specific, rare, localized and dispersed instances. The educational thought of Joseph Jacotot offers one such instance. Rancière’s book on Jacotot, Le Maître ignorant, assumes the principle of the rarity of politics, not least because it tells the story of the demise of a specific politics. 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 founded on the conviction of universal equality: ‘there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacities’ (HD: 48). Here, again, the stultifying effect of an exclusionary system of signification is brought to an end. To start with, the doctrine of emancipation simply needs to be proclaimed. The truth of Jacotot’s folly spreads rapidly, and gathers a host of adherents. What interferes with the trajectory of Jacotot’s truth is not reaction but the ideology of progress. The progressives who usurp Jacotot’s project agree that the old hierarchical conception of intelligence and the cretinization of ordinary people must end. But, for the progressives, the road to freedom is instruction not emancipation. If the intelligence

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of the working person is set on its own way by another intelligence that merely declares their equality, it will be unreliable. The ordinary mind must be guided, lest it err. Thus the progressives introduce methods, commissions, initiatives, reports, reforms, anticipating the comprehensively ‘pedagogized’ society of today, with its ‘experts’ and policy wonks, its think tanks, its hysterical over-attentiveness to interpretations and ‘teaching aids’, its infantilization of those it educates (MI: 221). Worse still, the progressives restore the figure of the explicator. They argue for a cautious, gradual approach to the eradication of equality. But this covertly reinstals the very principle against which they first set themselves, the ranking of intelligence. Stultification continues. The litany of progressive ‘gains’ grows more and more heavy and insistent. Jacotot finally accepts that ‘ “in fact, it is impossible that equality should persist for long” ’;10 his dream confronts the ‘mystery’ of inertia,11 and looks utopian if not absurd. The logic of the poets’ ‘courts voyages’ provides another example of the ‘egalitarian moment’. Wordsworth, Büchner and Rilke are all surprised by an event or an encounter. This launches them on the ‘short voyage’ from a territory designated by a familiar topography to the foreign country of the people (CV: 10). Wordsworth disembarks at Calais to encounter the revolutionary celebrations of July 1790. Here ‘a new mode of the existence of truth’ imposes itself upon the young poet (CV: 24). Already a revolutionary, the young Büchner encounters the Saint-Simonian Achille Rousseau, who preaches the doctrine of labouring alongside the people. In his own way, which will never be SaintSimonian, for he is a disciple of modern science, Büchner will learn to listen to their ‘songs’ (CV: 68). Rilke encounters the extreme poverty of the seventeen-year-old working girl Marthe, who offers a chilling paradigm of non-relationship, the total absence of reciprocity. Her destitution is such that she is a pure watcher and listener. She is attentive, however, not so much to the poet, as to what she might begin to know of herself in the poet’s speech. Rilke sees the enigma of his own solitude in her, the evil of separation, the absence of the social relationship. All three voyages are essentially rare ventures. Wordsworth will reach Paris again in 1792, the day after the September massacres. By 1797, he is expressing his disillusionment in The Borderers and presenting Rivers’s doctrine of means and ends as a diabolical sophistry. Rilke will finally experience Marthe’s world as a void – ‘ “it is not even ugly” ’, she tells him, ‘ “since it is nothing” ’ – from which he must take flight.12 The ‘short voyage’ is an intermission. Rancière, however, is not concerned to indict the ‘bourgeois artist’ for his half-heartedness or present the three poets as dilettantes of misery.

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In the Courts voyages, what repeatedly fascinates him is exchanges in a hinterland where workers marginal to their class and intellectuals marginal to theirs can meet. This hinterland, however, is not in itself a recognizable social territory. The political subject does not belong but rather sporadically appears there. In the case of the poets, what concludes the sojourn in the hinterland is the end of the parenthesis that began with the event. This is the moment when Wordsworth no longer inhabits but starts to invent a political landscape, when Rilke takes leave of Marthe and finds that he can finish the Duino Elegies. HISTORICAL DECOMPOSITIONS Rancière has comparatively little to say about the conditions under which the democratic or egalitarian event takes place. For him as for Badiou, the event is a slight but generative turbulence in the order of things, like the Lucretian clinamen. But in Badiou, an event indicates a hiatus in contingent social formations. It makes possible an exposure of the void that underlies them. For Rancière, this is the logic that Tacitus attributes to the revolt of the Pannonian legions stirred up by Percennius after Augustus Caesar’s death: ‘Augustus has just died. Tiberius is not yet on the throne. An objective void exists’ (NH: 25). Rancière holds this explanation at a certain distance. Predictably, he rather insists on Percennius’s ‘excessive, illegitimate speech’, his transgression of dominant discourses and their economy. The event appears as a quarrel over names. So too, for example, with the student demonstration in Paris in 1986: this strike against a ‘rather tepid law’ intended to make higher education ‘more responsive to economic requirements’, introducing a ‘ “selective orientation” ’ and increasing enrolment fees was scarcely a radical or subversive affair (SP: 55). It took place because, in ‘a situation where the demands of economic competition and geopolitical equilibrium now leave democracies the slenderest of margins for political alternatives’, nonetheless, suddenly, it takes almost nothing – one word too many, say – for a polemical space [of disagreement] to re-emerge where trivial differences can be translated into major options, where a system of possibilities with the minutest of variables gives way to a basic alternative in which there is a choice between egalitarian and inegalitarian words. (SP: 59–60)

Rancière’s logic of emergence, then, is unelaborated. His logic of declension, by contrast, of the waning or extinction of the promise opened up by the event, may frequently be inexplicit and seem under-theorized relative to its pervasive importance in his work. It is

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nonetheless multiple and complex. Rancière has been much concerned with the lapse from or, to use a word more his own, the ‘decomposition’ of the egalitarian and/or democratic moment (PP: 95). His accounts of the Aventine Hill, Jacotot and his educational principles, the three-day July Revolution of 1830 (in La Nuit des prolétaires), Wordsworth and Rilke, Cabet and the Icarians in Aux bords du politique, of Marx and Sartre: all these and others involve a narrative of a declension from a break or rupture, from an egalitarian or democratic event. ‘The social bond’, writes Rancière, ‘is maintained by [an] endless manufacture of acquiescence, which in schools is called explanation and in public assemblies and courts is called persuasion’ (SP: 83). Why is there a remainder? Why does ‘the weight of things in us’ become consent? (SP: 81). No doubt, as sociology cannot stop demonstrating, because we cannot escape thraldom to ‘the great law of the social machine, the law of exploitation and domination’ (PP: 169). But this does not of itself supply the reason for the demise of Reason, of the Idea that inspires Rembrantsz. We need to look elsewhere, extrapolating from Rancière categories he does not formulate as such. Firstly, there is the slipperiness of signifiers. Here, at once, we enter into paradox again: on the one hand, political creativity is fed by the décalage in the relationship between signifier and signified. ‘The gap between names and things . . . is precisely what defines the space of political rationality’ (SP: 93). Thus, according to Tacitus, the Caledonian chief Galgacus institutes a politics in that he calls a desert ‘that which the Romans baptize with the deceptive name of peace’ (NH: 25). The quarrel over words and meanings, the appropriation and reappropriation of terms are crucial indices of equality and democracy, of modernity as feared by Hobbes. What terrifies Hobbes, and the ‘royal-empiricism’ that follows in his wake,13 is that words are springing loose from the referents to which they were presumed to be bound. The words ‘despot’ and ‘tyrant’ have long had a given and incontestable signification. Hobbes, however, is appalled to find that others are applying them to the English king. Rancière repeatedly seeks to promote the dissensus produced by the quarrel over signifiers, notably as opposed to the timorous, intellectually flaccid valuation of the centre ground. But, through an ineluctable process of ‘historical mutation’ (PP: 199), the slipperiness of the signifier also dooms the egalitarian moment to resignification, and with it, secondly, to the simulacrum, an acutely problematic development. Though Rancière has some fun with Marx’s concept of historical repetition as depreciation, he nonetheless strikingly confirms it. It is the simulacrum that dooms the 1848 revolution to failure, as ‘each class appears to be doubled, decomposed by its

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own caricature’ (PP: 95).14 The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France repeatedly show how, insidiously, the very slipperiness of the signifier dooms crucial political terms (social democracy, republic, constitution) to a process of inane reinvention.15 Marx warns against ‘that which does not split itself apart [dialectically] but contents itself with its duplication’ (PP: 66), and this is also the lesson of Le Maître ignorant, notably in the case of Jacotot’s ‘apes’, who increasingly simulate his emancipatory logic. Here, however, Rancière’s point is not Marx’s: the lumpenproletariat do not appear as a second-order version of the proletariat. It is not the workers who are in question at all. It is rather their educators, the progressives and ‘pedagogues’ who ape the egalitarians. Descartes did not hand Rembrantsz a primer fit for kindergartens; he presumed Rembrantsz’s equality from the start. Equality resides in, and only in, the axiomatic character of that presupposition. By contrast, in the order of the simulacrum, mediation is crucial. But herein lies an ambivalence. Rancière develops a brilliantly specific critique of contemporary democracy. Yet he also insistently presents it as an open field for political opportunity. For there can be no naïve return from ‘a world devoted to simulacra’ (PP: 216). We are necessarily caught up in their play. Nor should one turn up one’s nose at the ‘interworlds from which are turned out the dreamers of the proletariat and the déclassé intelligentsia’ (PP: 201), That is to reproduce the Sartrean contempt for the Autodidact. ‘Hybrid forms’ may indeed tighten the bonds of domination, but they may equally be ‘conquests for the dominated’. Yet at the same time, ‘the levelling assurance that everything is a simulacrum’ may leave us only with an ‘equivalence of dogmatism and scepticism’ (PP: 216). Furthermore, for all the strenuousness of its efforts to reassure itself, the assiduity with which it talks itself up, simulation can never escape its status as a second-order, compensatory structure. It can never not be belated. Most importantly of all, whilst, indeed, the order of simulation can mean ‘conquests for the dominated’, it can never mean an end to the law of exploitation and domination, because, in composing with circumstances, it must immediately confirm them in place even as it begins its work. Thus Rancière finally remains haunted by the Platonic question, what is best? ‘How can what is best be distinguished from the forest of similar-sounding expressions and closely resounding ideas?’ How will this ‘ “best” ’ ever ‘impose itself on the universe of social competition where the inferiority of competitive values ensures their success every time?’ (PP: 204–5). The Good is rare. The world of the simulacrum does not automatically triumph, but nor must it be set at

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naught. Rather, perhaps, our inextricable involvement in simulacra is ideally and even practically inseparable from a ‘hidden work of mourning’ (PP: 216). Jacotot, for example, is ‘the only egalitarian’ to recognize that the triumph of his apes, the progressive educationalists, is actually a ‘work of mourning’ for emancipation (MI: 223), as Rilke learns from Marthe to mourn the social relationship of whose absence she has taught him. Simulation is the second organizing feature of the narrative of declension, intensity or ‘dynamism’ the third.16 If the simulacrum of the event is only a simulacrum, this requires that it be all the more vigorously and intently promulgated. But the dynamism in question is a surrogate. It works to disguise the movement of declension, to invert it into its opposite, finding a superior significance in insignificance. If equality appears in the event, then it has a pure form, in comparison with which, for all their more or less urgent efforts at self-persuasion, succeeding attempts to sustain or renew it appear as adulterations. Certainly, the event can return as reminiscence: this is the very guarantee that the event will happen again. But immediately, reminiscence produces only the simulacrum whose second-order existence must be compensated for by intensification. ‘To many reminiscence seems too evanescent’ (SP: 60). They insist on extending it into immediate participation. This is the problem, for example, with the ‘young fraternal workers’ of 1833, who cannot see that the event of the Trois Glorieuses, the three days of the July Revolution, cannot be sustained as such, and seek artificially to prolong and reimpose the violence of the break. They are intent on transforming ‘the governing idea of community into an organizing concept of social experience’ in starkly unpropitious circumstances (SP: 84). We should not slight their effort. It is by means of the organizing concept that the community of equals imprints the traces of the event on the surface of the social body, ensuring its persistence. But they remain traces, and no more. Fourthly, simulation and dynamism require acceleration, what Rancière calls the ‘headlong flight’.17 Once the simulacrum has appeared, the function of acceleration is to translate it into a seemingly urgent forward drive, a movement that is future-oriented and proceeds full speed ahead. Acceleration has the same compensatory function as dynamism. As dynamism plugs the gap between event and simulacrum, acceleration fills in the gap left by the absence of a telos, seeks to rush us on so fast we can forget it.18 Hence the giddy precipitation of Jacotot’s apes, the rush and distraction of their efforts to mimic Jacotot’s educational ideals. Things must get better, can only get better, are getting better all the time. Benjamin drily quotes Social Democrat Wilhelm

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Dietzgen: ‘Every day our cause becomes clearer and people become smarter’.19 Acceleration is a consequence of the desire, when there is an event, to find ‘the permanent expression’ of its power as promptly as possible, ‘there on the spot’ (SP: 60–1). Political significance cannot solely be attributed to ‘the invention of that unpredictable subject that momentarily occupies the street’, briefly insists that it can run the factory, or forces the university to accommodate its demands for justice (SP: 60–1). The ‘forms of participation’ must rather swiftly fill up ‘the dead times and spaces’, saturate the remainder (SP: 61). Acceleration, however, is by no means incompatible with, fifthly, a resort to strategic thinking. Indeed, the two combine together in the same reassurance, the same occlusion of the ‘dead times’. Behind both strategy and the will to accelerate lies an assumption that the Good – equality, justice – is more than a presupposition of Reason to be posited from the outset, that it must be either engineered or taken by storm (SP: 83). Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg provides an important if distinctively inflected example of the workings of simulation, dynamism and acceleration together. Rancière discusses the opera in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (PP: 57–63), and sees it as paradigmatic. I adapt and modify his account below. As ‘an aesthetic and progressive refinement of the new dream of “popular culture” ’, this ‘ “Gothic” ’ opera ‘represents one of the dominant forms of our modernity’ (PP: 62). It does so precisely as a simulation of an Idea, the revolutionary Idea, the Idea of equality and justice, together. The basic facts tell some of the story. As a Leipzig schoolboy during the People’s Uprising of 1830, in his own words, Wagner ‘became a revolutionary overnight’.20 Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, he dreams of a new, liberal, properly democratic Germany and conducts ‘a trench war with the powers of the past’ (Köhler 2004 [2001]: 213). The concept of Die Meistersinger first comes to him in 1845; not much later we find Wagner arguing for republican aspirations, universal suffrage, a democratic militia, even the abolition of money and (particularly important with regard to Die Meistersinger) the end of the German aristocracy. He makes speeches and writes articles, including ‘Revolution’ (April 1849), which calls for the destruction of the old order. His close friends include Bakunin. In 1848, he joins wildly in the celebrations after Friedrich August II of Saxony appoints a new, liberal ministry. Then, in 1849, Friedrich August dissolves this elected parliament and replaces it with a royalist government. Wagner is consumed by derision. He takes part in the May Uprising in Dresden, making hand grenades, joining the snipers on the Kreuzturm and hiding from bullets behind upturned mattresses. When the uprising fails, he flees to Paris, then Zürich. He begins his long

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engagement with the work of Schopenhauer, and returns to Germany only in 1861, not, immediately, to Saxony, but to pre-Bismarckian, liberalizing Prussia. It is there that he begins Die Meistersinger in earnest. In Rancière’s terms, the young Wagner dreams of a collapse of the old orders (rich/poor, aristocracy/peasantry, philosophers/people). By contrast, the older, sadder, Wagner founds his sunniest opera on a structure which surreptitiously reinstates those orders even whilst blurring them. This ambivalent structure is one of Rancière’s ‘dominant forms of modernity’, and as such extremely important. On the one hand, Die Meistersinger presents the triumph of shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs, whose principle is both democratic and egalitarian: ‘ob Herr, ob Bauer, hier nichts beschließt; / hier fragt sich’s nach der Kunst allein’ (‘whether lord or peasant has no importance here; / here is it only a question of art’). Hans not only ensures the happiness of the lovers, Walther and Eva. Walther’s song is both rooted in medievalism – he is an enthusiastic devotee of Walther von der Vogelweide – and, to the Masters, disturbingly, even obscurely modernistic. Sachs advises Walther and corrects the mastersong he wishes to present in the competition in order to win Eva’s hand. Walther does indeed win, partly because of Hans’s guile, and the Masters finally bend their rules to accommodate the new style of song. The order of the Masters, however, is thereby merely confirmed in place. But Rancière sets especial store by the fact that Walther is a knight. Aided by the shoemaker, the aristocratic poet wins the day; thus ‘[t]he triumph of the shoemaker-poet is at the same time his abdication’ (PP: 61). No realization of the possibility the opera so lightly toys with – that Hans himself might win Eva’s hand – is truly conceivable. For all its cheerfulness, says Rancière, Die Meistersinger signals above all that ‘the game is over’. Under the surface of Wagner’s opera, we find (again) a hidden work of mourning: Die Meistersinger ‘is, precisely, a farewell performance. The insurrection of the shoemakers is finished’ (PP: 61). Wagner both grants the profound significance of the popular genius (Hans’s) and immediately cedes it back to power, alienates it from itself in a simulation. Thus the opera offers ‘the guardians and those inspired by the modern age a new legitimacy’. This legitimacy is supposedly ‘based on the only powers that now are said to matter, those from below’ (PP: 62). Meanwhile, the shoemaker is confirmed in his place. The same doubleness is implicit in the art of Die Meistersinger, which conducts a kind of round-trip ‘to the heart of the popular spirit’ (PP: 62). As Thomas Mann knew, Wagner’s projection of a new ‘popular theatre’ remained only ‘in ideal and conception’ (Mann 1985 [1967]: 34–5). But precisely because the Wagnerian aesthetic is founded

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on a political fantasy, the grandeur of the music must fill the gaps. Its dynamic force must prevent any manifestation of the hidden work of mourning, however oblique and inverted. Indeed, this is what we moderns respond to so intensely in the opera: The powerful, strutting motif associated with the guild of Mastersingers constitutes the assured signal of a new world whose radiant rebirth follows on from the victory of chivalric love poetry over the pedant’s bleating, with a bombastic fortissimo to underline the message of a new faith in which there is no longer any room for the subtleties of irony. (Köhler 2004 [2001]: 495)

At the same time, there must be a place for urgency, acceleration, notably in the ‘modernist’ Walther’s headlong career from desperate and unschooled outsider to triumphant victor. In his collusion with Hans, Walther even learns the value of strategic thinking. There is of course a logic binding simulation, dynamism, acceleration and strategy together. Simulation aspires in vain to the status of the event itself, because the event was a revelation. It appeared to make justice possible all at once, and whole. Dynamism, acceleration and strategy reflect a vain aspiration to coincide with justice. But the event of justice can also be simulated – or travestied – in another, macabre form of unity. In 1672, the Dutch rampjaar or disaster year, just eight years after Rembrantsz’s visit to Descartes, the moderate, antiOrangist, former ruler of the Republic of the United Provinces, Johan de Witt, and his brother, Dutch statesman Cornelis, are murdered by an Orangist lynch mob of artisans stirred up by Admiral Tromp and Johan Kievit, probably with the connivance of William of Orange. Their bodies are horribly mutilated. Cornelis is eviscerated alive and partially eaten. The hearts of both are carved out to be exhibited as trophies. This takes place, as Rancière points out, among a citizenry swelled with a sense of complacent well-being and members of ‘that nation of mercantile capital which pioneered our boundless modernity’ (SP: 28). Spinoza is at work in his study at the time. On hearing the news, he makes a placard on which he inscribes the words ultimi barbarorum. He intends to run to the site of the killings and plant it there, and is saved only by the intervention of his friends, notably his landlord van der Spyck, who double-locks all the doors. The murder of the de Witts is an instance of the ochlos. The demos is the power of the people as an unruly and disputatious throng existing on the basis of equality, as in the Athenian agora. Its element is dissensus not consensus. By contrast, the ochlos is a name for the masses rallying around the one idea or conducting themselves as one. The Orangist mob is only the most obvious and repellent example of

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it: contemporary democracy, for example, notably combines an ‘ochlocracy’ with an ‘epistemocracy’ (SP: 35, 58; the ‘one idea’ being a mediatized economism, and epistemocracy a government by ‘experts’; see CH: 206–9). The demos tears the people away from the possibility of forming a unity and becoming the ochlos (cf. Proust 1997a: 80). But the ochlos always threatens to appear again, because the demos is intermittent, unpredictable, and democracy always vulnerable. The notable paradox of the recent triumph of progressive ‘realism’ in politics is precisely that it is accompanied by and cannot shake off the threat of reversion (see SP: 9–12). Progressive realism announces the end of promise, whether Hegelian, Marxist or other. But the trouble with the loss of promise is that the peaceful ‘end of politics’ repeatedly fails to separate itself off decisively from its murderous prehistory (SP: 24). In this respect, it is delusional to suppose that we can avoid the lesson of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud’s stark admonition is in effect Rancièrian: the demos must be affirmed at all costs. But democracy is ‘enacted through a contingent historical system of events, discourses and practices’ (SP: 32, italics mine). There is no logic to its interruptions of the ochlos. There are no assurances of its taking place. Commentators on Rancière are not anxious to dwell on the story of the de Witts. But it is to Rancière’s credit that he refers to it, for the lynch mob was composed of the very class, the artisanate, whom Rembrantsz represents. The important point, however, is that, in Spinoza, the story proposes a different figure for the philosopher’s failure to go out into the community. For van der Spyck does no more than call Spinoza back to an awareness of the separate space that is specifically and habitually that of the philosopher, behind the double-locked doors. Philosophy, says Rancière, has trouble approaching radical evil. Finally, Spinoza was not required to take the full measure of the de Witts’ barbaric murder. Had he had to do so, it would have compelled him ‘to ruin his philosophical edifice’. For he would have been bound to acknowledge ‘the irreducible region of a distress resistant to that knowledge which changes sadness into joy’ (SP: 28). Unlike Ruby or May, Rancière himself neither slights nor dismisses the ‘irreducible region’ in question. Nonetheless, for all that he raises the issue, he to some extent shares the philosophical reluctance to take the full measure of the ochlos. This has a bearing on how he thinks historical intermittency. The paradigmatic instance of the egalitarian presupposition, Rembrantsz’s relationship to Descartes, has in fact an asymmetrical structure. Equality appears only because Rembrantsz takes the initiative and persists in his demand. So, too, Menenius Agrippa negotiates with the plebeians on an equal basis only because

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they force him to do so. Rancière retreats from one crucial question which can be put in very simple form: why is Rembrantsz such a solitary figure? Rancière insists that democracy and equality are always a question of individuals. Subjects may form a specific egalitarian community. But in a university or factory, the egalitarian axiom only appears ‘individually’ (PP: 223). Why is Rembrantsz seemingly alone in acting as if intellectual equality were already real and effective? Why is it that only ‘a few dozen or hundred labourers’ decided ‘that they would no longer tolerate the intolerable’ in the Paris of the 1830s (NP: 7, italics mine)? Why must the demand for democracy and equality be a matter of a few scattered subjectivities? Why – that is – are the people at large not caught up irresistibly in a drive for democracy and equality? They are not sluggish by nature; it is impossible that Rancière should assume that. Nor is there any simple pessimism at stake. The democratic and egalitarian drive is not always necessarily compelled to retreat before the threat of the ochlos. Indeed, Rancière puts matters the other way round: the demos is always at work within the ochlos, threatening to split and dissipate it. Perhaps the conflictual impulse of the demos is finally irreconcilable with the egalitarian impulse towards community? But the demos requires a basis in equality, as in the agora. This leaves two possibilities. One is that Rancière finally succumbs to a peculiarly debilitating irony, surrendering to the same habit of exclusion as Marx and Sartre, but giving it a different configuration. The worker commonly excludes him- or herself from the paradise of the philosopher. That assertion, however, ignores the work of Rancière the historian who prefers hard labour in the working-class archive to Marx and Sartre’s exclusionary move, and patiently sifts and weighs the evidence. Yet the second possibility, precisely, that Rancière is committed to going by the evidence, is hardly more encouraging. For that would mean that it is history itself that instructs us that the event of the demos must be sporadic. Marx once wearily remarked that a proletarian revolution in England would always be impossible, because a liberated English working class were bound immediately to aspire to the condition of the petit bourgeoisie. Rancière quotes this as another instance of the philosopher prematurely passing judgement on his poor. But he offers no historical evidence to suggest, in the teeth inter alia of 1979, that Marx’s scepticism was mistaken rather than exact. So, too, if it was indeed an elite corps of the working class which formed the Mobile Guard of the Provisional Government in 1848, that may indeed call into question Marx’s ‘hallucination’ of a lumpenproletariat. It is scarcely reassuring in itself. But to leave matters here would be unjust. In a singularly brilliant

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essay on ‘Le gai savoir de Bertolt Brecht’ (PL: 113–43), Rancière faces precisely the problem I have raised. Brecht had at length to confront an altogether challenging question: why was it that ‘the German workers fought, right to the end, in the factory as at the front, for the defence of a Reich that was actually condemned to death’ (PL: 132, italics mine)? Neither Rancière nor Brecht has an answer to this. But Brecht does at least respond. He refuses to elevate himself, or the ‘proletarian’, above such ordinary workers, to dissociate himself from Hašek’s Schweik or Céline’s Bardamu, from an unregenerate figure who is conformist where necessary but also resists when possible. This figure is seemingly ‘ “indestructible” ’ and endlessly ‘ “abusable” ’, and yet, at the same time, also the ‘mulch [terreau] of liberation’.21 But Schweik is not to be conceived of as either pure positivity or negativity, or positivity and negativity together. Rereading Hašek’s novel in May 1943, Brecht writes that I feel myself subjugated once again by [his] immense panorama, by its purely un-positive [unpositif] view of the people which is precisely the unique positive itself and can therefore not appear ‘positive’ in relation to anything else . . .22

Schweik embodies an ‘un-positivity’ within which lies the only possible thought of the positive. In effect, Brecht finally asserts that Marx must be rethought through Hašek: ‘there is no politics of the dialectic’ (PL: 143). There is no dialectic in history. From now on, we ‘depend on the event’ (Badiou 1991a: 20). In the end, we should not pin too much on the possibility of a comprehensive rationale for the occasional event, certainly not in Rancière. For to a surprising extent, he positively wills intermittency. The most revealing moment comes at the end of ‘The Uses of Democracy’: When striking workers acquire power by demonstrating that they can, if need be, run their own factory, why should we wish for that power to find its permanent expression there on the spot, in the form of self-management? (SP: 60–1, italics mine)

The ‘we’ who might wish for the ‘permanent expression’ of workers’ power would doubtless also be wishing for its philosophical systemization. ‘We’ would thus embark again on the familiar process of selfseparation from ‘them’. The irony is that it is precisely because Rancière refuses to separate himself off from what the workers or the ‘sans-part’ are capable of in themselves that he must present the democratic or egalitarian moment as occasional. Thus grand narratives of history become another mode of philosophical self-separation from the poor, where the concept of intermittency closes the gap.

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Radically shorn of any end or purpose, the flaring of the event has thus become its own value. Rancière tells us that arbitrariness always appears in two ways. Firstly, there is the primary and founding nonreason (contingency) of language and things. According to this nonreason, the event of justice is always possible. Secondly, there is the inegalitarian unreason of the social body, within which justice repeatedly fails and disappears (SP: 84). This seemingly spells out a switchback or Moebius-strip logic in which both sides entail the other, and from which there appears to be no escape. No matter how many individuals become emancipated, society can never do so. Equality may be the law of the transitory community; society inevitably remains permanently in thrall to inequality. A community of equals can never become coextensive with a society of the unequal. Rancière says all that, quite explicitly. The sober conclusion we must therefore draw is that justice, equality and the Good can only be thought in terms of intermittency. The event cannot be prolonged, indeed must not be, lest it be travestied in its simulacra, caught up in negotiation and exchange, and therefore betrayed. For all his tough realism, for all his admirable, selfless commitment to the discomforts and distresses of archival labour, there is a sense in which Rancière remains, obstinately, a purist. Rancière’s anti-schematics of historical reason has an undeniable power. It owes this partly to its being so precisely formulated in contradistinction to the narrativizations of history by Hegelians, Marxists, contemporary progressives, gradualists and meliorists alike. Its power also partly derives from Rancière’s purism, and partly from his historical materialism. Unlike Lardreau, Proust or Jambet, Rancière roots his thought in this materialism, in the archive. It is thus notably different to Badiou’s ‘materialist dialectics’. Insofar as Rancière’s own poor are at stake in his work, he is not concerned with telling a modern philosophical story of the working classes. It is the philosophical implications of the stories of the disempowered or dispossessed themselves that matter. Here Rancière seeks to close the gap opened up by philosophy from Plato to Marx and Sartre, and fleshes out what my earlier chapters have sometimes presented as a rather abstract conception of intermittency. Yet, at the same time, he also frequently makes history seem strangely spectral. The event is rare, the logic of its declension inexorable. The corollary of this is the necessary existence of desert stretches of dead time. Dead time breeds melancholy. Rancière is caught in a peculiarly acute version of the melancholic–ecstatic conception of history, and conveys the lived experience of that conception with genuine poignancy. However, we should not mistake the melancholy in question, nor confuse it with other melancholies.23 It is sober, but not to be confused

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with any defeatism. It is intellectual above all. It does not counsel an end to struggle or endeavour, though it complicates them. Take for example Büchner’s epitaph: Ein unvollendet Lied sinkt er ins Grab Der Verse schönsten nimmt er mit hinab. (CV: 73) An unfinished song sinks into the grave, He takes his most beautiful verses with him.

Rancière imagines Achille Rousseau, ‘decidedly happier’ than Büchner, mutely contemplating the tomb of the young German sceptic in Zürich. So, too, at the very end of Le Maître ignorant, he turns to Jacotot’s tomb in Père Lachaise, noting that, within months of its erection, the ‘credo of intellectual emancipation’ inscribed on the tomb had been profaned (MI: 230). Not surprisingly, the subtitle of the final section of the book is ‘The Tomb of Emancipation’. If there is an elegiac note to both Courts voyages au pays du peuple and Le Maître ignorant, the elegy is for a thought, or better, the effectiveness of a thought. Of course, Büchner’s work survives and, whilst Jacotot’s educational ideas did not prevail, they are nonetheless imperishable. But the passing of Jacotot himself indicates a balked or endstopped trajectory, the death of an ‘unfinished song’. The elegy, however, is not for an idea, but rather for an idea become inoperative, an idea from which the subjective conviction of its adherents has drained away, or which has been replaced by its simulacrum. Much of the second half of Le Maître ignorant is caught up in such an elegy. Here the colour of intermittency seems hardly distinct from Sartrean ‘gray on gray’. The logic of melancholy in Rancière is starkly clear. Politics suffers eclipse. Furthermore, if politics is rare, the failure, death or absence of politics is necessarily commonplace, leaving a melancholy of the interim. The corollary of the rarity of politics is the proliferation of such waste times and spaces. Rancière does not explicitly formulate the melancholy of the interim as such. Indeed, insofar as he associates melancholy with ‘postmodern disenchantment’, he tends to polemicize against it (PS: 14). It is nonetheless an inescapable consequence of his understanding of intermittency, and other features of his thought can in some degree be placed in relation to it. When Badiou metaphorically casts Rancière as a Beckettian character, under a single tree in a bleak landscape, meditating on the gloom of the ‘morne plaine’ (AM: 138), he is noting precisely this. Rancière’s most compellingly melancholic work is undoubtedly La Nuit des prolétaires, precisely because it is so deeply imbricated in the

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archives of the ‘singular dream’ of the working class (NP: 60) and, unsurprisingly, therefore very much concerned with the rarity and eclipse of politics. It is about the emergence of political subjectivities in the wake of a major if abortive political event, the July Revolution of 1830. In this respect, Rancière’s subjects ‘march under the sign of interruption’, of ‘an event’ which has ‘suspended the course of things’ (CV: 152). Thus politics, in the sense in which it occurs on the Aventine Hill, is more or less over with the start of the book. Furthermore, the very condition of the working-class commitment to the impossible is that it be fitful, and the subjectivities at stake scattered and sporadic. Rancière’s methodology is precisely tailored to this condition: he expressly resists any systematization of his material, any imposition of a larger historical narrative or interpretative grid on it, focusing rather on the specificity of a ‘few dozen or hundred labourers’. These men and women made a difference in that they ‘made themselves “different” ’ (NP: 7, 9), and cannot be treated as either representative or paradigmatic. Rancière’s methodology, however, increasingly produces a secondary and incipiently melancholic logic as its necessary consequence. Firstly, the presentation of political subjectivity as scattered and sporadic effectively sets it in relief, picking it out from a background that remains obscure. Rancière firmly denies that his title has a metaphorical dimension. The ‘night’ in question is the nocturnal time of intellectual as opposed to manual work in that, after 1830, a few workers who were committed to the impossible refused to see the schooling that can take place at night as solely a bourgeois preserve. Yet, for all Rancière’s disavowals, this implies another darkness in which the proletariat remains massively buried, and which is never far from the book, because it is what Rancière’s rare subjects must struggle with. Here there is a double intermittency, of radical subjectivity in relation to both the larger life of the subject and his or her historical context. Secondly, Rancière’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 that of ‘the spiritual spark [étincelle] of revolt’ (NP: 127). His book underwrites his subjects’ conviction of their larger purposes, but does so only ethically, not in terms of the retrospective justifications of any larger logic, like class struggle. Rancière is right to dismiss any idea that it is really about ‘the futility of emancipation’s byways’ (NP: 11). At the same time, however, he treats his subjects as irreducible to ‘what is sayable about the social, the people, the proletariat or any other representable object of the same genre’, and therefore as existing in a state of hallowed disconnection (CV: 152). It is thus not clear how far the

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book transcends its power as a memorial, a melancholy testimony to an ‘unfinished song’. Thirdly, the very acuteness of the subjects that Rancière is so concerned to register has itself a melancholic complexion, 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 Rancière’s subjects is therefore necessarily double. If they illuminate the logic for occasions of resistance, they also insistently gesture towards a world beyond and unredeemed by those occasions. The book is always close to tilting in the direction of historical melancholy, 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). Ideas and the triumph or death of ideas frequently determine the quality of lives, or their lack of quality. But if, in La Nuit des prolétaires, Rancière repeatedly demonstrates the quality of his subjects’ political ideas, that very quality leads them intermittently to bear peculiarly vivid witness to the melancholy as well as the meaning of intermittency. Why is it, asks seamstress Julie Fanfernot, after the failure of the July Revolution, ‘ “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?” ’ (Fanfernot 1833; quoted NP: 39). The ‘dark labyrinth’ of the worker’s customary life is both constituted and revealed as such in the waning of the ‘spark’. There is no true thought of justice that is not endemically melancholic. Rancière’s note of melancholy is proportional to the precarious tenure of the kind of ideas that grip Fanfernot. Yet the melancholic disposition is also a form of nay-saying, in that the melancholic refuses to surrender certain ideas, either to the world, or for it. If melancholy in Rancière often appears to be a patient, self-abnegating, almost quietistic form of revolt, it is also an intransigently, boldly defiant one.24 The relationship between the will to justice and melancholy also appears in Rancière’s absorbing account of Michelet. The historians of the Annales school had been vigorously critical of Michelet, and Rancière is partly concerned to reinstate him as an object of interest. But this effort is not chiefly what makes his argument original. For like Benjamin on the Trauerspiel, Rancière’s account of Michelet is also a major attempt to think historical work in relation to the remainder. Rancière argues that Michelet invented his ‘republican-romantic paradigm of history’ in the face of the (Hobbesian) royal-empiricist model. This involved the invention of a historical ‘art of treating the excess of words’ (NH: 42). Unsurprisingly, Rancière is chiefly interested in

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Michelet as a historian of the poor, more exactly and inspiringly, with Michelet as a historian of those ‘who died too early to know that they had lived’. Rancière argues that they must be liberated from ‘their own unconsciousness’ (NH: 62, second italics mine), that is, they beg to be rescued, not from historical oblivion, but from their obscurity to themselves. This, we might recall, is precisely what Marthe required from Rilke. Michelet’s historiography is therefore a poetic operation which neutralizes a prior ‘appearance of the past’ (NH: 49) and makes manifest what that appearance had previously occluded. But Michelet does not exactly give the poor a voice or make them speak. Here Rancière is largely indifferent to the commonplace notion of giving a voice to those historically deprived of one. Michelet makes it possible for his subjects to ‘speak’ by keeping them silent but making them visible. He himself will speak for them, indeed, this is very much his task, for the historian alone can deliver a meaning in their speech which they themselves were unable to grasp. Michelet’s rhetoric, which can so easily sound fustian today, is entirely given over to this project. Rancière writes of Michelet’s practice as a ‘making-perceptible’, rendering his subjects visible by stating their historical significance directly, rather than having them appear to state it. His expertise is diegetic not mimetic. Michelet’s subject is the silent witness who holds the truth of science, but without having the power to deliver it. The historian will make him or her perceptible in a discourse radically other than mimetic discourse. Indeed, Michelet uses the powers of narrative to destroy the system of mimesis and convert democracy into truth. It is precisely ‘the subject that one cannot imitate [and must therefore narrate] that becomes the guarantor of the true’ (NH: 55). Michelet has his own example of the practice of rhetoric making the truth ‘perceptible’: the Lyonnais lawyer, orator, Jacobin leader and martyr Joseph Chalier. The historical remainder speaks in and through Chalier: . . . a whole city, a whole bleeding world – the agonized cry of Lyons. He is the voice of the deep dark mud of its streets, silent since the beginning of time. Through him the ancient dismal darkness, the damp and filthy houses begin to speak; and hunger and fasts; and abandoned children and women dishonoured; and all those heaped-up sacrificed generations. How all these awake, now they arise, now sing from their sepulchres; and their story is of menace and death . . . Their voices, their song, their menace, all is Chalier.25

But in a doubling up of his method, he actually gives us none of Chalier’s own speech, of his revolutionary eloquence. To allow Chalier to speak would not have been hard, notably via his stirring address to

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the National Assembly in 1792.26 Nonetheless, Michelet makes the orator dumb. If this is necessary, it is no doubt partly in respect of Chalier’s fate: arrested and tried by the Convention, he was guillotined on its orders in 1793. But to have Chalier speak would also ironically have placed his speech ‘outside the truth, in the logic of mimesis’ (NH: 45). For Michelet, Chalier is the witness of a silence so ‘ancient’ and indurated as to require dragging into the light of knowledge, but not enhancing with a knowledge it did not possess and which would betray a truth that is recalcitrant to light. Michelet silences Chalier in order that the silent misery of others should come to the surface in and through him. In a more recent account of Michelet, in Politique de la littérature, Rancière presents his practice as constituting one particular, modern ‘politics of literature’. Yet if the politics at stake is that of an ‘ardent republican’ (PL: 30), it nonetheless enjoins a melancholy task. ‘The truth’, Michelet tells us, is better read in cries than spoken words, ‘where no one is trying to speak, where no one is trying to deceive’. In the order of truth, the only one who should speak is ‘the one who would speak. And not, certainly not, the one who spoke’. Yet the silent voice ‘is that which can come back to us only through the tombstone and the cries of rocks’. The exact point is that here ‘there is a little more pathos than our positive ears can bear’ (NH: 57, ‘positive’ playing nicely against Brecht’s unpositif). Indeed, Michelet’s historiography both suppresses and sustains the event of the Revolution, concerning itself with bringing to light a mute suffering that predates the Revolution, but in a work that only becomes possible because of it. The gift of the Revolution is precisely to make possible the formulation of a world from which the Revolution itself sprang but which it has superseded, and that resists the revolutionary principle. The Revolution liberated its own adherents from the condition of what preceded it. But it also ushered in a postRevolutionary present which will make possible new ways of formulating the relationship between present and past, of conjuring up the past with fresh intensity and point. This involves a particular conception of the historian’s task as settling a debt. Rancière soberly admits that the utopian dream which founded Michelet’s project is no longer with us. Michelet believed that the silence of the voiceless was part of a historical phase which the forward march of historical progress was leaving in its wake. This belief was dependent on a grand narrative that has long been in tatters. Yet the disintegration of this narrative does not deny the value of wresting the meaning of historical obscurity from petrifaction. It even makes the task more imperative – but also makes it unending. The labour of

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rendering justice to historical obscurity is the historian’s. In a ‘redemption of absence’, the historian refuses to accept ‘[any] equivalence of ignorance and death’ (NH: 63). But he or she can do so only in a melancholic gesture that refuses any valuation of ‘the continuity of life’, any attempt to produce an artificial historical continuity. History has its ‘organ pauses’: We must make the silences of history speak, those fearsome organ pauses when history speaks no more and which are precisely its most tragic tones. Only then do the dead accept the sepulchre. (Michelet 1980: 122; quoted NH: 62)

There is therefore a need for a historiography that takes up Michelet’s mantle, but in an awareness that the understanding of history that nourished him can no longer be sustained. In other words, in the very act of ‘filling gaps’, the historiography in question will proceed through a thought of intermittency, and the melancholy that necessarily accompanies it. AESTHETICS AND PARTAGE If intermittency provides the logic for a certain historiography, it also finally does so for a turn to aesthetics. We might begin, here, with the parallel between Marx and Flaubert that Rancière develops in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres. There is of course an air of provocation to this, not least because of the wariness of Flaubert traditional within Marxist aesthetics (which Badiou partly inherits). But Rancière is concerned to substitute a conception of Marxist fiction for that of Marxist ‘science’. Both Marx and Flaubert, he writes, ‘are equally convinced by the revolutionary farce [of 1848] that there is only one thing left to do: the work that will be the total negation of the reigning baseness, of the bourgeois world by its reproduction’. Both are ‘lovers of Cervantes’ who ‘engage in the quixotic project of the absolute work’ (PP: 113). This project, however, has quite different implications in the two instances, for Marx’s work is supposed to work; Flaubert’s rests in its désœuvrement. But if there is no doubt a delicate irony at Marx’s expense, here, does it not also ‘save’ Flaubert? If, under certain conditions, political work collapses into the aesthetic realm, does art not also fulfil specific purposes relative to the political sphere? Rancière’s work on art and his work on politics have long gone hand in hand. They appear to belong together. His concept of the relations between them, however, is complex and by no means self-evident. Art cannot (banally) ‘stand in’ for politics. But in Rancière’s conception

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of it, it seems intimately related to the incompletion of politics, to intermittency and Marx’s ‘waiting time’. That Rancière has edited a collection of essays subtitled Pourquoi des poètes en temps de détresse? is not coincidental. His aesthetics offers a way of thinking beyond the local, specific, discontinuous rarity of political events to certain forms of persistence. Insofar as there is a residue of the great Hegelian and Marxist valuations of continuity in Rancière, insofar as he rescues a vestige of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit for a thought that is ostensibly much closer to Jambet’s counter-phenomenology than to Hegel, he does so precisely through art. In a world where so much depends, all the time, on politics, yet where political satisfactions are fitful at very best, where politics is so frequently impoverished if not actually catastrophic, where the likelihood of political disappointment is always imminent, art offers, not a pedagogic tool, support or solace, but a disposition towards the world which sustains a desire otherwise balked by political defeat or disaster. It is thus unsurprising that Flaubert is one of Rancière’s repeated points of reference. Art is even a manifestation or example of the irrepressibility of politics. For Rancière, it is axiomatic that no science, knowledge or act of will necessarily leads from a present experiencing an eclipse of politics to a future in which politics reappears. However, certain forms of political subjectivity can emerge in the wake of the rare event of politics and anticipate an undetermined realization in an indeterminate future. So much is clear, for example, from La Nuit des prolétaires. One might think of a Fanfernot or carpenter Gabriel Gauny as a figure in whom a certain political subjectivity survives, but in suspended form. Here the appropriate comparison is precisely with art, whose mode of existence above all is ‘suspensive’ (AU: 147). The concept of suspension is crucial to Rancière’s aesthetics. Like Gauny and Fanfernot, in Courts voyages, Wordsworth, Büchner and Rilke suffer the reality of the eclipse of politics, traverse the sombre epoch of its loss. The poets represent certain modes of subjectification that, ‘fragile and fleeting’ as their inscriptions may be (ME: 126), thread their way through the waste times of an intermittent world. No logic underwrites, effects or automatically produces such a concatenation. The delirium of history is irreducible. Nonetheless, art bridges the rifts produced by intermittency, saving the impact of an event, of a democratic and egalitarian moment, for another, however negative, inverted or unpromising the form in which it does so. In this respect, art thrives off the intermittency of subjectivity and experience, but also traces and retraces the limit that intermittency sets to both. Rancière sees politics and art as indissolubly connected chiefly in

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the concept of ‘le partage du sensible’. Politics takes place as ‘a quarrel . . . over the constitution of an aesthesis . . . the partition [partage] of the sensible world by means of which bodies find themselves in a community’ (ME: 48). Politics in its rarity calls an aesthetic disposition of the world into question, instigating a dispute over an aesthesis where no such dispute had previously existed. It challenges this aesthesis as a partage, that is, as a form of participation and separation together, a mode of sharing the sensory world that is also a sharing out. Politics ‘is a question of what one sees and what one can say about it, of who has the competence to see and the ability to speak, of the properties of space and the possibilities of time’ (ME: 14). It takes to task, for example, the contemporary culture of consensus, which is in fact ‘an operational map of war, a topography of the visible, the thinkable and the possible in which to locate [loger] war and peace’ (CH: 8). Conversely, the aesthetic realm itself is neither purely autonomous (and to be celebrated as such) nor illusory (and therefore to be unmasked). In Malaise dans l’esthétique, Rancière argues that the standing of aesthetics itself has recently, notably declined, citing what he sees as the two major recent anti-aesthetic positions as instances of this. The first, as in Bourdieu and Anglo-Saxon historical materialism and leftist criticism, turns the work of art itself into a secondary affair, to be demystified in an exposure of its political, economic and ideological determinations. This constitutes the undeniably powerful hermeneutics of suspicion as the mature philistinism of the less deceived. Here aesthetics is at best an idle by-play: the critic has come to ‘know better than’ art. But the major ideologies to which the hermeneutics of suspicion attached itself have actually been discredited, the historical logic undergirding them has foundered. The hermeneutics of suspicion dispels fantasmal superstructures, but is no longer able to summon up the evident superiority of a truth that would ensure their being superseded. It has therefore recently yielded to an unfettered celebration of the pure face-to-face with the unconditioned event of the artwork. ‘Adult’ rigour has given way to ‘youthful’ hedonism, the reality- to the pleasure-principle. The celebrants, however, are as disparaging about aesthetics as the sceptics, seeing aesthetics as getting in the way of aesthetic experience itself. Neither persuasion holds much sway with Rancière. For he takes the autonomy of art to be inseparable from its heteronomy. His writings on art repeatedly seek to think autonomy and heteronomy together. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, art ‘reframes the division of the forms of our experience’ (AR: 133). This understanding of it grows with the loss of any conviction that there are

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‘rules of concord’ between nature and society or culture. Thus Schiller, Baudelaire and Adorno all recognize in art the promise of a humanity to come. This is what makes the modern withdrawal from the world into art, as supremely in Flaubert, seem, not only possible, but precious.27 But the promise of a humanity to come has nothing to do with political projects. Art does not come to the aid of political emancipation. Nor does it provide models or blueprints, ideal, utopian or exemplary forms. It functions as a metapolitics. Equally, the autonomy of art is not that of its ‘making’ as championed by modernism. Art is autonomous in that it materially anticipates another configuration of the community that has yet to find material embodiment itself. Art ‘suspends’ the ordinary forms of sensory experience. It constructs spaces specific to it, invites us to share the common world differently, functions as a dream of a place where bodies, images, spaces and times are creatively redistributed, new organizations of identities, of language and noise, the visible and invisible become possible. Art offers a different world inseparable from its promise of ‘a new life for individuals and the community’ (AR: 133), holds out a promise of emancipation that resists any final surrender either to militancy or to the market. But art also everywhere confuses the things which are intrinsic to it and the things which belong to ordinary life (as is evident in the ship’s siren sounds in Varèse’s Ionizations, or, abundantly, Joyce’s Ulysses). In this respect, its condition is mélange or ‘jumbling [brouillement]’, its condition, in one sense, disorder. It confuses different worlds and obscures the frontiers between them, blurring all hierarchies of subjects and publics. It offers itself to ‘n’importe qui’, anyone at all, indifferently. This, its democratic and egalitarian essence, its abiding promise, has a basis in historical specificity and conditionality. The work of art can offer its promise only because of its heteronomy, because it expresses, not just a free community, but the disposition of the community from which it springs. It holds out a promise of a community to come because it is art, but also because it is not just art. It ‘constructs the forms of a world to come in the interior of an existing world’ (MA: 65). In La Mésentente, Rancière discusses Kant and the figure of the royal palace, which for Kant can be an object of aesthetic pleasure, irrespective of its symbolic value, uses or associations (power, wealth, privilege, injustice, etc.). But though the pleasure in question is in principle available to all, and it therefore projects a conception of an aesthetic community, to which such associations can be indifferent, it also projects a certain idea of a historical community, to which they cannot be. The aesthetic community is universal in intention. It includes the

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‘sans-part’, those without a stake, but therefore remains a virtual community. The work of art is always closed in on itself. It is inaccessible to thought and ‘indisponible’ (MA: 51), not disposable according to the subject’s desires or ends. It promises the possession of a new world, but in a work that the subject ‘cannot possess in any way’ (AR: 136; cf. MA: 51). It has no means of passing from the question of the aesthetic to that of the symbolic value of the palace, or of addressing the question of the symbolic through the question of aesthetic value. In that respect, it remains powerless, unworldly, remote. The subject of art is promised a new world but also denied any knowledge of a means by which that world might be realized: art promotes the hallucination of ‘a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy’ (AR: 150). A gulf inexorably yawns between the anticipation of a future and its realization, between promise and fulfilment, constituting both the significance and the nec plus ultra of the aesthetic realm. Rancière has explored this gulf more fully in recent work, notably the third chapter of Le Spectateur émancipé (SE: 51–82). Here again art changes ‘the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible’, allowing for ‘new modes of political construction of the common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation’. It ‘disidentifies’ the subject (strips it of its prior identifications), but we cannot ‘calculate the dis-identifying effect’: it points beyond ‘political subjectivation’ to new modes of individuation that ‘cancel any [prior] form of it’, but these are not predictable. Art is capable of producing otherwise implausible dis-identifications, as when nineteenth-century European labourers begin to appropriate the ‘sorrows’ of idle romantic heroes like Werther and René. Dis-identification is not controllable: indeed, this is one of art’s great virtues, but there is no reason why, on that basis, it should bring about ‘either an understanding of the state of the world’ or ‘a decision to change it’. The ‘processes of dissociation’ may be random, unlikely, untimely, and cannot be reduced to or subsumed within a political programme. ‘Such breaks can happen anywhere and at any time’; they, their effects and their efficacy are intermittent and ‘cannot be calculated’. Of course, the undecidability of the relation between artistic stimulus and political response has by now become a feature of an ironical postmodern art of the struggle against the ‘society of the spectacle’. But this art by now is constantly telling us what we already know, and merely ‘ends up revolving around itself and capitalizing on the undecidability in question’ (SE: 76). More to the point are other contemporary aesthetics – as in, say, the art of Pedro Costa, Portuguese film-maker – ‘in which the form is not split off from the construction of a social relation or

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from the realization of a capacity that belongs to everyone’ and which is concerned with partage, reworking ‘the frame of our perceptions’ and the ‘dynamism of our affects’, and opening up ‘new passages towards new forms of subjectivation’. But no such art ‘can avoid the aesthetic cut that separates outcomes from intentions and precludes any direct path towards an “other side” of words and images’ (SE: 81–2). In this respect, once more, art appears to thrive on an incipiently melancholic sense of limit. Rancière knows this full well, as the oscillations between his exquisite appreciation of both Costa’s art and his grim evocations of the paltry shanty towns of Lisbon, the unaltered desperation of the lives lived within them, discreetly demonstrate. The work of ‘suspension’ that Rancière identifies with art is closely connected to his understanding of its limit. This is particularly clear in the case of literature and ‘the “limit” [“échec”] of realism’ (PM: 98). In ‘Le Corps de la lettre: Bible, épopée, roman’ (CM: 87–113), Rancière distinguishes between two conceptions of the relationship between literature and the world, the figurative, in Auerbach’s Mimesis, and the figural, in Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy. For Auerbach, any subject whatsoever can be represented, and can be represented alongside any other subject, whilst, for Kermode, the representation of the material world in the novel is always an event of writing. Rancière’s concept of the limit of realism steers a course between the two (see PM: ch. 7). The limit of novelistic realism is the final, categorical unavailability of the world it designates. For all the scrupulous minuteness with which Dostoevsky depicts Raskolnikov’s room, we will never enter it, nor see the buttons on Monsieur Grandet’s coat or Charles Bovary’s fabulous casquette. These remote worlds are always comprehensively deprived of any material or sensory concreteness, and any thought of adequation is idle. For the limit of realism is inexorable, decisive, and can never be surpassed. It decrees that literature is language, and can never rejoin the corporeal world. The argument might appear closer to Kermode’s than Auerbach’s, but this ignores the importance for Rancière of the moment of surprise at the self-evidence of the limit of realism. Flaubert describes Charles Bovary’s casquette with a sedulous, almost maniacal exhaustiveness and precision. He does not for all that change the condition of literature. Flaubert’s text itself will never transcend the mute expressiveness that it attributes to its object and, in that respect, the famous casquette is emblematic of realism itself. Flaubert indicates a paradox beyond which his novel cannot go, for the novelist must write as though realism knew no limit, as though his description were continuous with the world, rather than categorically distant from it. The language of literature is

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‘dumb speech’ or ‘mute chatter’ (PM: passim). Rancière both sustains and reverses the Platonic critique of writing at the end of the Phaedrus, in that writing is mute, incapable of participating in the living world of the logos, of process, exchange, alteration, but also ‘bavarde’, chattering on endlessly and senselessly, an orphan language deprived of the relationship of authority and legitimacy conferred by the voice. The world of literature is that of ‘insensible sensation’ or the ‘quasi-corporeal’ (CM: passim), and the novel indicates an apparently embodied world that, in reality, forever awaits embodiment. The condition of literature, then, is one of suspension, a ‘quasicorporeality’ fundamentally analogous to that of Gauny’s or Fanfernot’s political dream. It is also possible to turn this argument in other directions: Benjamin famously found in Leskov a paradigm of the storyteller for whom the language of narrative art is still ‘rooted in experience’, a link broken by ‘the new technological age and the traumatic experience of the First World War’ (PL: 159; cf. Benjamin 1979: 83–109). But literature is ‘already itself the loss of this experience’, this form ‘of continuity between words and life’ (PL: 159). Furthermore, if literature is the suspension of politics, it is also the beginning 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). But literature remains the very figure of the interim, in that its worlds forever await realization, their ghostly bodies forever waiting to take on flesh. Hence the fact that literature promises where it cannot satisfy. Literature is the very paradigm of ‘the unfinished song’, the idea that has yet to take material form. In a world given over to intermittencies, the interim matters. The interim is the ‘morne plaine’, designating a specific temporality between events, lacking in events, in which the certainty of events is possible only insofar as memory and logic insist on them. The suspended worlds of art inhabit the interim, represent a kind of anticipatory work within it. Art is a mode of preserving a principle of liberty which requires the continuance offered by art as its guarantee, and also a form of patience within the interim, a way of suffering the interim.28 Politique de la littérature offers a counsel 2of patience, conceives of such a counsel as intrinsic to literature, not least, in contradistinction to traditional Marxist or leftist aesthetics, in which historical impatience becomes inseparable from a certain impatience with art. Rancière cites an obvious example of this impatience, Sartre’s critique of Flaubert (in L’Idiot de la famille; see PL: 15–16). Modern literature has insistently provided a figure for this kind of impatience, in the protagonists – Ruy Blas, Emma Bovary, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jude the Obscure – who ‘seek to transform the words

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and stories in books into the matter of their own life’ (PL: 22). These characters cannot rest content with the condition of ‘suspension’. Sartre does not understand the relationship between politics and literature; it is never a question of the artist’s ‘commitment’, his or her artistic ‘intervention’ in political struggles, or the more or less direct representation of political forces and social structures in art. This argument is the major burden of Politique de la littérature, its full complexity most amply expressed in the first and most significant essay in the volume. There are at least three forms of the politics of literature, regimes of its expression, forms of equality that they define: firstly, the equality of all subjects, languages, discourses, their ‘indifference’, as in Flaubert, as opposed to the hierarchical differentiations of classical aesthetics; secondly, the equality of ‘dumb things’ whose silent expressiveness says more than princes or orators (including revolutionary orators, as in Michelet); thirdly, the (Deleuzeanly) molecular equality of ‘reasonless states of things’ as opposed to the differentiating structures of hermeneutic ‘chatter [bavardage]’, as in Dos Passos’s USA. But these three forms of equality do not smoothly coincide. Michelet’s ‘hymn of the people’ (PL: 39) is not reconcilable with Flaubert’s doctrine of pure art or the levelling principle of social atomization in the Dos Passos trilogy. For it involves the very act of decision that they repudiate. Literature holds the different forms of equality together in an unresolved ‘tension’ with one another (PL: 35–6), therefore running up against the limit constituted by its own radical disembodiment. This is no longer just a question of the impossibility of embodying a literary world. If there is more than ‘just one politics of literature’ at issue (PL: 30), the implications of this are larger than might first appear. Literature holds more disparate ideas of democracy and equality in suspension than could ever conceivably be embodied together. There is thus a kind of irreducible excess of forms of democracy and equality in the eternally frozen utopia that is literature, which no teleology could possibly accommodate. The iron concatenations of end-driven plots may seem teleological in their implication. Literature itself, however, always traces a limit to teleological schemes, to the very structure of thought that makes teleology possible. THE EXAMPLE OF ROSSELLINI But Rancière also supplies us with another way of thinking about the relationship between art and intermittency which pays more attention to the internalization or thematization of the relationship within the artwork. I shall exemplify this with reference to Rossellini’s neo-realist

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films, taking my bearings from but also supplementing Rancière’s essay on Europa ’51 (CV: 139–71). Rancière’s choice of Rossellini’s early films to exemplify the court voyage is an inspired one, for they are very much about ‘short voyages to the land of the people’. Perhaps the classic instance would be the second narrative in Paisà. Joe is an MP with the US forces occupying Naples in June 1944. Street-urchin Pasquale steals his boots while he is drunk. By chance, Joe comes across Pasquale again. He forces the boy to take him to his home, hoping to retrieve the boots. But ‘home’ is about homelessness. Pasquale lives in an extraordinary, vast, cavernous space inhabited by the wretched of the Neapolitan earth. These fantasmal figures have been doubly, triply, quadruply displaced by, have always been on the wrong side of, history, war and invasion, fascism. In Rancière’s terms, here there is no chez soi; the chez soi is indelibly marked by loss. Joe contemplates the scene in silent awe, and Pasquale fades from the scene. The last, brief, shot, of Joe’s jeep driving down a narrow alley and out into the sun again, boots presumably forgotten, is powerfully if mutely expressive. Though he does not cite it, various of Rancière’s themes come together in the narrative. It tells the story of a ‘short voyage’ made possible by art, and also points to its limit. The ‘voyage’ also involves a new partage du sensible. Various distributions of wealth, power and status are at stake. When, in the compelling images that constitute the final sequence, Rossellini makes wide-eyed Joe confront mass destitution, he compels him to share the world afresh. Furthermore, Joe is the spectator’s means of partage, his or her point of access to (literally) a realm of darkness. If art ‘suspends’ the quotidian ‘world as sensed’, if indeed it creates new worlds particular to the works in which they appear; if it urges us to share the world differently, disposes bodies and images in new configurations, and challenges our customary, thoughtless distributions of space and time, the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, the second narrative of Paisà in its simplicity is paradigmatic of this. Furthermore, it is paradigmatic of the mode of aesthetic ‘suspension’ in Rossellini’s early cinema. Rossellini’s early films repeatedly both chart the experience of a character who undergoes a court voyage and allow the cinemagoer’s experience of ‘redistribution’ to mirror the character’s. At the most obvious of levels, the neo-realist genius was partly aiming to introduce Italian audiences to a new experience of their own nation and fellow-nationals. For Italian history after the Risorgimento had progressively brought certain Italian cultures out of obscurity, ensuring that modern Italy assumed new dimensions beyond the average Italian cinemagoer’s horizons. What Rancière notes as the

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repeated theme of the revelatory or strange encounter is endemic to the court voyage. Characters and audiences together come face to face with (a more or less astounding) other world, from Russia as it appears to the Italian units on the Eastern front (L’uomo dalla croce), to Greece as experienced by the Italian participants in a largely forgotten campaign (Un pilota ritorna), the extraordinary marshes of the Po delta in the last narrative in Paisà, the bombed-out cityscapes of Berlin in 1946 (Germania anno zero) or the desolate, black landscapes and smoke clouds that loom up as one of the great spectacles of modern cinema in Stromboli, terra di Dio.29 The redistributions of the sensible world in these films are selfevident. Any one of them could have been paradigmatic for Rancière. This makes it the more curious that he should have focused almost entirely on Europa ’51, one of the less popular of Rossellini’s early films,30 and one of his least adventurous ones. Both Rancière and Rossellini have a crucial stake in it, however, for Europa ’51 is about an event. Rancière says this quite explicitly. Something happens: ‘a child commits suicide’ (CV: 141). The young son of wealthy, sophisticated, haute-bourgeoise Irene (Ingrid Bergman) throws himself into a stairwell, and dies soon afterwards. But this of course is not the event in question. Irene’s affluent lifestyle has been holding her at a protective distance from ‘l’intolérable’, the stark intolerability of things (CV: 141–2). Her son’s suicide abruptly draws her into contact with it, or rather, back into contact: the film has fleetingly informed us that mother and son spent the war years avoiding bombs in England. By 1951, however, like the social stratum to which she belongs, Irene has already bracketed the war off as a historical episode. As Rancière notes, the disturbed and uncomprehending mother–son relationship is clearly interpretable as a symptom of repressed memories. The early sequences of the film register the fitful, edgy manifestations of the relationship within a larger family and social life patently ill-suited to accommodating, let alone dealing with it. Indeed, the early part of the film is effectively about a historically specific instance of the Benjaminian ‘shock defence’. But Irene’s learning curve reverses the vector Benjamin describes. Irene undergoes an unremitting exposure to ‘catastrophe in permanence’. Rancière clearly distinguishes this exposure from ‘trauma’, aware that, certainly in contemporary usage, ‘trauma’ implies the isolability of the experience in question (‘life’s not like that’) and ‘the rationality of profits and losses’ (‘we can learn from this’, CV: 143). Irene recognizes that the modern ‘state of emergency’ is always with us, and the rest of the film is about the consequences of the event that forces her into this recognition. In

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Rancière’s terms, these consequences are another court voyage and a new partage du sensible, though Irene will find herself unable to return from the ‘voyage’ in question. Rancière tells the story of this ‘voyage’ with blinding clarity. Irene begins with her Communist cousin Andrea, who persuades her to translate her grief into practical action by coming to the aid of a poor family on the outskirts of the city, and takes her to visit them. ‘Au bout du tramway, le peuple’ (CV: 145): here, at the last stop that designates the frontier of her world, Irene discovers another one. But ‘ici ni bars, ni bistrots, ni couleur locale’ (CV: 146), none of the conventional signs of ‘the people’ (nor any ‘popular culture’):31 the camera duly turns from one blank, empty shot of a shabby block of flats to another, and another. The Communist insistence, however, on taking account of a workingclass community is only the beginning of Irene’s trajectory. Rancière is scathing about the system of understanding which motivates Andrea’s own ‘voyages’. For Andrea’s concern with the ‘class struggle’ insists on relation, the connection between the inhabitants of the blocks of flats and the ‘scientific’ discourses about them. ‘Derrière la douleur individuelle . . . la grande douleur sociale dont [Andrea] connaît la raison’ (CV: 145): Andrea’s interest is in the reasons for misery, and brings with it an investment in reasoning misery away. By contrast, Irene’s true ‘voyage’ starts when she goes back to the end of the tramway-line and visits the pays du peuple on her own. Thereafter, in a staggered (and staggering) series, she and the film progress from one encounter to another: the confused and confusing scene on the bank of the river as the body of a boy is dragged from it; the ensuing scene in the hovel of Giulietta, the loving mother of six children by different fathers (mesmerisingly played by the great Giulietta Masina); the factory in which Irene works so that Giulietta can spend time with her current lover; the dying prostitute to whom Irene ministers; the maddened, desperate young delinquent she persuades to give himself up. The image that climaxes the series is one (precisely) of partage, as Irene’s head finally shares the pillow of the demented epileptic whose suffering she has also faithfully promised to share. Rancière and Rossellini’s logic seems clear enough: Irene’s encounter with l’intolérable catches her up in a sheer overflow of generosity of spirit that takes on its own momentum and dictates the very course of the film. As Bergman’s extraordinarily subtle and beautiful performance makes clear, Irene’s extra-vagance even surprises and puzzles the heroine. She herself seems increasingly not to understand what it happening to her, but then, a fortiori, nor does society, represented by

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husband, parents, the law, the religious, medical and psychiatric establishments. As Irene’s will to generosity overflows, becomes seemingly unstaunchable, so the forces that seek to place, understand and finally incarcerate it become the more inexorable. Irene ends in the asylum herself, her hand raised in benediction to a group of her ‘people’ who stand in awe beneath her window. The gesture, of course, is saintly, as Rancière notes. But he also notes that it faintly retraces the gesture of the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill. This is not an idle association, since Irene and Andrea have previously walked beneath the grave figure on horseback. If, however, the stoic philosopher-emperor, friend of slaves, widows and minors, John Stuart Mill’s man of infinite tenderness, is usually assumed to be extending his hand in a gesture of clemency, Rancière also quotes Taine: the Emperor is seeking to command the attention of his soldiers ‘ “parce qu’il a quelque chose d’important à leur dire” ’.32 The significance of the tiny recollection of the statue in Bergman’s gesture does not end here. Rancière goes on to suggest that it defines itself against the work of Eisenstein the revolutionary cinéaste-emperor. Eisenstein’s ‘mastery’ means that he can actually ‘make statues move’ (Potemkin), and marks ‘the fall of idols’ (October) as part of the transformative historical process (CV: 164). By contrast, Rossellini refuses Eisensteinian positivity. The wisdom of Europa ’51 lies, no doubt, in its austere, melancholic presentation of the meaning of a rare event, but also in what Rancière calls ‘an impossible morality of politics’. As in Europa ’51, political morality begins in and is never separable from an irreducible work of mourning which, if it ever existed within revolutions, might conceivably save us from having to mourn revolutions themselves (CV: 171). Irene is no doubt intended to be a secular, latterday version of the ‘fool for Christ’ (1 Corinthians 4: 10). The look of kindly bafflement that frequently crosses Bergman’s face is almost magically expressive. Even as she is interrogated, immured, deserted by family and friends, her face and body show no traces of anger or despair. She is wholly and helplessly transfigured by a rare excess that at once both disempowers and massively empowers her. She is, genuinely, bewildered that the world should be as she has learnt it is. When he says that Europa ’51 is ‘a film about the event, a film suited to [propre à] instructing us as to what “something happens” means’, Rancière finally himself means something very special (CV: 141). He also indicates why the event should be so rare an occasion in his work, why he should so seldom allude to it. As the subject of an event, Irene is caught up in a process of what Badiou calls apagogic reason. In apagogic reason, I suppose the truth

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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’ (PU: 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. Apagogic reason is actually a peculiarly daring form of thought. It does not know where it is going, is an ‘adventurous pilgrimage in disorder’ and imposes a responsibility that can only be assumed voluntarily (EE: 279).33 The paradigm of the apagogic reason specifically of the ‘fool for Christ’ is St Francis of Assisi who, like Irene, in Rossellini’s film about him, Francesco, giullare di Dio, is pitted against an incredulous world. But perhaps the most famous secular example of apagogic reason is a figure often compared to St Francis, Don Quixote. The parallel should not surprise us, since Cervantes himself suggests it in the novel. However, unlike St Francis or Irene, Quixote is a profoundly ambivalent figure, which makes him an appropriate touchstone for Rancière as the other two could not be. A particular Quixote does indeed loom large in Rancière’s work: not the comic victim of the worldly, the figure of fun beloved of eighteenth-century England (Defoe, Smollett, Fielding), but the melancholic, modern European version of the Knight of the Sad Countenance that runs from Unamuno through Ortega and Lukács to Foucault. Quixote takes issue with a partage du sensible by wilfully manufacturing correspondences between art and life. In doing so, he defects from a communal truth, disputes an aesthesis, insistently declares that correspondence is not pre-ordained, that there are no rules that govern it. Nothing will ever categorically disprove the assumption of a correspondence between the chivalric romances and the world, but of course nothing will ever definitively bear it out, either. The apagogic commitment can neither finally settle for the world, nor categorically declare its victory over it. Apagogic reason is therefore inextricably entwined with melancholia. At the end of Rancière’s essay ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, melancholy, and particularly aesthetic melancholy, becomes an explicit theme. The term appears on two distinct occasions, and with two distinct connotations. Rancière clearly wishes to resist a melancholy emergent in the nineties which he identifies chiefly with Lyotard’s late work, dismissing the laments for the political destiny of art produced by a contemporary ‘mourning choir’ (AR: 150). So, too, in Le Partage du sensible he suggests that, in late Lyotard, ‘ “aesthetics” ’ has turned into ‘the privileged place where the tradition of critical

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thought has metamorphosed into the thought of mourning’ (PS: 8).34 He makes more or less the same point at the end of La Mésentente, with reference to Lyotard and the Holocaust.35 In the final sentence of the essay, however, he also refers to ‘a certain melancholy’ to which art condemns those who take its promise seriously (AR: 151). This can hardly be the Lyotardian melancholy, which Rancière rather understands as a kind of dereliction, an abandonment of the aesthetic promise. It is rather the melancholy of an intermittent world, of the ‘unfinished song’. As such, it is a melancholy inseparable from Rancière’s own concept of the limits of the aesthetic realm. Though Rancière would wish not to be convicted of melancholy, it repeatedly turns out to be present in his work. There is even an ethics of melancholy in Rancière. Melancholy functions both as a scrupulous refusal of the contemporary will to contentment, its disregard for the contemporary ‘state of emergency’, and a cautionary brake on a century and more of fruitless and finally bankrupt ‘left positivity’. We might recall, here, that, as an expression of the promise that cannot be satisfied, literature works precisely to separate language from the mirage of incarnation, not least, insofar as this is a political mirage. The gaunt, curved figure of Don Quixote is like a sober question mark held up to politics that politics, by its very nature, tends to avoid. The antithesis of Don Quixote is Althusser, as described in Rancière’s essay on the two of them in La Chair des mots: I have considered this opposition elsewhere (Gibson 2005: 73–4). To refuse the ethics of melancholy out of hand is to court the Althusserian risk. The thinker whom, in Chroniques des temps consensuels, Rancière has recently presented as attuned to a certain melancholy ethics is Foucault (CH: 183–7). Foucault promises no life to come. His work is sunk in life from the start, police decisions, the cries of the incarcerated, the scrutiny of afflicted bodies, but he has no theory of what we should do with our knowledge of the life in question. Foucault never had any idea of ‘where we might go from here’. The ‘philosophical displacement’ that he put into practice insidiously disrupted established notions of the relations between positive knowledge, philosophical consciousness and action. The philosopher no longer occupies a central position within these relations, and he or she does not furnish revolt with any particular consciousness, still less ‘arm the masses’. Philosophers can do no more than offer the possibility of connecting their work with other logics and knowledges, in a manner that may introduce a grain of sand into the machine. This does not mean that, for Foucault, politics merely disappears into a network of relations. But it does mean that ‘politics is always a leap which no knowledge will justify and which no politi-

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cal thought will supply’, a leap provoked by what Rancière describes as a sentiment, a more or less abrupt persuasion that the status quo is intolerable. But the other side of ‘the sentiment of the intolerable’ (l’intolérable, again) is the melancholy of the worlds in which Foucault pervasively submerges us. Rancière beautifully proposes that we learn to listen to Althusser as we listen to Mandelstam’s haunting plea from the prison camp near Vladivostok: ‘À jamais souviens-toi de ma parole pour son goût de malheur et de fumée’: ‘Remember my words forever, for their taste of smoke and misfortune’ (CM: 177). Another way of putting this would be to suggest that Althusser is (and really always was) only readable in Foucauldian tones. Althusser suffered from a specific form of lunacy, the refusal to think the possible delirium of history, its oscillations, its mixture of sense and nonsense, frenzies and stases, manias and depressions. The crucial Althusserian conviction is that history can never be mad, never lack logic or sense. The Althusserian disaster was the consequence of his failure to see himself as conceivably a Don Quixote in the desert, to imagine that, whilst his thought might have all the persuasive power of Flaubert’s description of Bovary’s casquette, it might also be destined to encounter the same limit. Althusser altogether shared the classic Marxist proscription of a melancholic logic which is at one and the same time Foucauldian, and a truth of modern art: a logic according to which politics is rare, the waste spaces that surround it, daunting, and art a major form, both of thinking through those spaces, and thinking those spaces through. NOTES 1. But contrast what is effectively the third volume of Marx’s French ‘trilogy’, The Civil War in France. However destined to defeat, the Commune is a ‘completely new historical creation’. The interferences of the foreign powers testify to the internationalization of the class war. Thus the Communards are workers who have become proletarians. See Marx 1933 [1871]: 42. 2. Cf. the negativity of the most inventive passage in The Class Struggles in France, on the peasant insurrection: ‘The symbol that expressed their entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsily cunning, knavishly naïve, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world historical piece of buffoonery – this symbol bore the unmistakeable features of the class that represents barbarism within civilization’. Marx also comments dismissively on ‘the unleashed property fanaticism of the peasant’. The peasant is driven to socialism only by taxation, and will be ‘raised’ only by a proletarian government. See Marx (1934 [1895]): 60, 71, 115. 3. In the terms of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the negation of the negation

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

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Intermittency which is lack born of scarcity is the primary and fundamental form of human praxis, the shaping and organization of the world relative to need and desire. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx refers to it as ‘sensuous human activity’ (Marx 1998 [1846]: 572). See ME, especially 45–9; and Livy (1967): Book 2, xxxii. The quotation is from MI: 164. May emphasizes the rarity of politics for Rancière where Ruby ignores it. But May’s Rancière is nonetheless a progressivist, his understanding of ‘equality’ North American. For another unpersuasive conflation of Rancière’s politics with social-democratic progressivism and postmodern US liberalism, see Chambers and O’Rourke (2009). Contrast Hewlett’s precise assertion that Rancière breaks ‘with an Enlightenment concept of progress, without convincingly replacing it with another’ (Hewlett 2007: 106); though even Hewlett assumes an available logic of ‘replacement’. Potte-Bonneville’s brilliant comparison of Rancière and Foucault distinguishes exactly between Rancière’s commitment to ‘intermittent affirmation’ and Foucault’s to ‘perpetual battle’, but associates only the second and not the first with melancholy (Potte-Bonneville 2006: 183–4). See ME: 10–11, the source of the quotation. Cf. one of the great literary works about the ‘sans-part’ and ‘mésentente’, Büchner’s Woyzeck. For Rancière’s account of Büchner, see CV: 55–73. See Plato (2006): 59. The Athenian: ‘There is a seventh kind of rule which is awarded by lot, and is dear to the Gods and a token of good fortune: he on whom the lot falls is a ruler, and he who fails in obtaining the lot goes away and is the subject; and this we affirm to be quite just’ (III, 690). MI: 148. Rancière is quoting from Jacotot (1836): 109. MI: 154. The logic of inertia is discussed in Chapter IV. Rilke to Lou Salomé, 16 January 1920; (1979): 381; quoted CV: 132. ‘Hobbes . . . founds an alliance between the point of view of science and that of the royal palace, a theoretical tradition I propose to call royal-empiricism. This tradition will nourish the criticism of the French Revolution and of the “metaphysical” rights of man for which Burke will become the champion’. ‘The theoretical and political evil, for Hobbes and the tradition he opens, may be identified in this way: the proliferation of borrowed names, of names that do not resemble any reality, and that kill because they are poorly used, used by people who should not handle them, who have torn them from their context to apply them in a situation that has nothing to do with their context’ (NH: 21–2). For clarity, I have reversed the order of the passages in the text. Or, ‘more precisely, its lumpen’ (PP: 95): thus, after 1848, there is also a decomposition of the bourgeoisie, one that bears the name of its own lumpen, ‘the finance aristocracy’ (PP: 98); on which see Marx (1984 [1852]): 90–1; (1934 [1895]): 33–8, 110–13. There are traces of this in The Civil War in France, but here the ‘narrative of caricature’ conflicts with a narrative of the emergence of an advance guard, the ‘French working-class’ as ‘modern proletariate [sic]’, Marx (1933 [1871]): 62. Not a common term in Rancière’s work. But see for instance the discussion in SP: 7–11. See for example his account of the ‘headlong flight’ of the contemporary ‘realist utopia’, SP: 26.

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18. That gradualism should be characterized by acceleration is therefore only superficially a paradox. 19. Benjamin (1979): 255–66, especially at 262. Of course, given the historical irony at stake here, ‘dryness’ is hardly the point. 20. Quoted Köhler (2004 [2001]): 212. I derive my biographical information largely from Köhler’s book. 21. Rancière is quoting Brecht, 27 May 1943; Brecht (1976): 345. See PL: 139. 22. Brecht, 27 May 1943; (1976): 345. See PL: 138–9. 23. Cf. Adorno (1978 [1951]): 15. For a relevant account of melancholy that compares and contrasts the conception of melancholy in Rancière, Freud and Adorno, see Gibson (2003a). 24. The profound version of the logic at stake here is Lacanian: ‘there is no satisfaction for the individual outside the satisfaction of all’. Lacan (1999 [1986]): 292. 25. Michelet (1973 [1847–56]): 6: 156. Quoted NH: 46, translation slightly modified. 26. For a translation of which see http://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/chalier/1792/address.htm. 27. Rancière argues that the Flaubertian dream of a work of art without purpose, intention, message or point of view is egalitarian in its indifference to all questions of preference or hierarchy. 28. Rancière himself appears reluctant to place himself in this position, holding himself aloof from those who read Mallarmé as ‘the thinker proper to the task of endurance required by the times’. See ‘Le Poète et le philosophe’, PL: 205–29, especially at 207. Cf. also Rancière (1996a). 29. The major early film not exactly conforming to this structure is Viaggio in Italia, where the two main characters do not properly encounter the otherness of Naples and environs until the closing sequence. But they are English, and spiritually impoverished instances of the culture of the victor. 30. It is a mark of this that Europa ’51 has never been shown commercially in Britain. 31. This for Rancière is crucial, as is the fact that Rossellini’s workers do not speak an authentic vernacular. What defines ‘the people’ is a frame, partage, separation (CV: 146). 32. Taine (1965 [1866]): 1. 124; quoted CV: 162–3. 33. For a more extensive account of apagogic reason, including its closeness to irony, see Gibson 2006: 87–8. 34. Cf. his association of Lyotard with an aesthetic which predicts a global catastrophe from which only a God can save us (MA: 62). 35. Elsewhere, Rancière has read Lyotard more positively, as capturing the ‘latest trick played by the aesthetic unconscious on the Freudian unconscious’. The aesthetic unconscious repeatedly obstructs those, like Freud, who seek to think it, unmelancholically, without ambivalence, in terms of hope, effectiveness and remedy. See Rancière (2001a): 75–8.

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Conclusion: Prolegomena to a Critical Synthesis

BADIOU AND SPECULATIVE REALISM This book has identified and described five original, distinct but overlapping conceptions of historical time more or less explicit in the work of five recent and contemporary French philosophers. It has assumed that these conceptions are important in themselves. As should be abundantly clear, however, they cannot be smoothly amalgamated into a consistent whole. The main task of this conclusion is therefore to establish the outlines of a coherent thought of intermittency, isolating a series of propositions from the foregoing material, marshalling them and placing them in relation to one another, whilst also supplementing them. In so short a space, I cannot hope comprehensively to pin down the theoretical structure that emerges. I shall rather raise certain questions and, in addressing them, try to avoid making the answers appear invariable and final, not in the hope of rendering the structure as a whole provisional or indeterminate, but instead by way of admitting that it is open to radical development. We may take certain bearings from what has been the most significant new development in continental (here Franco-British) philosophy in the past few years, speculative realism, as represented in major books by Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant. Speculative realism is crucial because, after what Lyotard foresaw would be a time of theoretical ‘slackening’ (Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 82) – pragmatisms, presentisms, vitalisms, neo-theologies, soft ethicisms – it insists on returning us to key principles, not least, by reinjecting a scientific toughness of mind and formidable logical rigour into philosophy, on the one hand, and insisting that philosophy does not tell us what we would like to hear, on the other. The emphasis on beginning from what modern science has ungainsayably told us is very important. Chief among the principles are four that the philosophers in this book, 246

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and the book itself, commonly seek to sustain: a conviction of the void, ‘two histories’, contingency, and the habitual (but not necessary) non-appearance of contingency as such. I shall begin by considering how speculative realism confirms and elaborates these principles.1 But at a certain point, I shall also reintroduce Badiou into the picture, as the major thinker of intermittency. Badiou has been very influential on the speculative realists (which has also allowed them to develop a significantly different tradition of reading him to the dominant, politically inspired one). However, his thought also offers a particular, crucial supplement to speculative realism. This in turn will eventually lead to a third mode of reading Badiou that I associate with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Jean-Michel Rabaté and myself.2 There is perhaps no better place to start from with speculative realism than Nietzsche’s superb account of the implication of species annihilation, which I shall unforgivably shrink to a single sentence: ‘And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened’ (Nietzsche 1979 [1873]: 79; quoted Brassier 2010 [2007]: 205). As a great deal of modern thought has urged us, we must think beyond the human parenthesis, think it in relation to what is beyond it without recuperating that ‘beyond’, for example, in what Hamilton Grant calls a ‘runaway ethico-teleology’ or an ‘economic-teleological principle’ (Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 104, 106), for example, that ‘ “the earth is there for the sake of man” ’ (Ritter 1984 [1810]: 184; quoted Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 106). Speculative realism requires that we think a different time, a time beyond both the scope and the historical experience of the human world, a time indifferent to it.3 This is the time that modern science has increasingly borne in on us, a ‘cosmological time’ within which ‘anthropomorphic time’ is ‘nested’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 58). Meillassoux calls it ‘ancestral time’. It exists beyond the human world as and in objects. This is strikingly evidenced in ‘arche-fossils’, materials that bear the traces, not of prehistoric life, but of ‘phenomena anterior even to the emergence of life . . . such as the radioactive isotope whose rate of decay provides an index of the decay of rock samples, or the starlight whose luminescence provides an index of the age of distant stars’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 49). So, too, in Hamilton Grant’s account of it, Schellingian Naturphilosophie may involve a one-world physics; it nonetheless also institutes if it does not exactly insist on a double thought of temporality, and this is part of its importance here. Schelling is concerned with ‘becomings prior to mind, or nature’, with nature as ‘unconditioned’ or ‘unthinged’, a nexus of forces for which ‘finite human experience can provide no standard’ (Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 107, 109,

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121). Nature cannot be deduced, Kantianly, from a priori principles, the nature of our minds. Humanity ties nature to no determination at all; nature will extinguish humanity as it has stars, and equally produce wholly new species. At the same time, the need to think species annihilation stipulates a thought of historical caesura. What we know geologically, for instance, means that the Leibnizian assurance ‘of continuity and plenitude’ can no longer be sustained (Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 123). Nature is not thinkable apart from catastrophic rifts, as heterochronic. The ‘timescales’ involved here, the historical developments in question, are beyond ‘the phenomenological capacity not only of individuals, but also of any and all species’ (Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 127). Nature does not descend to the systemic level of one of its products. Time itself necessarily exceeds any system whatever that seeks to measure it, not least in its splits and divisions. To think otherwise is always to think ‘ethico-teleologically’, whether on behalf of God or man. Insofar as it insists that we separate a specifically human, phenomenal temporality from others distinct from it, Hamilton Grant’s plurality of times coincides with Meillassoux’s dualism. Modern science increasingly informs us of a (radically material, unromantic, non-mystical, thoroughly secular) ‘other temporality’, to which the birth of the universe, the earth and life belong, as, equally surely, do the future dates of the collision of the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way, the incineration of the earth by the sun, the death of starlight and of cosmic matter. The existence of this time is only deniable at the risk of collapsing the gap between supposedly serious thought and creationism. But of course the issues are not in the first instance empirical. Speculative realism insists that the question is what thought, logic can make of our knowledge of a time ‘anterior to the possibility of [human] experience’ and to representation, articulation (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 52). Bracketed within the vast expanses of objectively existent, non-human time – and the speculative realist insists that thought must orientate itself according to a grasp of this radical temporal excess over the human – the human intellect is nothing. Its creations, not just its infinity of theoretical and cognitive constructions but its legends, myths, romances, Gods, psychologies, social formations, historical narratives, amount to nothing, mere humanisms; hence the starting-point for thought, the void and ‘two histories’. Brassier in particular conceives of ours as the age of ‘nihil unbound’, experiencing as never before the impact of the steadily emerging history of scientific discovery on the apparent solidities on which we have traditionally depended. What Wilfrid Sellars calls the ‘scientific image’

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of ourselves provided by physics, neuro-physiology, evolutionary biology and cognitive science is swiftly ruining the ‘folk-psychology’ of the ‘manifest image’ which was the very foundation of ‘our capacity to identify ourselves as human, which is to say, as persons’ (see Sellars 1963: 7, 18; Brassier 2010 [2007]: 3–6). This points in the direction of a drastically ‘eliminative materialism’ along P. M. Churchland’s lines, which seeks to have done with folk-psychology and epiphenomenal constructs such as ‘consciousness’, ‘beliefs’, ‘meanings’ and ‘folksemantical notions’ such as ‘truth and reference’ (Churchland 1989: 276–7; quoted Brassier 2010 [2007]: 14–15, 19). Meanwhile, modern mathematics has made it possible for Badiou to produce an ontology founded on the void and in which we can properly think the fact that Being is nothing, that ‘the question of the meaning of Being’ can be ‘abandoned as an antiquated superstition’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 116). Here Brassier shores Badiou up with François Laruelle, who convincingly posits the existence of ‘the void qua being-nothing’ beyond deconstruction without resorting either to phenomenology or empiricism (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 116). For his part, the Lyotard of The Inhuman asserts that the future occurrence of ‘solar death’ vitiates the ‘ontological temporality’ according to which philosophy has always constituted itself relative to a future, understanding that solar death is something that has ‘already happened’, is even ‘the aboriginal trauma driving the history of human life’; which means that ‘[e]verything is dead already’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 223). Freud remarkably confirms this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, conceiving of the will to an inorganic return as founded on an ‘anterior posteriority proper to physical death which seizes organic temporality but cannot be seized by it’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 236). Nihilism, then: we start with the void, anterior death. But ‘modern’ thought has failed to keep pace with the scientific lesson. Not only that: whilst science has pursued Copernican revolution upon Copernican revolution, philosophy, which, with Kant, famously announces its own Copernican revolution, rather than recognizing how far modern science supplies it with materials of ungainsayable significance, has inaugurated a counter-revolution, exacting the ‘revenge of Ptolemy’ (Meillassoux 2006: 155–78). Modern thought is belated: all now revolves around the knowing subject. From the appearance of postcritical modernity, unknowability becomes a kind of imperious last instance, and traps philosophy in a circle. If the Ding an sich exists, the human subject cannot know it independently of the constituting mind. It has no properties outside the relationship between it ‘and its subjective apprehension’ (Meillassoux 2006: 14–15). Thought cannot

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‘step outside itself’ to gauge the distance between the ‘in-itself’ and the ‘for-us’. Exteriority thus becomes co-extensive with the human frame of reference, whether this last be perceptual, linguistic, discursive, ideological, communal or, indeed, historical. By the same token, the thinker always exists in conjunction with his or her ‘correlate’ (as subjectobject, noesis-noema, language-reference, etc.). Meillassoux calls the assumption of the co-extensivity in question ‘correlationism’ (2006: 18), arguing that it has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to postmodernism. But Kant’s is still a ‘weak’ form of correlationism in that, whilst it tells us that the thing is unknowable, it nonetheless insists that it is thinkable. The forms of things may be inaccessible, but not the forms of logic. However, there are also ‘strong’ forms of correlationism that claim that the thing is no more thinkable than knowable, is no more necessary to thought than to knowledge. We cannot be sure of the absolute truth of any form of logic. On the one hand, this leads to the hypervaluation of a single term beyond logic identified with intellection, consciousness or the vital principle: Hegelian spirit, Schopenhauerian will, Nietzschean will to power, Bergsonian perception charged with memory, Deleuzean life. On the other hand, unknowability grows radical. At length, correlationism spins off a concept of an ineffable alterity, an ‘Altogether-Other’ defined as such by its inaccessibility to cognition: Wittgensteinian mysticism, or Heidegger’s ‘wonder of wonders’, the being of beings (Heidegger 1968 [1929]: 79; quoted Meillassoux 2006: 57). At the same time, paradoxically, all knowledge and thought now appears to emerge from a finite situation, which means that any conception of the universal is merely a mystificatory residue of an outdated metaphysics. This leads to presentism (since the present now solely determines the horizons of knowledge, and ‘the community of thinking beings’ no longer has ‘any concern save with itself’, but is caught up in a ‘communal solipsism’, Meillassoux (2006): 69–70). Various compromises with and capitulations to immediate interest follow hard upon presentism. But at the same time, the logic of correlationism leads inexorably to the contemporary neo-theologies and quasi-religiosities (since ineffability appears to underwrite the concept of a ‘God beyond knowledge’). This may sound contradictory, but such is the fate of the age of the closure of metaphysics, which is increasingly describable as ‘sceptico-fideist’ (Meillassoux 2006: 66) and a historical oddity, a period in which we cannot get things straight. Certainly, Meillassoux’s argument is partly that we must begin to think a temporality in which correlationism itself is no more than an occurrence among others. Correlationism is eminently historiciz-

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able, if within a conspectus that includes ‘ancestrality’. Being is not Heideggerian ‘donation’; not all worlds exist only as they are ‘given-toa-living-being’ (Meillassoux 2006: 33). Indeed, the arche-fossil exposes all correlationisms as ‘extreme idealisms’ (Meillassoux 2006: 36). But even more notable is the audacious move which allows Meillassoux to shift the philosophical ground by bracketing off and grasping the meaning of correlationism as a whole and thinking it inside out. Thought can have access to an absolute which is in Brassier’s terms ‘unbound’. This absolute, however, does not ‘lead us back to any absolutely necessary being’ (Meillassoux 2006: 47). In that respect, Meillassoux’s absolutism actually coincides with correlationism. It does so, however, by asserting that correlationism itself has discovered the absolute. For correlationism establishes a nec plus ultra of Humean doubt regarding sufficient reason. The correlationist assumption is that there is no sufficient reason for any given proposition. One cannot absolutely insist on one’s own reason at the expense of any other. All forms of reason are irremediably factitious, all hypotheses ‘equally licit’ (Meillassoux 2006: 55). But such thought ultimately proceeds beyond itself, in that, if the facticity of reason everywhere lays bare the truth of ungroundedness, then the only thinkable foundation for any kind of thought is irraison, not unreason, but ‘the absence of reason’ (Meillassoux 2006: 56). In this respect, again, speculative realism peremptorily uncovers the nihilism which Nietzsche feared had everywhere begun to stalk modern thought. The absolute is the absolute lack of the absolute, of sufficient reason, which means that the absolute is stated thus: ‘Being and thought must be thought as capable of being quite otherwise’ (Meillassoux, 2006: 61). Everything, from trees to stars to the laws of physics and logic, is capable of becoming other, with no reason at all. It is from this absolute lack of the absolute that the neo-theologian’s ‘belief’ also stems, but it precludes him or her from absolutizing that belief, since it is on the very basis of the absence of the absolute that he or she has declared the belief to be possible. No proposition can protect itself from an admission of its own facticity, its possible ulteriority. But this means that, if irraison is absolute, it also definitively entails the absolute possibility of ‘radical transformation’ (Meillassoux 2006: 77); that is, of events. If one follows the presumption of facticity all the way down, then the proposition must apply to itself, or rather, reintroduce itself as absolute. This absolute is the necessary contingency which correlationism must everywhere presuppose. Facticity expresses what Meillassoux calls the ‘factiality’ of fact, its ineluctable contingency (Meillassoux 2006: 107).4 Only factiality itself escapes the law of factiality; for it

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to be subordinate to its own law would be self-evidently contradictory. The logic here is irreversible: contingency cannot be contingent on something else. If one absolutizes contingency, one just gets more contingency. Here we arrive at my third principle: but we also arrive at what might seem to be a curious anomaly in Meillassoux’s thought, in that he asserts that the laws of nature are contingent but stable. This coincides with a paradox central to my book from beginning to end. I shall reserve my account of Meillassoux’s reasoning for the third section of this chapter, where it will play an important role, here remarking only that the seeming paradox constitutes my fourth key principle: absolute contingency does not absolutely appear as such (to us), and one cannot assume that it might; or, as Brassier says, ‘the absolute contingency of the world’s physical structure is perfectly compatible with the stability of phenomena’ and ‘the stability of appearances’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 82–3). If certain of the principles of the speculative realist project as a whole are key, however, at least two caveats regarding it are also necessary. Firstly: in Badiou’s terms, for the speculative realists, there often seems to be only one truth-domain, science. Meillassoux and Brassier reinsert science and scientific enquiry, above all mathematics, at the centre of philosophical work. Science in effect becomes the sole point of orientation for philosophy. The epistemological focus of speculative realism is clearly necessary to it; but its scientific orientation seals it into a predominantly epistemological set of concerns. This dictates certain limits. Brassier appears to think of nihilism as ‘an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: xi), but does speculative realism really have anything significant to tell us about history, politics, aesthetics, ethics? Compared with Badiou’s radically ‘subtractive’ methodology, even whilst expanding the scope of thought, it also confines it. Brassier in particular sometimes appears, not only to write off anthropocentrism, but to be almost indifferent even to a degree zero of the human thing. The speculative realist attempt to reaffirm the indissoluble connection between philosophy and science is as plausible as Badiou’s insistence that the integral bond between philosophy and politics is not at an end. But for Badiou, there must be no philosophical conflation of truth with a single, privileged domain at the expense of the others. To suture philosophy to either science or to politics would notably exclude the relation of philosophy to love and art. But if, in speculative realist terms, modern philosophy has failed to keep pace with modern science, so too it has with modern literature. From H. G. Wells to Musil, Woolf, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, to name but a few, modern literature has repeatedly sought to conceive of a time

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exempt from human thought, to think anthropomorphic together with ancestral time. A speculative realist would presumably argue that, as contrasted with mathematics, the means by which literature effects this are representational, inextricably bound up with affect, and therefore always problematic. But this is to fail to understand how representation and affect function as aspects of a literary thought (of which more later). So, too, as Badiou has amply demonstrated with reference to Mallarmé and Beckett, modern literature has repeatedly shown itself capable of taking its bearings from a concept of the void, and doing so as intently as modern science. Here we may coincide with the speculative realists whilst also reversing them: if the Big Bang, the death of the sun and ‘the oldest formations of the earth’5 all teach us the lesson of nihilism and absolute contingency, so do Kleist and Rimbaud, not least insofar as their writing is a birth ex nihilo, a purely contingent event, and realizes a seeming impossibility. No one could have seen them coming. In the end, Rimbaud, an obscure, unprecedented nobody arriving from nowhere, presents us with a world as distinct from the human world that went before it as ancestral time and the time of extinction are distinct from human time. My second caveat regarding speculative realism is closely linked to the first. If Wells, Musil, Woolf, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet think both ancestral and anthropomorphic time, they also think a relation between them. For Meillassoux and Brassier, any such thought is problematic if not unallowable. Once again, the epistemological thesis would appear to be all. Here Brassier’s account of Badiou is particularly revealing. If Badiou’s subtractive ontology is of major importance, for Brassier, his theory of the event is not, and can be left to one side. It is startling to find Brassier remarking that, for Badiou, ‘[t]hinking is all that matters’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 115). This hardly squares either with Badiou’s conception of truth or his personal involvements in truth-procedures. If the statement holds good at all, it does so for the Badiou on whom Brassier has already performed his amputation. The claim is far more convincingly made of the speculative realists themselves. The real difficulty, however, lies, not with the claim itself, but its absolute separation of the two worlds. Here thinking takes the side of the scientific revelation and ancestral time, casting anthropomorphic time aside as it does so. That it should do so might appear to be a logical consequence of the critique of correlationism: it is imperative that the thinker effect a clear division between two categories that correlationism insists on blurring. But this is to assume that the question of cognition is the only one at stake in the relation between human and inhuman, that all that matters in our relation to what is not us is whether we know it, and, if we do,

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what we know of it and how we know it. But there are other possible ways of thinking the relation. Badiou of course is not concerned with the epistemological theme. For all the speculative realists’ debt to him, in this respect, their thought is remote from his. If, as Norris says, the distinction in Badiou ‘between truth and knowledge’ is cardinal (Norris 2009: 8), this distinction is also inseparable from a judgement. Truths break with knowledge, are ‘purified’ of knowledge, emerge as radical subtractions from existing knowledge (EE: 472). The subjects of truths do not apprehend them as objects of knowledge, but profess or declare them. In that respect, Badiou’s subject is emphatically not the correlationist subject and is altogether specific in being always already outside correlationism. So, too, the concepts of ancestral and anthropomorphic time have no immediate relevance to Badiou. But as we saw in Chapter 1, truths begin in an interruption of an existing human world by a possibility not immediately comprehensible in that world’s ‘knowledge’ of what it is to be human. None of this would appear to have any interest or probably any meaning, certainly for Brassier, and commonly for Meillassoux. That is because, for Brassier, even if ‘unbound’ itself, nihil unbinds nothing in any given human, historical world, as it does for Badiou. So, too, in Meillassoux’s account of it, concerned above all to escape the correlationist imaginary, absolute contingency is inapparent, has implications for thinking but not living. Brassier is particularly intransigent on the point. He thinks that a residual idealism prevents Badiou from finally going the whole nihilist hog, that he betrays himself ‘in the fact that the sole real supposition [for subtractive presentation] is that of the name of the void’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 116). Certainly, for Badiou, nihil is never available to us save under a mark, as ∅, the empty set. Brassier sees this as constituting a lapse into correlationism. But it is surely rather the point at which the anti-correlationist case reaches its limit. Badiou and Churchland are not engaged in the same kind of endeavour. To think the void is not to establish a relation to an object. The void does not exist as do the traces of ancestrality or the scientific image. Two distinct forms of statement are at issue. The existence of the void can only be declared axiomatically; in other words, signified. What makes possible Brassier’s dream of a pure nothing or nothingness exempt from the human sign? What licenses a thought of a nothing beyond ∅? Furthermore, if nihil is unrelated to anything human, how can it have the ‘hidden depths’ Brassier attributes to it (2010 [2007]: x)? What does he propose as the adventure to which he thinks nihilism beckons, beyond politics, ethics or some other recognizable field of human endeavour? His fleeting, half-hearted dalliance with McLuhanite and

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Baudrillardian fantasies of techno-mutancy is unworthy of his thought, and hardly answers the question. It is part of Badiou’s great achievement to have, in a sense, taken key aspects of the speculative realist position on board from the start, but also to have moved beyond them. He comes both before and after the speculative realists. If cosmological time is of quite a different scope to anthropomorphic time, so too it must also trouble it or mark it as provisional. Brassier claims in effect that the ‘ontological a priori’ never ‘intersects with the ‘a posteriori (the “world”)’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 113). But from Archimedes’ ‘Eureka!’ to Wordsworth’s ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’,6 we know the contrary to be possible. We know it from innumerable diaries, letters and other writings by modern poets, lovers, revolutionaries, artists, scientific innovators, visionaries and ordinary men and women. We know that the world can break, fall apart, appear to be drastically renewable. This, in the teeth of correlationism and progressivism, is modern knowledge. The reference to experience, however, will hardly clinch the case. We might rather remind ourselves of Badiou’s concept of nature. Badiou coincides with the speculative realists in setting out from a modern conception of an objective nature. Modern nature is under the sway of mathematical ideas and ‘ “written in mathematical language” ’ (EE: 141). It is a presentation of the multiple secured by or as ‘a [normal] state of things’ (EE: 146). But as such, as mathematics makes clear, the multiple of multiples that is nature is founded only on the void which is omnipresent but a ‘spectre’, a ghostly figure wandering through all things (EE: 111). Hence nature is always unstable. In Hamilton Grant’s Schellingian terms, what we are given as nature, including what human beings give themselves as nature, is never and can never be the whole of nature. As for Schelling there is what he calls the ‘nature of nature’, what Lardreau understands as ‘another nature’ (Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 159; LV: 192), so, too, for Badiou, there is a principle of instability in nature which is in a sense more natural than it is. More precisely, in Badiou’s terms, nature is a paradoxical mixture, both constitutively normal and endemically volatile. This, too, is modern knowledge, and here, again, we grasp the key, the founding importance of Wordsworth, if Wordsworth read in a certain way. The sense of nature as paradox is crucial to a conception of the event and the remainder. The apparent stability of any given multiple in nature can always be contradicted by singularities. Nature is founded on the void, and therefore precarious. But it is so ontologically and not ontically. Ontically, in particular historical contexts, a stable and normative conception of nature prevails. In principle, a break with

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nature 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 the event. But if singularities break with what for us is the natural regime, they are abnormal, and appear only sporadically, here and there. The intersection of Jambet’s metahistorical with historical time is available to logical explanation. Anthropomorphism always has an exteriority, which is also its void. It can never grasp or express a totality, and will necessarily be at risk. Here and there, however, precisely because the anthropomorphic world is only ever provisional, the time of absolute contingency breaks into it, lays it bare. The major question is why it should do so rarely. THE QUESTION OF RARITY A coherent thought of intermittency will start from the void and absolute contingency, but concede that we never exactly start from the void. The event is at once in composition. We might recall Badiou’s theory of the arrival of the event: events must always compose with their sites; that is, their elements derive from their sites.7 The site is the material base of a truth-procedure, and provides the very conditions of its intelligibility. The event arrives in relation to an existing multiple which furnishes it with its substance. Restructured, these conditions allow us to recognize an event and its consequences. Brassier criticizes Badiou for bridging the gap between ‘ontological discourse’ and ‘mundane reality’ through a theory of ‘transcendent interruption’ (Brassier 2010 [2007]: 113, my italics). But here he is more faithful to his own iron determination to keep the two realms absolutely apart than he is to Badiou. Badiou has repeatedly underlined the immanence of the event. It is Jambet not Brassier who is right about Badiou, here, in arguing that it is the implication of the event in a situation, an actual context, that most distinguishes it from the concept of a ‘vertical intervention’ into a ‘horizontal domain’, which is always in principle religious (Jambet 1989c: 172). We return to Bosteels’s rebuttal of the notion that Badiou trades in the concept of miracle.8 Badiou is no more a closet transcendentalist than an instance of a clandestine but nonetheless eminently twenty-first-century religiosity.9 His insistence on the immanence of the event becomes part of the position elaborated here. To the construction of this position we must add an insistence on rarity. But here we encounter another problem. It is not hard to demonstrate the rarity of events and the limits to their practical trajectories. The obvious example is politics: how often do political events for the good take place, and how far-reaching is their purchase? Consider the

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millennial history of, say, China or the Papacy. The major hole in the architecture of Badiou’s thought at the current time is not to do with any need to refute the charge of transcendentalism. It is the absence of any developed explanation of the rarity of the event. Badiou has tirelessly insisted that the event is rare. In his materialist dialectics as articulated in Logiques des mondes, truths exist ‘only as exceptions to the existent [ce qu’il y a]’ (LM: 12). Rarity should have major implications for Badiou’s philosophical scheme, since if events and truths are rare, they by implication leave unredeemed a great mass of history, experience, the world. The insistence on rarity ought necessarily to portend a thought that is melancholic if not tragic. But why are events rare? This is a key question, perhaps the key one. In L’Être et l’événement, the concept of rarity appears to be related to a concept of the State. Being is an infinite and inconsistent multiplicity, but we encounter it only as situated, structured, presented. The State is a re-presentation of presentation, an imposition of a metastructure upon structure. It ‘recounts’ all the elements that have first been counted in the presentation (EE: 126). One might think for example of the gulf that yawns between ‘citizens’ (a presentation) and ‘political parties’ (their representation). In more senses than one, the State cannot contain the whole of any given situation. But it dominates the whole through the ‘fictional being’ of a metastructure (EE: 115). Plato defined the fictions in question as those of doxa or opinion, and Badiou agrees. ‘What accords with the State in the minds of the people’, he writes, ‘is the apparatus of opinion’ (SA: 15; SI: 16). In the end, however, the ‘ultimate foundation of the State’ is not so much consistency as ‘the peril (and the fear) of inconsistency’ (EE: 126). All structures are at risk from an irruption of inconsistency, and work to hold it at bay. No metastructure can exhaust ‘the immanent resources of a presented multiple’ (EE: 100). But the State works effectively as a protective apparatus for structure, defending it from catastrophe, and rendering any breach of it the rarer. But this is hardly a sufficient explanation of rarity. Badiou does not limit the meaning of metastructure to the political sphere. Spinoza’s God is a possible example of it. But metastructure is not a concept that functions at the level of Lacan’s RSI as explicated by Lardreau. If not uniquely a political concept, it is chiefly one, largely relevant only to one of the four truth-domains. A long, blank time of lovelessness, for example, can hardly be thought of as the necessary consequence of metastructure, rather than, say, ill fortune. If, as Badiou claims, there is no master-truth, including politics, and metastructure is above all a political concept, it is hard to see how it can be an ontological one.

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The same is true of opinion. Self-evidently, politics suffers periods characterized by ‘the absence of any present’, when opinion appears to be all (LS: 197). But when Mallarmé announces the existence of a time in which ‘a present is lacking’ (CO: 23), this must be the case for politics but seems unlikely to be so exactly for art, since it is a poet who declares the lack; and indeed Badiou knows very well, and says, that poetry may flourish precisely in a time of the failure of politics, may even particularly matter at such a time. It appears that a monde atone for one kind of truth is not so for another contemporaneous with it. This in turn would suggest that opinion can simultaneously be favourable to one kind of truth and hostile to another. But Badiou thinks of opinion as inveterately opposed to truth. The prevalence of opinion thus looks like a symptom of the intermittency of truths, rather than its cause. One might expect Badiou’s logic to provide the relevant corrective or clarification. In Logiques des mondes, he once again insists that truths are exceptions. In the order of truth, ‘the Paris Commune, bloodily crushed in two months, is nonetheless much more important than 4 September 1870, when the political regime of the Second Empire collapses and the Third Republic, which will last for seventy years, begins’ (LM: 395). Two months, seventy years: there could hardly be a starker statement of rarity. The concept of rarity runs as deep in Logiques des mondes as anywhere else in Badiou’s work. Indeed, it affects the very structure of the book. The bulk of Logiques des mondes provides us with a formal theory of appearance and worlds. Wedged in at the end, after the great logic, is a comparatively diminutive fifth book on ‘the four types of change’ (LM: 375–418). Certainly, what one finds there is a powerful and scrupulous set of distinctions between the different kinds of event and change, an account of how truths disappear, a description of the different ways in which ‘reactive’ or ‘obscure’ subjects can betray truths ; but one finds no account of rarity. Save in a tiny section entitled ‘Ontology of Change’ (LM: 412–13): there Badiou defines an event as ‘the brusque raising of an axiomatic interdiction, by means of which what is [ontologically] impossible becomes possible’. According to Badiou, set theory supplies us with an account of this ‘interdiction’ in the axiom of foundation. The axiom states that a set cannot belong to itself, that, in effect, there are only relations. But the event belongs to itself. There is no prior relation between the event and the world in which it takes place. The event is thus axiomatically a virtually impossible occasion. But this remains an ontological and not a logical explanation of rarity, as is evident in Badiou’s return to set theory at this point, where his logic depends

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rather on category theory. Indeed, more or less the same explanation had already briefly appeared in the eighteenth Meditation of L’Être et l’événement. Thus the logic only restates what the ontology had already made clear. In any world whatever, we encounter ‘laws of being’ which ‘immediately re-close around any seeming exception to them’, strictly delimiting the power of the event (LM: 413). The axiom of foundation defines an ‘axiomatic interdiction’ that is a ‘law of being’ and is manifestly the axiom of intermittency and rarity. But why is this explication so hard to find? In Logiques des mondes, as in L’Être et l’événement and virtually all of the literature on Badiou, there is a sense of an iron ontological law which is significant for a host of major theses in his philosophy, yet which goes largely unexamined (as do its consequences). It is hard not to feel that, in Badiou’s case, at least, this is finally a matter of indifference, that is, his indifference to any law of being. This indifference is finally Platonic. For Badiou as for Plato, there is one world alone that is worthy of thought, that calls to the honour of thought. Badiou, however, is by no means an isolated figure: the question of rarity is problematic for virtually all the philosophers in question here, and commentaries on them. So uneasy is Pluth, for example, about Badiou’s pervasive emphasis on rarity that he discreetly ignores it: truths in Badiou are not rare at all, but ‘already factors for every situation’ (which incidentally means that the subject need not wait for them; the desire for truth can find a thoroughly contemporary instant gratification, Pluth 2010: 84). Françoise Proust does not provide a theory of rarity, and indeed leaves us wondering whether Benjamin does. Rancière’s sophisticated account of the logic of the declension from the event functions very plausibly at the sociological level, but offers no account of the logic of the rarity of events per se. The omission seems the more starkly evident in May’s work on Rancière (2008), which takes the assumption of rarity over without noticing that it effectively wrecks his efforts to assimilate Rancière’s thought to contemporary progressivisms (which certainly do not think rarity). A conviction of rarity sometimes appears to haunt Jambet’s esoteric Islam, and seems implicit in its ‘dialectic of duration’ (GR: 350), as in the story of Alamut. This is hardly surprising, if one considers the chronic inequity in relations between esoteric Islam and power and Law. But, for all the importance of its conception of the melancholic–ecstatic paradox, Jambet’s work contains no major theory of rarity and does not think it as such. This is not surprising, since a concept of rarity is hardly reconcilable with a theology unless it veers towards the kind of extreme point represented by Manichaeanism. Whatever the degree to which

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Jambet’s Nietzscheanism successfully distances him from the theological conviction, on this particular question, he can hardly but follow it. A dissatisfied reader may in fact suppose that the philosophers have inherited the Sartrean problematic of rareté but neither interrogated nor elaborated it, leaving us merely to nod agreement on the basis of the empirical presumption: ‘that’s so’, ‘rarity is just a fact’. By contrast, Sartre’s own explication of the logic of rarity is masterful, precisely because it grapples so seriously and intensely with the problem. Might it not provide sufficient explanation in itself? For Sartre, everything begins within the condition of rareté, scarcity. Scarcity ineluctably breeds need which, in turn, ineluctably breeds violence. But for Sartre scarcity is the rule only for historically extant and human worlds. Sartre says this quite explicitly: the law of scarcity is ‘contingent’, and other worlds not subject to it are quite conceivable (Sartre 2004 [1960]: 123). This is a crucial assertion, but one the Critique cannot altogether justify. For if scarcity is determined as such by the existence of humanity, its causes ought to be endemic to the human thing itself. But they are not. Sartre cannot possibly say that, because it would deny the radically unfounded conception of human-ness which lies at the very root of Sartre’s existentialism, and which cannot admit the possibility of any intrinsic determination of human-ness. Thus Sartre is drawn to offload the reasons for scarcity onto the historical recalcitrance of matter, which he presents as incessantly recapturing human freedom. One curious aspect of the concepts of counter-finality and the practicoinert is therefore that they protect existentialism as a humanism (cf. Sartre 1946). In effect, Sartre rescues human freedom by demonizing a world that is other than it. From its queasy disquiet at mucosity to the alarmed evocation of the monstrosity of the tree-root in La Nausée, Sartre’s fiction reveals just how far down this disposition went. Two moves are necessary at this point, one disconcerting, the other, if speculatively necessary, also possibly alarming. Firstly, Lardreau’s version of the late Lacan offers an important approach to the problem that bedevils Sartre’s account of rarity. But the relevance of Lardreau’s case becomes fully intelligible only in a procedure which refracts it through certain features of speculative realist thought. The second move, which follows on from the first, is a refusal to write off the possibility of a human nature, if in an extremely specific conception of it. But firstly, why is a concept of rarity important at all? Is it not incipiently anti-democratic? Why think in terms of rarity in an age of plenitude, with everything in principle available to all? We may turn to Proust and Benjamin for an answer. In Benjaminian terms, ‘explosions of justice’ – of a will to treat inexistents, those without a

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stake in the world, past and present, fully as equals – are indeed rare. Historiography relentlessly and ceaselessly bears this out. The question of whether we need a concept of rarity resolves itself into whether we at all need a Benjaminian concept of justice, that is, as opposed to a Rawlsian one,10 one rendered problematic by being founded on or at least complicit with the logic of the historical victor. As Benjamin famously recognized, history, philosophies of history, thought about history have always been radically exclusionary, the victor’s province. This has not changed. Badiou, Rancière, Proust, Jambet, Lardreau and Agamben all share the conviction that, however bien pensant, however assured of having rescued their own categories of victim from historical exclusion, the ‘advanced democracies’ remain, at the very least, profoundly complicit in the creation and maintenance of other such categories. Here another formerly disempowered subculture proves to be a business success in central London, there an Indian state survives on rat meat. Historical irony is everywhere, banal. Exclusionary thought everywhere persists, though its self-deceptions may conceivably grow more sophisticated. This brings us back to exceptionalism: in Agamben’s terms, exceptionalism is a function of a snare which ‘our age cannot master’. But the imperative of the sovereign relation cannot finally mask ‘the nihilism in which we are living’, and must repeatedly come to light in itself (Agamben 1998 [1995]: 50). The most relevant question at this point is therefore not how one escapes exceptionalism, but the responsibility on the basis of which one thinks it, the seriousness of the stake one has in mind. Here the choice grows stark: the logic of the victor or the logic of justice. But the logic of justice must lead to an assertion of its rarity, the structure of rarity being that of events and their historical remainder. In Lardreau’s account of him, the late Lacan becomes a master explicator of ‘the nihilism in which we are living’, the vérité d’immondice. Lacan is a thinker par excellence of a predicament that is historical, cultural and psychic at once. Language, which necessarily enables the human thing, also crucially disables it, producing the very lack which subjects must then seek interminably and vainly to fill. This is the irreducible source of the law of semblance and misrecognition, which inexorably becomes the law of the remainder: aggressivity, conflict, domination, exploitation, catastrophe in permanence. This constitutes in effect a Lacanian theory of scarcity (lack) and violence (an effect of desire without object), the obvious difference with Sartre being that Lacan sees scarcity and violence as intrinsic to the very make-up of the human thing, where Sartre, still the humanist, understands it to be conditional.

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As Sartrean exceptionalism leaves a space for the event, however, so too there is a Lacanian exceptionalism, the recognition of a minimal opportunity within the sprung trap of language. Lacan’s is an exceptionalism that stems from the existence of the faille. The faille cannot but make possible the singular breaks which declare histories of various different kinds to have reached their ends and announce a new beginning. Declaration, announcement: the event, for Lacan, is always inseparable from language. If the great figure of Sartrean exceptionalism is the fall of the Bastille, pace Bosteels,11 the great figure of Lacanian exceptionalism remains Antigone (see Lacan 1999 [1986]: 277–83). Of course, writes Lacan, the outcome of the ‘game by Creon’ is ‘known in advance’. But that does not prohibit Antigone’s ύβρίζεις, her outrage, her will to aller outre, to go beyond the rules of Creon’s game, speaking singularly the singular and irretrievable value of Polynices, ‘whatever good or evil [he] may have done’. Thus Antigone appears as αυτόνομος [autonomous, self-governing], as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him.

Antigone becomes the very paradigm of the Lacanian version of Benjamin’s voice of justice in its rarity. In Lardreau’s terms, the voice of justice can only be rare, for the Borromean knot is in effect a kind of circuit diagram, and RSI the technical term for the hard-wiring of the human thing (with the sinthome curiously incidental to it, as far as Lardreau is concerned). This hardwiring ensures certain repetitive functions, but may also occasionally short-circuit, with unpredictable consequences. The argument here can be dovetailed with a strain of thought we have already noted in speculative realism. Anthropomorphic time appears as a small and not overly significant phase in ancestral time. But there is no reason to think of the time of its world as homogeneous rather than diverse and various, in accordance with the diversity of technological systems (including so-called ‘life-forms’), since these may institute distinct temporalities within the overarching category of the ancestral, whose temporality is self-evidently heterogeneous. This suggests that we might speculatively rethink the concept of human nature, quite separately from the grandiose fantasies of both its proponents and its critics, as a technological system with a specific structure of time implicit in it, but one also subject to blips. Like innumerable such systems, organic and inorganic, from bees to computers, this technological system performs a limited

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set of functions very efficiently, but other capabilities are beyond its range. The particular hard-wiring of the human thing makes it good at certain activities, like survival, reproduction, proliferation and the persistently successful prosecution of advances in its own techne, but bad at others, like the protection of its world, or just, wise, luminous, beautiful, sophisticated, peaceful, harmonious, equal, co-operative forms of social organization and development. The circle never quite closes around the techno-schematic of ‘human nature’; the indubitable arrival of events and truths in itself informs us of that. Lacan’s saint homme (as exemplified in Joyce) is capable of ‘outwitting’, ‘displacing’, ‘forcing back’, even ‘multiplying’ the ‘original sin’ of the sinthome (Lacan 2005: 11, 13, 14). But hard-wiring is mechanical: the circuitry is a fix, any reprogramming apparently destined to mess up; glitches in the system, or what Žižek more usefully calls its ‘marginal malfunctions and points of failure’, are ‘a structural necessity’ within it (Žižek 2008b: 150), but also eccentric and usually rectifiable. This is a way of formulating the logic of event and remainder that takes it to its furthest possible limit. In Lardreau’s vision of him, it is the late Lacan’s great achievement to have theorized both this logic and the hard-wiring involved, and to have seen both as inseparable from a single technical component within the system, language. In a sense, to conflate him with Sartre for a moment, Lardreau’s Lacan thinks that language has its own counterfinality. For Lardreau, this urges us in the direction of an austere philosophical and moral minimalism; he is practically a model in this respect. Indeed, so compelling may the Lacanian logic seem – and we should remember that the late Lacan categorically discounts all possibility of progress: ‘I think, in the end, we must expect no progress in anything, absolutely anything’ (Lacan 1973: 111; 1976: 12) – that we may feel tempted by another kind of minimalism, a doctrine of extreme rarity of the kind adumbrated by Meillassoux or Gillespie, a rarity that does not at all disqualify the event, but comes close to putting the human world beyond its reach. Gillespie finally wonders whether any of Badiou’s events really count as such, or whether Badiou believes they do. For Badiou, thought profoundly grasps the truths of groundlessness and of innovation, which it treasures thereafter; that is finally all that is truly at stake for it. But the world is inveterately hostile to what is truly new; the new cannot enter the world without immediate capture by it. The world is thus also implacably hostile to thought itself. In the end, Badiou must assume that ‘it is simply enough to know that there can be events’; and we do know this, because we are ‘capable of thinking nothing’. By this point, Gillespie has come close to presenting Badiou as a secular version of the Manichaean electus. Astonishingly, for

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Gillespie’s Badiou, the event has yet to happen, and ‘the world we have created is devoid of truth and value’ (Gillespie 2008: 148). The fourth chapter of Meillassoux’s Après la finitude, ‘The Problem of Hume’, indirectly explicates the kind of extreme position that Gillespie attributes to Badiou and, finally, the logic of rarity itself. It sets out from that great proto-modern text, Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature, notably 1.3 and 1.4. For what Hume confronts there is the enigma which subsequently remains at the heart of modernity: the knowledge of contingency and groundlessness underwrites a logic of absolute change which is nonetheless not given to us in experience, or rarely given, as opposed to a logic of indefinite repetition or conservation that is everywhere given. Meillassoux notes that one obvious objection to his own thesis regarding contingency is that, if absolute contingency were indeed the rule, the laws of nature would be infinitely and spontaneously modifiable and the behaviour of objects infinitely capricious. But this is not the case. Hume’s example (in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) is that of a billiard ball moving directly towards another. We know that the first ball will cause the second to move, that they will not both immediately find a state of complete rest, that the first will not rebound whilst the second remains absolutely still, that the first will not abruptly stop and the second begin to move, and so on. There must therefore be seemingly necessary and immutable physical if not logico-mathematical laws of causality which decree certain fixities to becoming. For Meillassoux, the Humean question is: must the same effects indeed unendingly follow the same causes? If not, why do we assume they do? For Hume, there are only two ways of distinguishing between existence and inexistence: the principle of non-contradiction, and experience. There is nothing contradictory in supposing that the same causes might produce different effects from one day to the next. But experience can only tell us about what has been the case, not what might or will be. The possibility of the billiard balls behaving according to an aberrant causality is eminently thinkable.12 By contrast, the reason for the balls invariably behaving in one way and not another is not and cannot be available to thought. There is no a priori reason for the one eventuality prevailing over all the other possible ones; it is not possible to demonstrate the necessity of the causal connection. It is possible however to ask where our belief in the causal connection comes from, and there Hume had an answer: habit, custom. Where causality is concerned, habit and custom insist on certain invariants which we subsequently project into an undecided future. Kant refuses to follow the implications of the Humean case: if the

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laws of nature were obviously contingent, there would necessarily be only ‘phenomenal disorder’, the end of consciousness and the objective world alike (Meillassoux 2006: 122). We cannot be absolutely sure that the laws in themselves are not contingent, but we can be sure that, if they are, they cannot manifest themselves as such. Meillassoux heads in the opposite direction to Kant, radicalizing Humean scepticism. It ‘is simply the case’, he asserts, ‘that the causal connection has nothing necessary about it’ (Meillassoux 2006: 125). The intellect understands that a single cause can produce a hundred different events. The senses may tell us otherwise, but there is no reason to exempt them from the Humean critique of their cognitive value as determined by habitual structures. If we ignore the contingency of causality, that is because we confuse the question of necessity with that of stability, taking the stability of laws for their necessity. Stability is a matter of frequency. Frequency, of course, is the opposite of rarity. The Kantian assumption is that, if the laws of nature were contingent, events would be frequent. Like Kant, we assume that, if the laws of nature could change without reason, then they would do so often and we would therefore have a direct experience of the truth of contingency. This is the logic of ‘the frequential implication’ (Meillassoux 2006: 129). But there are various problems with frequentialism. Firstly, it assumes that necessity is an a priori and contingency empirical. Secondly, frequentialist logic is probabilist in the mathematical sense of the term (Meillassoux 2006: 130; cf. Vernes 1982). It is founded on an ‘aleatory reason’ which equates contingency with chance, with the throw of a dice, necessity then being the ‘bille de plomb [lead shot]’ which loads the dice and means that it always shows the same face. Thirdly, probabilism takes our world to be paradigmatic of every possible world; and, fourthly and most importantly, ontologically, probabilistic reasoning assumes that the possible is thinkable as a finite set or ‘numerical totality’ within which finite calculation remains feasible (Meillassoux 2006: 139). Meillassoux reverses all this. It is contingency, the myriad possibilities conceivable as available to the billiard balls, that are thinkable as a priori, and necessity as what is given only to experience. This is the conclusion to which Hume must lead us, in the end, unless we assume that the backward look of experience provides us with all the knowledge we could imaginably need for the indefinite proliferation of future worlds. Furthermore, the very necessitarian certainty that the ‘dice-universe’ is loaded is impossible without presuming aleatory reason, an initial construction of contingency as chance, which is itself non-necessary, as logic and mathematics demonstrate. The disorder that Kant feared is

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itself a function of aleatory reason, which can only imagine what falls outside it as prodigious or monstrous. The figure of the dice is apt, for it presents the relation between possibility and actuality as having the same form from one throw to the next, which is not how we need conceive of contingency. Contingency is ‘inaccessible to aleatory reason’ (Meillassoux 2006: 137). If the figure of the dice automatically homogenizes contingency, so too does the assumption that our world is necessarily paradigmatic or representative of any others. There is no reason to take for granted a ground on which worlds supposedly coincide. Finally, the numerical totality of possibilities is not an a priori. Possibilities do not form a finite set; we have known that ever since Cantor developed the concept of the transfinite, providing us with a logic of the infinite multiplication of possibility, its non-totalizability. Cantor explodes all thinkable totalities. This does not require one to choose a post-Cantorian axiomatic or ‘prevent one from choosing another’ (Meillassoux 2006: 144). But it does suggest that ‘the stability of laws can be conjugated perfectly with their contingency’ (Meillassoux 2006: 137). This in turn means that we cannot legitimately move from experience, what we observe as happening, to necessity. Frequency does not spell inexorability. There is no reason to assume that, because a certain cause-and-effect chain has always functioned in a particular way, it must invariably do so. Kant is mistaken in his a priori exclusion of the possibility that ‘contingent laws are rarely modified’ (Meillassoux 2006: 147). ‘When something really happens to us’, writes Meillassoux, in an unusually human-centred moment, ‘when novelty grabs us by the throat, then calculation and game-playing are at an end, and the serious things begin at last’ (Meillassoux 2006: 149). Whilst it is true that Meillassoux does not exactly provide us with a steely logic of rarity – one can only hope that Badiou will bridge this gap13 – he tells us why there is no need to assume that events are other than rare. Indeed, they may be so rare that ‘no-one has yet had the occasion to ascertain the type of modification’ involved (Meillassoux 2006: 147). Here Meillassoux almost exactly coincides with Gillespie. The rigour with which both philosophers argue the extreme case is laudably cleareyed. I shall nonetheless shortly propose that it – and the speculative realist case ‘as a whole’ – requires the corrective of modern literature. All the same: a ‘serious thing’ begins here too, one that also requires us to think, and to think in ways that may neither suit nor please us, nor flatter our self-esteem. For it is precisely the refusal to think rarity, or to think its full implications, that has for more than two centuries repeatedly crippled a modern concept of transformation, above all, in

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the political sphere. Any adequate thought of intermittency must finally confront this difficulty. THE UNERASABLE CONVICTION My synthesis therefore bolts together the void, but also its mark, the sign that it is inaccessible save insofar as it fractures presentation as the event; absolute contingency; nature (though this term is always in some sense under erasure, here, as in Badiou and in Meillassoux, insofar as nature is paradoxically both contingent and a stabilizing presentation); the cancellation of the transcendental domain; the cancellation of any Hegelian or post-Hegelian ‘reason in history’, including any concept of progress; the event (and its logic); rarity (and its); and the ‘two histories’. These are the terms of a melancholic–ecstatic conception of history and an anti-schematics of historical reason. The melancholic– ecstatic formula does not immediately refer back to subjective conditions. Lepenies has shown how far one European tradition of thought about melancholy presents it as a historical condition, a condition of the State, bound up with observable political as it is with observable geographical landscapes (Lepenies 1992 [1969]: passim; cf. Gibson 2003a: 127). In effect, Lepenies’s case takes on a fresh extension here: the melancholic landscape is dominant in history. Its dominance can be demonstrated not just taken as premise, precisely because it is also traversed by historical ecstasies, occasions for the good, irregular and unpredictable occasions of unforeseeable duration. These, again, are demonstrable, the disputes over their defining characteristics (and therefore what exactly counts as an event), probably interminable. To this, however, as the book has also abundantly demonstrated, one must add an ecstatic historical subject, or rather, since, whilst I do not abolish all relation between the event and affect, as does Bosteels, I would also not claim that it is a determining feature of the arrival of a truth, the subject of έκ-στασις, ek-stasis, the subject beside or beyond itself, the cogitor. The historical existence of the cogitor is again demonstrable. But alongside it one must not only set a melancholic historical subject, but formalize this subject, think it through in all its seriousness and complexity. Whilst Proust, Jambet and Rancière glance obliquely at this subject, they do not give it prominence. But it is the most common subject of history, whether it knows that or not. Philosophy from Leibniz to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Badiou, with many others along the way, has tended to shirk it. This threatens to make philosophy single-toned, monotonous, leaving it in need of a radical complement.

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Historical reason appears as an immediate effect of the void and absolute contingency. To think historical reason is to proceed from the logical assertion of both in the first instance. If, in Brassier’s terms, the world is founded solely on the void, and in Meillassoux’s, contingency is its only necessity, its apparent stabilities and coherences are always precarious and endangered. But as we have just seen, it is only rarely that they disintegrate; historical reason manifests itself only rarely. Lardreau asserts that ‘[r]eason . . . is what demands of man that he admit another nature, that he is unknowable’ (LV: 192), as is history. Or, differently again: historical reason begins in and as the modern doublet we can initially derive from Hume: the world is as it is . . . for no sufficient reason. Or, to put the point the other way round, the world is available to decisive transformations for the Good, but justice, the Good are local, sporadic, transitory. It is only seldom that man admits ‘another nature’, that the world seems capable of becoming otherwise. How then does one respond to intermittency, what does one make of it? I shall address the point through trying to answer some of the objections that others have raised with me. Firstly and crucially, a thought of intermittency is emphatically not a conservative thought of history by another name, though it deliberately sails quite close to being one (that being the necessary mode of thought). It subscribes neither to what Feltham calls ‘right Badiousianism’, according to which truthprocedures break with structures of exclusion only inexorably to be reassimilated by them (see Feltham 2008: 118–19),14 nor shares the guffaw of the Proustian Abderite, who retires from the historical fray to contemplate its recurrence with amused detachment. For intermittency is not an ‘essence of history’. A theory of intermittency is not a theory of history as a cyclical or repetitive system. Though Lardreau’s particular Lacanianism has been important, here, seemingly encouraging a kind of ‘pessimism of RSI’, we must nonetheless finally hold any Lardreauian construction of a ‘minimal intermittency’ at a certain distance. Firstly, events are singularities, and the power and reach of truths is therefore neither thinkable nor predictable on the basis of the stories of other truth-sequences. Furthermore, as singularities, events can always in principle modify the field, in other words, the structure of the relation between event and remainder itself. Indeed, as the Argentinian Walter Kohan has brilliantly indicated with Rancière and Brazilian history in mind, a concept of history founded on the intermittency of politics must logically include the possibility of subverting its own principle (see Kohan: 2006). Since the theory of intermittency is a theory of historical transformation that proceeds from a first principle

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of sheer groundlessness – in Jambet’s terms, the indefinite repetition of historical discontinuity, which is new each time – it must be thinkable as capable of transforming itself. This I take to be the Humean argument applied to history (as Hume himself did not apply it): rarity is indeed the demonstrable and empirical rule, the rule of history as we have experience of it and insofar as we can extrapolate from that knowledge. But history as it is known to experience hardly constitutes the whole of what history may turn out to be. The lack of sufficient or absolute reason at issue here is itself historical reason. Not only will events continue to take place; nothing absolutely forbids the arrival of a singular event that will transform the status of the event within the structure of intermittency itself. Thus, for all his major importance to this book, ultimately we must hold Jambet at a certain distance, too. He is the only one of my five philosophers to think intermittency rigorously according to a Moebius-strip logic of necessary inter-implication. This is because he is concerned with a theology, and it provides him with an ontology that is comprehensive and capable of founding a politics and an ethics, but also functions like a machine. The Moebius-strip is predictable, inexorable and there is no place outside it. The principle at stake is one of regular, formal reversibility. Jambet thus provides the clearest example of a determinism which periodically haunts every one of our five philosophers, and implies if he does not state that intermittency is all. In fact, according to Badiou and Meillassoux’s thesis of absolute contingency, there is no logical reason for assuming this. There is no absolute reason to assume that the event cannot conceivably arrive that will change the event–remainder relation, except for what we know of history, which has only de facto status. Historical possibility can no more form an absolutely closed whole than we can be sure that Hume’s billiard balls must always behave in the same way in all conceivable worlds. There is no complete and wholly compelling logic of intermittency, other than those determined by power and interest, whose nullity is evident in the very fact that it so obviously suits their proponents to insist on them. Intermittency is no more a last word or endstopper than God, economism, DNA or the hadron collider. Secondly, if a thought of intermittency is not reactionary, nor (as some have suggested to me) do the philosophers in question here represent the fag-end of a spent and futile republicanism or radicalism. This book is not about the exhaustion of the great French revolutionary tradition in philosophy and politics, and certainly does not summon up a ‘mature’ Anglo-American pragmatism as the necessary point of contrast to an ‘infantile’ (French) leftism. Why should one assume,

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in any case, that a tradition of thought is at its most significant in its grandest and most ambitious phases or forms? Embers and endgames can leap to grippingly vivid life: Jacobean drama, Mannerist painting, Mahler’s tenth symphony. The philosophers here break decisively with any drive towards completion or comprehensive illumination, not least in the context of Enlightenment and Hegelian-Marxist narratives that opened themselves up to the judgement of history and could therefore ‘fail’ or be ‘disproved’. The five philosophers release philosophy from the need to produce or conform to ethico-teleologies of all descriptions. It is rather their critics who fall back on the ethico-teleleogical principle, for, whilst it is the platitudinous temporality of the market, turnover, obsolescence, new models, sell-by dates that chiefly informs the objections, they briskly occlude the Benjaminian, infernal aspect of that temporality, conceal it yet again beneath the progressivist delusion (we have ‘left behind’ the French revolution and French republicanism).15 The particular ‘logic of the supplement’ operative here hardly seems an index of ‘maturity’. The present study has adamantly refused to subscribe to the disqualifications pronounced by contemporary progressivisms. It seeks rather to poise itself between ‘catastrophe in permanence’ or the time of the remainder, and those tears in the fabric of history in which the possibility of another history or temporality opens up. The thought at stake here is one of disconnection or interruption, not concatenation or consequence. One recurrent term in this book has been minimalism. In one way or another, the work of all of the five philosophers here involves a major scaling-down of philosophical pretensions, a modest or minimalist project for thought that amounts to ‘very little . . . almost nothing’, to quote Critchley’s resonant title again (Critchley 1997). Minimalism remains a crucial principle for serious contemporary work, its great presiding figure, a moriae et stultitiae magister for the new century, being Samuel Beckett. As Beckett knew, however, minima can not only add up to maxima (as they did in his own œuvre) but imply maxima as their negative or obverse. Nothing absolutely debars the minimal element from becoming the whole, as, again, in Badiou’s much-treasured words from the Internationale. The importance of a minimum cannot be set apart from the maximum it adumbrates. An ethics of historical reason, of intermittency, has steadily emerged in this book. This ethics particularly (though not exclusively) involves the question of the status of the subject and the remainder, of the ethical disposition in a monde atone. We might group and generalize its major emphases under six headings: the wager; fidelity, transmission or dissemination, and gardiennage or wardenship (these three are closely

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related); waiting; and resistance. An ethics of the wager is founded on the principle of apagogic reason which, as we have seen, proceeds on the basis of that which it will have been absurd not to have believed. Apagogic reason takes its bearings from a certainty the grounds for which radically lack self-evidence but which nonetheless appears incontrovertible. Thus, as Jambet says, his (earlier) genealogical project involves a wager, if not one that will meet with its reward. This is a wager on the eventual disappearance of a given historical world. It springs, says Jambet, from the unerasable conviction that the creation of a present beyond all forms of domination is not impossible. It is a modern wager, since it has no foundation or ground, and has been possible to us only since Nietzsche. The significance of genealogy itself is that it prepares one for the wager, the prophetic wager, a wager on a new beginning, on the rarity of the event. As we have seen, fidelity is above all a term in Badiou. It resembles apagogic reason in that it shrugs off its own implausibility, even makes a strength of it. Bosteels and Pluth have both argued that, for Badiou, the event is virtually nothing, a trace, that it is its consequences that chiefly matter, that truths are chiefly questions of fidelity, of the work and thought involved in the step-by-step prolongation and development of the event as a tiny but extreme fissure in what is given us to think and know (see Pluth 2010: 84ff; Bosteels 2009: 196 and passim). But this is fidelity as conceived of as in medias res, in the grip of a truth-procedure, taking on inert circumstance. We need to extend it to and complicate it with the kind of subjectivity adumbrated in Jambet and Rancière, a subjectivity overwhelmed by circumstance that may have to persist, quite literally, through eras of occultation and seeming defeat, and therefore assume subterranean, devious and ambivalent forms. This was my case regarding Flaubertian irony, and here the theme of gardiennage becomes apparent. Far from being merely sceptical and therefore implicitly reactionary, Flaubertian irony is the bent and twisted form which Flaubertian truth must assume in bleakly unpropitious conditions. Its opposite is Badiou’s kind of vigorous, confrontational assertion of truth – he has very clearly always been hostile to irony. The risk of such assertiveness is that it may tip over from haughty indifference to circumstance into amnesia regarding its inhibiting power (as remainder), which is to begin to forget the logic of intermittency itself. This has started to happen in Badiou’s most recent work, notably in L’Hypothèse communiste. The problem here is not that Badiou fails to invent a new political name or names; in his terms, that has always been the task of the political subject, not the philosopher.16 It is rather

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that he appears to be insisting on a single, transhistorical political master-name, Communism, as an adequate and appropriate signifier for all political truth-procedures, including future ones, and forgetting the crucial emphasis on political inventiveness. But any such transhistorical narrative is broken by circumstance (by the remainder). Truthprocedures are singular, discrete, inaugurate new histories and demand new terms, not only because circumstances bring old procedures to an end, but because they add corrupted significations to trusted names (see Rancière’s concept of the simulacrum). As the earlier Badiou repeatedly said, this means listening out, doubtfully and even anxiously, for new names to arrive in an uncertain and possibly distant future. He appears however to have tired of the difficult patience involved in that position, in effect affirming the continuity of an ongoing project with a single name. If the trouble with Flaubertian irony is its openness to radical misinterpretation and therefore misuse, the trouble with the recent Badiou is that, for all the powerful and in many ways admirable animus he directs at contemporary culture, he is in danger of fatally contaminating his will to change with the contemporary will to swift reassurance. He has certainly seemed increasingly indifferent to the role and the strategies of the mere gardien. Of course, we have noted other conceptions of gardiennage here and there in the philosophies of intermittency, notably in the case of Lardreau and his minimal Kantianism, a conception of a moral will to ensure the preservation of the world insistent within thought. But the work of the gardien is not only that of the subject of a Kantian limit-thought; it is also that of Lardreau himself, as witness. This in itself is testimony to the extreme precariousness of the moral will, in Lardreau’s conception of it, the undeniable possibility of its extinction. Gardiennage and fidelity alike imply an insistence on the transmissibility of truths and the invention of effective, sophisticated, durable forms of transmission, promoting the survival of truths that might otherwise fade and die. For whilst no hegemonic culture – exoteric Islam, for example – can ensure its own eternal dominance, no culture resistant to it can necessarily ensure that its truths will not be annihilated by history. Jambet’s accounts of the system of reservoirs, conduits and relays that constitutes the memory and the handbook of esoteric Islam serves as an important paradigm, ensuring as it did an extraordinarily tenacious persistence through many embattled and perilous centuries. So, too, to address a third objection, if my project has appeared on occasions to muddle history and politics in history with questions of love, art, science and the moral subject, introducing a principle of variable reference, that is because everything has a history and various spheres

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of endeavour have their intermittencies. The model is transferable. It might in principle have various different applications in psychoanalysis, to take a single example, not least where conceptions of the psychic life have been inhibited by a linear or geometric imaginary. Questions of dissemination and transmission are clearly at stake here; the strategies adopted in this book are merely one way of addressing them. Transmission, gardiennage, fidelity in obscurity and defeat: all of these are aspects of an ethics of perseverance – the perseverance of the traces of subjectivity and truth, of the subject itself – through dead times, times in which truths appear to have failed. But this also implies an ethics of waiting; here the crucial question for the ethical subject is how best to inhabit the great, dark antechamber of historical truth without finally confusing it with truth itself, and disintegrating in the process. Compare the death of the spirit in Jambet. Curiously, however, though an insistence on waiting is implicit and sometimes quite explicit in Jambet, Lardreau, Proust and Rancière, it finds its most lucid exposition in Badiou. This will seem odder given what I have just said of him above, and indeed Bosteels rightly remarks that the emphasis seems to have disappeared from Badiou’s most recent work (after Le Siècle), as we have seen with L’Hypothèse communiste. But though Badiou has recently been writing approvingly of the figure of ‘the soldier’ in modern politics (2010c), earlier, in the ninth meditation in L’Être et l’événement, he declared that the true political subject was not (or not only) ‘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 different conception of subjectivity to the one we earlier associated with Badiou, what he himself refers to in Le Siècle as a ‘subjectivité 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. However, Badiou less identifies the modern political subject with the guetteur than he does the modern writer.17 The ‘waiting subject’ is chiefly the artist as subject, notably the poet who watches out for the event when it seems recalcitrant or unforthcoming. We should hardly be surprised, then, that the concept is much in evidence in Le Siècle, Badiou’s history of modern subjectivities. Indeed, Badiou returns to the 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). Here, he might seem to coincide with Heidegger: ‘[a]s Heidegger says’, the modern poet is ‘ “the guardian of the Open” ’ (LS: 37). It will by

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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. The modern poet is the ‘secret exception’ (note the term again) who attends to the memory of truths, and retains and fosters an awareness of their conditions, but also looks out for the emergence of new ones. Modern poets, then, commit themselves to a poetics of the threshold that is also both ‘a poetics of waiting’ and a subjectivity of the interim, the déchet, dead time, commensurate with a monde atone (LS: 39).18 Breton, for example, develops a ‘poétique du veilleur’, a ‘poetics of the lookout’, in response to the horrors of 1937 (LS: 40). Mandelstam creates a ‘subjectivity of waiting’ under Stalin (LS: 39). Celan insists on a poetics as a means of waiting to catch up with historical disaster. Mallarmé is exemplary in practising a mode of poetic waiting which sustains a trace of the possibility of the event through a ‘vacant time’ (‘temps atone’, CS: 151). The particular ‘time’ in question for Mallarmé is that which follows the crushing of the Paris Commune, and sees a culture turn to gorging complacently on its own pieties. Mallarmé cultivates an art of severe and rigorous meditation on the situations that make possible truths like that of the Commune, and thereby also thinks ahead to future ones. The waiting subject is vigilant: vigilance is a key term in this strand of Badiou’s thought. Insofar as the figure of the guetteur is not confined to the poet, however, and insofar as Badiou militarizes it, it sometimes lacks flexibility. For a more labile, subtle and inventive account of the ‘subject in waiting’ we may rather remind ourselves of Proust’s ethics. Proust has her own version of the guetteur, the casuist, and her own version of historical vigilance, which includes the casuist’s exact and exacting enquiry into the determinations of the possibility of the event. But in Proust vigilance is also active insofar as the subject is characterized by his or her resistance. Thus he or she does not merely listen to the scansion of history and hearken out for the possible event. The subject also bears witness to the creative Witz of history by miming it out, by repeating the principle of historical inauguration as a subjective principle and a subjective work, which, as we saw, Proust calls bravura, and whose maxim is: ‘Experiment freely with an ethical life, begin an ethical world’ (KA: 119); or, we might say, ‘Display the ingenium of history in your own conduct, as if you were responsible for exemplifying it’. As Proust describes it, the resisting subject understands the condition of intermittency. Resistance expresses ‘a passion for experiment’, an absolute no to any status quo and an absolute yes to invention (1995a: 95). It can take the form of a sublime politics, a limit-politics. But it is also perfectly intimate with negativity: it emerges for example in

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violent laughter, irony, sarcasm and invective. Voltaire and Kraus are perhaps Proust’s two great examples (see 1994a). Resistance mistrusts parties, programmes, aims and objectives, dreams of ‘total emancipation’ (1997b: 104). It understands that it must rather invent itself case by case. It does not aspire to power, since that would only provoke another form of resistance (for power and resistance are inseparable; see Proust 1997a; 1998a). It turns on and asks searching questions of itself, as Voltaire did (Proust 1994a: 35). The resistant spirit, says Proust, wryly, is well aware that ‘its chances of success are feeble, its consequences probably catastrophic, its forces slight’ (1997b: 103). It feeds off rarity, but also knows how rarity limits it, and thereby becomes an assertive but also poignant, comic, apparently perverse project. Though Proust would no doubt not have chosen him as an example, once again, Flaubert seems a case in point, and is characteristic in this respect of much modern literature. THE NECESSITY OF LITERATURE Žižek provides an example of at least the basis for a fourth objection to the philosophers of intermittency in his critique of Badiou’s Saint Paul (though it is not Žižek’s own point). Badiou promotes a conception of truth as revelation, ‘a flash of another dimension’, and thereby endorses a homology of Marxism with ‘a secularized version of Messianic religious ideology’ (Žižek 2008a [1999]: 154, 163). His theory of the event is thus complicit with the very theological mindset which his ontology and his politics vigorously repudiate. The same criticism of course has been levelled at Benjamin. The whole of this book must appear to have been cavalier about similar complicities, most obviously in Chapter 3. It has shown no interest in deconstructing them, and does not even seem to recognize the possible importance of doing so. It is vitiated, the argument roughly goes, to an extent it cannot see, by its compromise with a discourse or discourses categorically opposed to its purposes. One might turn as I have done before to Bosteels’s persuasive case against the ‘miraculous’ reading of the event in Badiou and sink it further into this book, if not throughout it; though I am not sure one could do so without also espousing Bosteels’s larger concern, a revival of dialectical materialism, a project doomed to fail. But there is another issue at stake at this juncture. Alberto Toscano quotes a passage from Lukács: When Ernst Bloch claims that this union of religion with socio-economic revolution points the way to a deepening of the ‘merely economic’ outlook

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of historical materialism, he fails to notice that his deepening simply bypasses the real depth of historical materialism. (Lukács 1972 [1923]: 193; quoted Toscano 2007)

Bloch conceives of the objectivity of economics as exclusive of ‘soul and inwardness’, and therefore as calling to religion as its supplement. But there is no need for this supplement, Lukács declares, for, in its concern with ‘the restructuring of the real and concrete life of man’, the Marxist tradition achieves its own ‘real depth’. The pathetic implausibility of this helps explain the subjective death of Marxism (which rightly concerns Badiou) as opposed to its objective decrepitude. With a very few exceptions, the obvious examples being Adorno and Benjamin, the Marxist tradition could not compete with the religions, not with respect to the concepts of ‘soul’, ‘depth’ and ‘inwardness’, but on the terrain those terms indicated. This book has followed Françoise Proust in repeatedly concerning itself with the terrain, if not subscribing to the terms: ‘It is when “God is dead” (Nietzsche) and “the world is disenchanted” (Weber)’, writes Proust, ‘that the theological eye reveals all its acuteness’. Contrary to those who have sought to reclaim him for theology, and far from being a conspicuous example of false consciousness, Benjamin endorses ‘a theology without theology’ which knows that ‘God is dead and the Messiah will not arrive’, that the recurrent question, seemingly forever, is survival after the Fall, in a nature definitively ‘deprived of [comprehensive] grace’ (Proust 1995d: 54–6).19 Or, to put the point the other way round, if, in repeatedly coinciding with Lukács’s assumption, Marxism, transformative politics and the modern historicisms not only disdained the use of the enemy’s armoury, but proscribed it, that was inhibiting, since the armoury is a formidable one. It had been developed and refined over millennia, with countless touches of genius, and had a range, power and expansiveness (in the breadth of experience it could accommodate: disappointment, disaster, corruption, historical grief, subjective eclipse and much more) unimaginable within the simple registers of Marxism. The religions also had extraordinary powers of seduction which we unhelpfully diminish if we scoff at those powers as merely ‘magical’ or ‘rhetorical’. Badiou’s unabashed gambit in Saint Paul is to work from the assumption that, given the manifest failure of any serious politics, historical and political narratives and significant historical thought may gain far more than they lose by troping themselves via the religions. This book has proceeded on the same assumption. Indeed, it also assumes that the encounter with the religions raises the stakes for any serious politics. Benjamin proposed no theory of

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religion, religious belief, modern form of religiosity or social form of religion. He understood, however, that theology supplies us with a host of ‘theoretical operators’ or concepts, and does so specifically with regard to modernity (Proust 1995d: 54). In this respect, he remains exemplary for us. What cripples Lukács’s statement is the concept of time that lies beneath it. For Lukács, the historical process is dynamic, up-tempo; victory is fast approaching. The incontestable logic of the historicisms leaves them speeding inexorably towards a successful conclusion. Here Lardreau’s critique of Marx’s account of history also seems apposite: Marxist historicism proclaimed that ‘all’s well that ends well’, made for satisfaction rather than understanding, was not reflexive enough about its own desire and thus proved too concerned to please, above all, in its assertion of a final good that would necessarily rise superior to all catastrophe (DI: 14). This assumption was inseparable from the assumption of the creative speed of time: modernity is, must be in the process of achievement. Oddly enough, here Marxism actually shares a certain ground with the social democrats and indeed postmodernism, which also thinks the ‘end of modernity’,20 if in very different terms. But why should the concept of completion be at all relevant to modernity? The philosophers of intermittency tell us that modernity has hardly begun, scarcely arrived as yet, may never properly arrive. It is nascent, faltering, occasional, evident here and there and from time to time. We may never disentangle ourselves from the toils of prehistory, other than in what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’ (Prelude 1805, XI, 208ff., though of course I adapt his meaning). But equally, if one sets the historically miniscule narrative of the secular historicisms – a mere two centuries – alongside the age-long history of the theologies, it is clear that we can hardly know as yet what the fate of modernity might be. The very temporality of the emergence of modernity needs to be drastically reconceived with reference to that of the history of the theologies. Whatever the fausses pistes of the contemporary scene, secular historicism still constitutes the place in which we find ourselves, the difference being that, recently, we have at last begun to understand that we hardly know what to do with it, and so retreat from its implications. The modern, secular historicisms are not finished, but the age of their hubris is over. They need to sink themselves in richer soil. Here, precisely, as Benjamin also understood, they can learn from the slow, millennial evolution of the theologies and their better virtues: intellectual sobriety, extreme subtlety, a language of hardly rivalled power. It is time to start raiding the theologies, battening on them for deeper

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‘colorations’ of a secular historicism that will be nonetheless intransigent for its thefts. If Jambet’s major philosophical orientation involves a secular, Foucauldian historicism, for example, that it sometimes feels as though it is coming from a deeply religious mind is crucial. Jambet provides us with a modern mode of historical thought that is the more provocative for being cast in a seriously theological register. Raiding the theologies will also necessarily mean reformulating an expressive repertoire. Here, however, another element in this book has been considerably more important to it than theology, and that has been art, above all literature. For a long time, historical and political thought lorded it over art, confident that they knew more about its determinants than art itself conceivably could. They could therefore instruct aesthetics. It is now clear that the opposite may be the case, that it is art – supremely literature – that may best instruct historical and political thought, or at least asks major questions of it. But here we need to take a specific turn. If Badiou is right to suggest that our age is characterized by an ‘immense “return to Kant” ’, that is not just, perhaps even not chiefly because it takes for granted certain formally representable but unexamined imperatives, as he also thinks (ES: 8). It is rather because it subscribes with such gusto to what Jambet calls the Kantian belief in the ‘ontological dignity’ of the positive (Jambet 2002a: 8). Contemporary culture everywhere exemplifies this belief, thereby functioning, in spite of itself, and ironically, as the very paradigm of modernity’s grim lookalike, Proust’s ‘satanic’ version of modernity. Correlationism promotes a generalized positivity. Contemporary boosterism is of course pervasively evident in party-political, business, commercial, mediatized and populist discourses, though there the investment is self-evident; but it is also progressively more evident in learned, academic and sub-academic discourses, where the investment may not be so obvious, may indeed wear a contrary face. A correlationist culture is characterized by the ubiquity and pure meaninglessness of positivity. If all hypotheses are equally licit, final error is impossible. Everyone has their share in the right, if only within certain limits, which means that all must strive to avoid dogma, but are confirmed in their existence ‘in the positive’. If there is a heresy in contemporary intellectual culture, it is possibly not so much dogma as serious irony, as in Flaubert, an irony always on the brink of defecting from any programme whatsoever. One hears the Kantian affirmation indifferently, left, right and ‘centre’. Thus the world at large busily cries its myriad goods. Whilst certainly not a correlationist, Badiou himself is caught up in this – that he is concerned with the dignity of an ontological supplement does not change the essential point – as a fortiori are most

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of his and Rancière’s commentators. But though Badiou may at times succumb to the boosterist temptation, it is not a temptation that the concept of intermittency properly holds out. To think intermittency is to run counter to the contemporary culture of plenitude, of which positivity is a crucial feature, and to persist with a Sartrean principle of austerity. This constitutes an emphatic, properly philosophical refusal to buy into the contemporary will to be swiftly comforted. There is not much there for us, most of the time; our share is not as we think. But the relevant contrast to the ontological dignity of the positive is not the sterile dereliction of pessimism. It is rather a quite distinct knowledge, the knowledge of the remainder, Rancière’s ‘unpositivity’, Brecht’s (Schweikian) unpositif. It is also a knowledge of the affect appropriate to the remainder, melancholy, not as a selfindulgence, certainly not as Badiou’s pleurnicherie, but as a disposition of thought, with its own honourable and durable traditions and (following Lepenies) its own realia. Melancholy properly speaking is what Jambet calls ‘an ontological configuration, a certain general sentiment of being, a coloration of the soul, a phenomenology of time which is experienced, lived and [not] a nosological category’ (2005: 217). It does not exclude Schweikian (or many other kinds of) laughter. If Badiou cannot help with a critique of the ontological dignity of positivity, however, once we raise the question of the relation between literature and un-positivity, he abruptly seems of central relevance again. For it is Badiou who exactly understands the place of literature relative to historical intermittency. It is literature, he suggests, quite rightly, that is most expert in the ‘formal possibility’ of mondes atones (LM: 443), and, we should add, their substance. For two hundred years, literature has been involved with a concept of nascent and interrupted modernity. From the major romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, Hölderlin, Kleist) to the great symbolists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, the young Tennyson) and their successors (Laforgue, Mallarmé, the young Eliot); from the great realists (Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky) to the proto-modernists (Conrad, James) and the great modernists and contemporaries (Barnes, Woolf, Kafka, Coetzee, Pamuk), with an extraordinary persistence, modern literature has repeatedly told us about epiphanies or events and their consequences, the occasion of the break-up of the world. It has repeatedly committed itself to a wager that is also a thought, beyond Brassier (for whom there are no events), Gillespie (for whom an event has yet to happen), and Meillassoux (for whom all that can be said is that no law of necessity debars events). At the same time, however, literature has repeatedly linked events with a structure also involving declension, recession, recursion, the fall into obscurity. It has thus

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incessantly raised uncomfortable questions for the Kantian (and the contemporary) belief in positivity. From the era of Wordsworth, Kleist and Hölderlin onwards, literature and art have been the key modern custodians of a conception of historical reason as intermittent. Modernity proper, a modernity thought under a deeply ambivalent sign, begins there. Hegel loathed Kleist, and this is cardinal. Indeed, Kleist becomes the lynchpin of the argument, for it was Kleistian modernity that was abruptly smothered and then obscured by the emergence of the great, supposedly ‘modern’ narratives, whether Hegelian, liberal-capitalist, liberal-progressive, utilitarian, Marxist, economist or contemporary social-democratic, by the ‘talking up’ that still has us in thrall. Kleist the great stammerer had no skill in ‘talking up’. The ‘modernity’ of the narratives was a surrogate modernity which had its origins in the suppression of another one evident in The Prelude and Kleist’s Kant-crisis. This second modernity subsequently takes the aesthetic as its proper realm, until the seeming extinction of revolutionary hopes at the very end of the twentieth century allows for a different conceptualization of it. It is not clear that we are or can be ‘out of prehistory’. That is what a great deal of modern literature keeps telling us, including the Mallarmé Badiou so reveres. Literature has been prepared to speculate that we are hardly worthy of politics as yet, to risk the thought that we might rarely be. As a consequence of this, it ushers in a modern subject who attends, stalls, delays, finds complex and subtle practices appropriate to a hiatus he or she cannot be certain will not be interminable. This is the ‘waiting subject’, on whom Badiou can occasionally meditate, but who, by and large, is not sufficient to his purposes. It is above all Proust’s ‘resisting subject’. Modern literature and art take the weight of history in a manner that philosophy seldom appears to be willing to do. It is not often that philosophy has anything much to say to or about Britten’s War Requiem, the fifteenth movement of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, Picasso’s Guernica or Geoffrey Hill’s The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Its deafness to the ‘violent contrariety of men and days’ (Hill 1983: 10) means that it unceasingly leaves the door open for the return of the theologies, for the theologies do address historical experience, if from a certain vantage-point. This is where Rancière’s aesthetics abruptly seems relevant: if literature in particular thinks Rancière’s interim or condition of suspension, the seeming predominance of slack time, Bataille’s ‘useless’ or idle negativity, historical désœuvrement (Proust, HC: 31), it also resists notions of and summons to historical acceleration, insisting on complication, contradiction, qualification, equivocation. This has been notably the case, for example, in a modern

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literature much concerned with waiting, or what Steven Connor (1998) has called ‘slow going’, which has run from Flaubert to Joyce to Beckett, including others along the way. As we have seen with Flaubert, however, the art of slow going itself is inextricable from a certain valuation of the event, however frail its traces. But if modern philosophy has in one sense turned away from literature, in another, it has embraced it, increasingly recognizing in literature an intellectual equal, even a competitor. Badiou insists on the cardinal importance of the distinct and specific category of literature, which is defined by the truth that literature thinks. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes, he thereby flies in the face of literary critics, at least recent ones. At the same time that philosophy has seemed more and more willing to acknowledge the distinction of literature, literary theory and criticism have progressively turned in the opposite direction, proving increasingly reluctant to think of literature as constituting a specific form of thought. The correlationist asserts that the category of literature can be dissolved into a larger entity like ‘culture’ or ‘textuality’, finally collapsing it into doxa or asserting their indistinctness. ‘Literature is a term with no referent’, ‘Literature is anything I say it is’, ‘There is no such thing as literature’: these assertions are late-correlationist. Where pre-Kantian aesthetics believed that self-evidently objective definitions of art could be produced according to a rigorous logic, by now, it is clear that all definitions of art are perspectival. Thus correlationism promotes soap operas as freely as it does God, and as indifferently. But for Badiou, it is precisely from the consequences of relentless perspectivism that philosophy is called on to deliver art. For art or literature constitutes a special form of thought of equal status but not reducible to philosophy and which can likewise be defined in contradistinction to doxa. This is what matters in art, and what the correlationist denies. The exact constituents of that form are debatable at indefinite length, as is what one includes within the category. But that is not a reason for surrendering the category itself. Literature matters, and perhaps only philosophy can give us an indication of how it does so. The irony is, however, that, precisely at the point at which it does so, literature also appears to be the necessary and radical complement to philosophy. Lecercle is the most significant commentator on Badiou’s relation to literature. He exactly captures, not only the extent to which Badiou’s readings of literature are intensely problematic, objectionable and compelling, all at once, but how far these features are inseparable from one another (this being a logical consequence of Badiou’s intransigent hostility to the correlationist assumption). Badiou is impatient with the concept of a philosophy of literature, for literature does not need one:

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literature is not an object for ‘philosophical theorizing’ and is not to be exploited for ‘philosophical purposes’; it ‘thinks on its own’ (Lecercle 2010: 190, my italics). The philosopher may elicit this thought by a practice of ‘strong reading’ which extracts a problem from the literary work, constructs a concept which grasps it, acknowledges and addresses the protracted insistence of both problem and concept and constitutes ‘an intervention rather than an interpretation’, in effect a Bloomian ‘creative misprision’ (Lecercle 2010: 114–16), but to an unBloomian end. Two related things can immediately be said for this procedure: firstly and importantly, the philosopher properly speaking is intent on reading against ‘the grain of received doxa’ (Lecercle 2010: 115). The philosopher clears doxa out of the way, because thought can be isolated from it. Secondly, though this is not exactly Lecercle’s point, whilst, for Badiou, philosophers cannot be subjects (as philosophers, at least), ‘strong reading’ is a structure of decision and analogous to a declared mode of subjecthood. In effect, the reader becomes a ‘subject by proxy’. Indeed, since Badiou refuses to let the decision slide into correlationist indifference, as Lecercle asserts, he ends up constructing a canon of a literature that matters to thought. In effect, for Badiou, canon formation and subjecthood are intrinsically related; indeed, with Badiou, we glimpse a new concept of canon formation as subjective but graspable as a thought, because it emerges as an organized system of distinctive choices which can in principle be justified in toto. There is of course an obvious objection to Badiou’s method: he ‘seems to find something in the text only because he sought it, and what he finds is always philosophical propositions, and always the propositions of his own philosophy’ (Lecercle 2010: 138). But though Lecercle insists on this, he does not hinge his account on it. Firstly, if Badiou imposes himself on literature, this is not in the mode of ‘subjective interpretation’. Badiou has no interest in interpretation. He is concerned with pursuing the thought in literature, and it is the philosopher who must supply the terms of that thought, as the contemporary literary critic often cannot do, because the terms must not be those of doxa. Only the philosopher can regulate the assertion of his or her imperious will, since any regulation must not sink back into received opinion, must be para-doxical. Badiou is unafraid of paradox, relishes it, uses it strategically, understands it in his own positions and seeks it out in literature, and again, this makes his readings, though more self-enclosed, contentious and even one-dimensional than others, also in some ways more demanding and more satisfying. Secondly, if Badiou reads Mallarmé and Beckett, Mallarmé and Beckett ‘read’ him. The question of how far ‘the propositions of his own philosophy’ that Badiou finds

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in Mallarmé are propositions he derived from the poet is finally undecidable, and this makes them seem less Procrustean and more like the building blocks of an emergent subjectivity. Thirdly, Badiou’s practice of intervention as ‘blatant misunderstanding’ is above all a provocation, a challenge to a ‘counter-reading’, (Lecercle 2010: 116). Badiou knows that his ‘strong readings’ invite resistance, that they cannot be the last word. They involve, not only a thought, but a crucial incitement to others to think; to think, that is, beyond doxa. In the end, then, one’s major reservation about Badiou reading literature has to do not with any authoritarian tendency we might detect within the result, still less with a supposedly solipsistic one. It has rather to do with the concept of the necessity of literature implicit in his work. In effect, for Badiou, literature either thinks the event or the possible condition of the event, or becomes one itself in initiating ‘a new artistic configuration’ (Lecercle 2010: 174). But as we have seen in every chapter of this book, literature (or art) also turns back to a world that has no relation to the order of events and truths and is not amenable to it. It may offer us little or nothing apart from that world. For Badiou, literature is in some degree consciousness-raising, and here, ironically, we are likely to lose any sense of his emphatic distinctness from the dominant tone in literary studies. He rather shares it, at least insofar as he shares its commitment to the ontological dignity of positivity. As Lecercle says, however important literary thought is for Badiou, he is also concerned that there should be no ‘contamination of philosophy by art’ (Lecercle 2010: 199). Here Lecercle’s Badiou-based reading of Frankenstein is important. Frankenstein is the subject of an event that he at length betrays. Where Badiou would only see a reactive subject, however, Mary Shelley sees both epiphany and loss, above all, the loss that is the monster’s. Literature refuses to turn everything to profit. It dwells with loss, loss of all kinds, remains intimate with it, does not write it off according to any economics of unrelenting positivity either left or right. Loss may even be modern literature’s primary element; literature picks up the loss that others leave in their wake; but it does so precisely because it knows the event. This, too, is a reason for the necessity of literature. Literature is necessary because it opens up events, pays tribute to them, shares their affirmation, but also because it drags back and away from them, insists on their infrequency and its subjective consequences, and thereby applies the historical brakes; to say which is emphatically not to identify modern literature (or my argument at any point) with gradualism, still less with cynicism, but rather with a ‘melancholic–ecstatic’ politics of broken lights. Unlike philosophy, literature can scarcely think the event apart from the remainder, the

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unpositif, as what is commonly the larger part of what we are given to know. Since it is the larger part, I shall end with it. THE EXAMPLE OF SEBALD One last objection to the philosophers of intermittency: Anglo-Saxon economist democracy and postmodern American liberalism globalize themselves as the only significant game in town, indeed the right one, the one that everyone else needs to learn. But do not the philosophers of intermittency in effect if often obliquely and clandestinely globalize a particular history, modern French history with its sporadic revolutions, as though it represented a universal truth? We should take the point seriously. If the concept of intermittency is properly to matter, we need to some extent to wean it away from French history and rethink it in relation to other histories, histories harder to read positively. Colonial histories immediately spring to mind. There is no example of a more lasting history of intermittency, for example, than Irish history after 1169. To review just some of the brief historical paroxysms (or events): 1261 . . . 1569–73, 1579–83, 1595–1603 . . . 1641 . . . 1798 . . . 1848 . . . 1875–91, 1916: on the one hand, the list is obviously selective. On the other, the gaps in it do not chiefly designate other historical events, but the kind of historical declension if not horror indicated by such signifiers as plantation, the Flight of the Earls, the Cromwellian campaign, the Ascendancy, the Penal Code, the Act of Union, the Great Famine and so on. Modern philosophers prefer French history, and seldom turn to the Irish. Benjamin is perhaps the only philosopher to have constructed a thought from the vantage-point of what is represented in Irish history, though Proust follows him in this, and Rancière sometimes seems to come close to doing so. Irish history teaches us a lesson that is or ought to be crucial to thought. To suppose anything else is to buy either into a self-satisfied reactionary narrative or a speciously cheering myth of progress. But Irish history represents par excellence the Benjaminian underside of a progress it ceaselessly reveals to be a fantasm. There are other histories even less in danger of being immediately recuperated within the positive conceptual horizons of postcolonialism: the history for instance of the Meridionale, or the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. This of course is also a colonial history, but considerably more obscure to us as such, its obscurity telling us yet another story of the exclusions that constantly go hand in hand with projects of inclusiveness. The history of southern Italy also has a historical reach well beyond that of Irish history which will underwrite a theory of history

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as few others will do. Tommaso Astarita’s engrossing account (2005) conveys a very clear sense of a history punctuated by occasional events, chiefly from the eighteenth century onwards: but in the context of the history of the Meridionale as a whole, these events must look historically if not philosophically insignificant, not only in their extreme rarity but also in the slightness of their purchase. Alongside the rare events – the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, Neapolitan humanism under Alphonsus the Magnanimous, the rebellion of 1647–8, Tommaso Cornelio’s scientific academy in the 1660s and its challenge to the Church, the Neapolitan Enlightenment, the 1799 Neapolitan Republic, the revolt of 1820, the rebellion of 1844 in Calabria, the revolution of 1848, the arrival of Garibaldi in 1860 – we must place the age-long reality of domination: Magna Graecia, Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, the Arabs and Saracens, the Normans, Hohenstaufen and Angevins, the Aragonese, Habsburgs and Bourbons: oppression, brutalization, exploitation, egregious obscurantism, plagues, barbarisms, massacres (for example, the Waldensians), endless corruption, crime, censorship, mass illiteracy, mass emigration, ‘warfare and political turmoil’, ‘urban disorder, rural crime and aristocratic violence’, ‘hunger, disease, chaos, violence, social instability’, ‘the abject misery of rural people’, people ‘not too different from the beasts they guarded’ (Astarita 2005: 84, 107, 133, 160, 187). The elite northern interests that prevailed after 1860 were neo-colonial and ‘brought no real social or economic change’ (Astarita 2005: 285). This is the history behind the view of Sicily conveyed by Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, in Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo, The Leopard, in response to a visiting northern dignitary offering him a seat in the new Italian senate in 1860: We [Sicilians] are old, Chevalley, the oldest. For at least twenty-five centuries we have been bearing on our shoulders the weight of magnificent, heterogeneous civilizations, all come from outside, all already perfect and complete, none having germinated in us, none to which we have given our own say-so . . . for two thousand five hundred years we have been a colony. I don’t say this out of self-pity; in great part, we have ourselves been to blame; but we are empty and exhausted, all the same. (Lampedusa 2010 [1969]: 178)

The point is not that Lampedusa and Don Fabrizio are unsympathetic to the event of Garibaldi and the modernity it represents – Don Fabrizio even considers it a privilege to have met Chevalley – but rather that both obstinately insist on fidelity to the understanding of (the) split-time produced by modernity, the turbid, protracted, backward lag along with the seeming moment of advance, the remainder along with the event.

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Sicily encapsulates the remainder: it is the ‘centenarian dragged in a bath-chair’ towards a future about which he understands nothing and cares less, longing only to be back asleep in his bed (Lampedusa 2010 [1969]: 178). Carlo Levi’s diagnosis of the cultural predicament of the Meridionale is in some ways very similar, though of course the irony in Levi’s case is that he has been banished to the South by Mussolini’s Fascist North, which leaves questions of relative progress looking far trickier than they might have done in 1860, and hardly makes that date the secure basis of a progressive narrative. As an instance of the onset of modernity, Françoise Proust cites Kleist’s observation that God is not only hidden; he is no longer anything but ‘a grotesque dwarf’ (Proust 1996: 46). Compare Dostoyevky’s Svidrigailov on eternity: ‘all there will be is one little room, something akin to the country bath-house, with soot on the walls and spiders in every corner, and there’s your eternity for you’ (Dostoevsky 1991 [1866]: 346). Onsets of modernity – or rather, Proust says herself, disenchanted modernity, the disenchantment being coeval with modernity itself, Kant and Kleist again together. Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli is a superb twentieth-century statement of modern disenchantment, the disenchantment of occasional modernity confronting its other, and therefore an expression of deep scepticism as to ‘what men call History’ (Levi 2000 [1945]: 11). The inhabitants of the ‘desolate land’ of Lucania have never escaped the assumption of the routine mundanity of ‘injustice and horror’ and the transgenerational chains of hate (Levi 2000 [1945]: 16, 204). Here time ‘has come to a stop’ (Levi 2000 [1945]: 72, 80), and history is profoundly recalcitrant to enlightenment and redemption alike. ‘The result is a poverty so dismal and abject that it amounts to slavery without hope of emancipation’ (Levi 2000 [1945]: 171). The Latin cras, tomorrow, has become the dialectal crai, never. The peasants’ one historical allegiance is to the brigands, whose ‘sporadic outbursts of revolt’ constitute ‘the only poetry in their existence’, though it is ‘doomed to repression’, a return to the silence, the ‘darkness of earth and death’ that is their element (Levi 2000 [1945]: 134, 137). Their attachment to the brigands is however indicative: the peasants nurse a vestigial sense of what a transformative event might be for them. For within them lies ‘a natural respect for justice, a spontaneous understanding of what government and the state should be, namely the will of the people expressed in terms of law’. This is the case for all their utter indifference to the larger world and its politics, or perhaps because of it, for they know that socialism, progress, liberalism, conservatism, fascism, ‘Power, Government and the State’ alike have no meaning, ‘nothing

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to do with them’ (Levi 2000 [1945]: 77, 218). Nonetheless, the only conceivable solution to their condition would be an unheard-of or as yet unnameable politics, ‘new political ideas and a new kind of state’ (Levi 2000 [1945]: 240). But if Ireland and the Meridionale pose problems for the philosophical thematization of history, as such, they neatly, even blatantly fit the bill. What of a liberal, pragmatic culture long hostile to historical events but with achieved democratic institutions, say, England? Here the obscure researches of literature turn out to be peculiarly fertile. The subject of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly simple: a walk along the East Anglian coastline. In reality, however, the book becomes one of Sebald’s great meditations ‘on the natural history of destruction’, to cite another of his other titles and what is surely his major theme. The immediate historical context for this meditation is not far to seek: Sebald carried out his walk ‘when the dog days were drawing to an end’, that is, August, but also 1992, towards the end of a recent phase in the history of English boosterism, if by no means the last one, the Thatcherite era (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 3). The book partly works by turning the Thatcherite project inside out, insisting that the scene of regeneration is in fact a panorama of devastation, most obviously, perhaps, in the account of the ‘insidious decay’ of Lowestoft, both economic and cultural at once (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 45). But this is only to scrape the surface of the book. Certainly, its historical range is wide and very various. Nothing in England will account for the seven hundred thousand Serbs, Jews and Bosnians bestially executed by the Croatian Ustasha, nor for Kurt Waldheim, the exHeeresgruppe intelligence officer who ends up Secretary General of the United Nations, and whose voice eventually represents humanity as it is prospectively conveyed to extra-terrestrial life on Voyager II. But the principal settings in the book are English, and it is on them that Sebald’s historical meditation most powerfully focuses. Sebald burrows into the landscapes of Norfolk and Suffolk, everywhere finding holes and corners of ‘encroaching misery’, pockets of recidivism, ruin, ‘dissolution and silent oblivion’ (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 36, 42). Frederick Farrar, George Wyndham Le Strange and others seem the very paradigm of the dead life of the monde atone. But beyond such individuals, Sebald is also acutely aware of how far his East Anglian horizons are haunted by historical catastrophe and historical suffering, from ‘the enormity of the havoc’ of the offshore naval battles with the Dutch, and ‘the agony that was endured’ by the participants (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 78), to ‘the madness of the whole colonial enterprise’, not least in Ireland, to the hundreds of thousands of bombs for starting German

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firestorms, and so on and on (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 117). If Sebald is a peculiarly gripping contemporary writer, this has partly to do with the intensity and tenacity with which, like Coetzee, he contests what he recognizes to be an essential contemporary fraudulence, the will to erase the historical remainder. He rather reawakens, restores it. His singular virtue is also to recognize the profound inscription of the remainder in modern English culture, as, here and there, the inherited wealth of the slave trade or the Opium Wars continues to underwrite its breezy free market economics: hence the degree to which, in Sebald’s treatment, Thatcherism not only finds a host of analogies and avatars in English history, but even begins to look like a comparatively innocent version of its typical structure. At the very end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald writes of ‘our history’ as ‘but a long account of calamities’ (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 295). His interest was always in what it might be possible to say about catastrophe in permanence. The Rings of Saturn appears to share Lepenies’s concept of melancholy as inherent or historically sedimented in a landscape. The upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, late nineteenth-century ‘business baron’ Cuthbert Quilter may assert his ‘spectacular success’ in his ‘maharajah’s palace’ on the Deben estuary (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 224). But such brisk attempts to expunge the endemic melancholy of the landscape soon falter. No ‘subjective impressionism’ is at stake here. In the very act of observation, Sebald repeatedly describes himself as fainting or fading away. This has nothing to do with the capture of the world in impressions, but rather with its obverse, the destruction of a subject by objective melancholy. It shows how little what matters to Sebald is his own ‘subjectivity’ in this sense (which is not Badiou’s), as, in a rather different mode, do the many photographs in the book. Indeed, for all that one might convict Sebald of self-absorption, it is others who matter to him, hopelessly matter, in their incompletion and unfulfilment, just as they do to Rossellini’s Irene or Agamben: Edward FitzGerald, for example, extremely badly damaged by monstrously indifferent parents, shabby, solitary, bleakly eccentric, much assailed by what he called ‘the blue devil of melancholy’ and constitutionally incapable of completing any project. Yet FitzGerald was not fated to inexistence, not only in that he experienced an event of love (for William Browne), but in that he proved capable of an exquisite act of gardiennage, a translation of a poem of two hundred and twenty-four lines, the Rubaiyat, a colloquy with Omar Khayyam ‘and an attempt to bring us tidings of him’, which radiates ‘a pure, unselfconscious beauty’ (Sebald 2002 [1995]: 200, 205). This may seem like an oddly slight, inconsequential, biographically centred image with which to end this

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book. But it is not irrelevant to what is and may interminably be an appropriate modern concept of historical reason.

NOTES 1. For reasons of succinctness, I largely ignore certain major differences between the individual philosophers, though I remark on one or two below. 2. For Rabaté on Badiou and literature, specifically Beckett, see Rabaté 2005. 3. This is more the case with Meillassoux and Hamilton Grant than Brassier, who resorts to the historical argument whilst also asserting that it is not wholly adequate to speculative realist purposes. Brassier argues that Meillassoux’s historicism tethers itself to correlationism, in that correlationists can always read off the chronological discrepancy between cosmological and anthropomorphic time as a ‘for us’ and not an ‘in itself’. Meillassoux however has already countered this argument, notably in asserting, firstly, that the scientific ‘procedure of knowledge’ that discovers ancestral time can exist independently of the human witness, not least as a technologized knowledge; and, secondly, that it is a function of the evolving scientific mathematization of nature, which separates the mathematizable from the non-mathematizable world, thereby demonstrating that it is ‘capable of autonomy’. See Meillassoux (2006): 15, 158–9. It is hard to see why Brassier does not grant this argument, given his own reliance on mathematization in his support of Badiou’s ontology. However, the crucial point is the one I raise regarding Badiou, the void and the mark. 4. ‘Factiality’ is Brassier’s translation of Meillassoux’s term ‘factualité’. For his account of its meaning, see Brassier (2010 [2007]): 63–7, 89–93. 5. In Hamilton Grant’s evocation of Schelling’s geologism (Schelling 1946 [1811–13]: 11; Hamilton Grant 2008 [2006]: 204). 6. ‘French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’, Wordsworth (1966): 165. 7. Cf. SA: 25: the event ‘mobilizes the elements of its site’. 8. He also seeks to rebut the notion of grace, however, which I have deliberately retained, because its secular nuance – suggesting an unexpected gift or donation – seems to me both beautiful and useful. 9. For this view, see for instance Connor (2007): passim. 10. See Rawls (1971), and, for a very specific contrast (1985). 11. Bosteels suggests that Lacan’s resort to Sophocles, classical within psychoanalysis, requires an Aeschylean supplement (2009: 79–95), a return to the defiantly oppositional Orestes determined to shatter a pernicious law and change the world. He derives this argument from Badiou’s early and ex-centric text, Theory of the Subject, but it is not clear that it plays a major part in Badiou’s thought. My commitment is to a Badiou more Lacanian in his circumspection, and less inclined to the reassurances of immediate action (not of course that Orestes in himself is a reassuring figure). 12. Here Meillassoux thinks in terms engagingly reminiscent of Rimbaud (see e.g. Rimbaud 2001: 133), thus also partly coinciding with the last section of my argument in Chapter 4. 13. He has promised the author to do so (by providing his own ‘logic of rarity’).

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14. Feltham engagingly argues that the voice of the ‘right Badiouian’ (or ‘the owl’) in Badiou’s work itself must be offset against the voice of ‘the eagle’, who peremptorily insists on change in its purity, and the voice of the mole, concerned with ‘slow pragmatic supplementation’ (Feltham 2008: 118–22). He is to my knowledge the only scholar to have valuably explored Badiou’s thought as ‘plurivocal’. 15. Feltham nicely counters this delusion: there are still plenty of high-school teachers in France ‘trying to work out just what the French revolution is . . . in the field of education’ (Feltham 2008: 103). 16. I am grateful to Judith Balso for reminding me of this. 17. The major concept of the waiting subject in Badiou is thus clearly distinct from Žižek’s (Adrian Johnston-derived) conception of it as involving a ‘specifically Communist patience’ (Žižek 2008c: 391). Pluth’s assertion that the subject need not wait at all (Pluth 2010: 84) is highly contemporary, but simply ignores a recurrent theme in Badiou’s work. 18. 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 LacoueLabarthe 1992: 43. 19. For an example of the theological recuperation of Benjamin, see Lane (2005). Contrast Howard Caygill, who argues that Benjamin’s messianism is an archaic vestige that ‘signifies the proximity of a lapse into dogmatism’. See Caygill 1998: 149–52. But Peter Osborne is surely right to assert that, in Benjamin’s properly materialist work, the theological motifs should be read as figures for a philosophical consciousness of history that has yet to develop an equivalent secular form (Osborne 1994: 63). 20. See the title of Vattimo 1991.

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Appendix: Lardreau: Philosophization, Negation and Veracity

For Lardreau, any unqualified celebration of ‘freedom’ and ‘openness’ in philosophy of the kind with which he associates Leibniz runs the risk of collapsing into easy-going relativism. This collapse is incompatible with the philosophical task. Yet Lardreau might himself seem to be very much of the relativist party, above all, in his concept of philosophization. He takes over the Lacanian principle that there is no cataphasis, definition by positive statement, without apophasis, definition by the negative. But this assertion must also be reversible, since any definition by the negative will allow a countervailing positive statement to emerge, and so on ad infinitum. Thus any discourse whatsoever, from detective fiction to apocalyptic Syriac texts, is open to philosophization. The work of philosophization transforms a given discourse into a new set of philosophemes. The discourse may be of any kind. The philosopher scorns no material intrinsically and in itself. Thus, for example, Lardreau seeks to redeem the weird eschatology of Syriac literalism.1 No propositions automatically have a philosophical dignity. The dignity of philosophy is to ignore questions of what is worthy or unworthy of philosophy. Thus philosophy appropriates phrases that are strange to it, in a Foucauldian stylization of some life preceding it; not a vertical, Platonic transcendence of opinion or doxa, but a lateral transformation of it.2 For all Lardreau’s love of Leibniz, he might also seem to be directly opposed to him, above all in the case of affirmation. Leibniz says all philosophy is true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. This is hardly likely to appeal to the Lacanian and sceptic in Lardreau: it is philosophy as a function of religiosity. Indeed, in this respect, Lardreau claims to say the reverse of what Leibniz says: where Leibniz works by affirmation, he himself works by negation. He everywhere categorizes his thought as a negative philosophy. But how then can he also claim, 291

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as he does, that he nonetheless contradicts Leibniz only superficially? On the one hand, a proposition contravenes truth insofar as it denies that all others are true and, in that denial, finds its own affirmation. On the other hand, a proposition is true if it affirms that all others are true and finds in that affirmation its own negation. In Lardreau’s terms, negation is thus not obliteration, cancellation or destruction. It is rather the point one at which one affirmation sets a limit to a contrary one. It therefore preserves affirmation in a kind of ironized or inverted form. Another way of putting this would be to say that, contra Leibniz, Bergson and Deleuze, Lardreau retains a concept of affirmation by retaining a concept and a practice of dialectics.3 What Lardreau means by negation is intimately related to his concept of veracity. This involves responsibility: in contemplating and engaging with another thought, one may address it at a ‘high point’: this means addressing it at the point of its desire to speak true, where it may always encounter and compose with another thought and be delimited by it without being humiliated. But one may also address it at a ‘low’ point, the point at which it is falsifiable, which is a point of indifference to its claim to speak true (ED: 46–7). Veracity is a form of probity. Yet veracity does not involve speaking the truth about the other’s truthclaim: for Lardreau, this would hardly be conceivable. Once again, it is a question of recognizing a limit through negation, in that veracity means establishing a stopping-point to the infinite recession of meaning (or what Lardreau calls ‘nominalist recession’, LV: 92). In the first instance, the stopping-point is the impossibility of certain readings, of which perhaps the most obvious form is anachronism. Thus we cannot know exactly what Rabelais’s religious views were, for example, but we can know what they were not. This precisely determines a field of likelihood which makes veracity possible, though only as an approximation. It is characteristic of Lardreau that he should be capable both of taking veracity extremely seriously (for example, his acerbic critique of Deleuze) and producing something close to a parody of the theme (for example, his essay on Porphyry).4 NOTES 1. See Lardreau 1983. 2. See ED: 23. It is hard to square this argument with Lardreau’s attacks on the ‘spiritualism’ of contemporary mass culture in VM, in particular at 59–72; in general, he is not at his most convincing when arguing for a new relationship between philosophy and opinion. Lardreau is not a social democrat, and the Lardreau who writes scholarly essays about Porphyry and St Bernard seems remote enough from social-democratic themes.

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3. Since Lardreau calls both Leibniz and Deleuze affirmative philosophers, this may lead to confusion. Leibniz thinks an affirmation within negation: he is a thinker of the half-thought (and the two). Deleuze thinks in terms of an unconditional affirmation everywhere and at all points. He is a ‘spiritualist’ and monist (a thinker of the one). 4. See the protracted account of Deleuze’s ‘falsifications’, ED: 50–7; and the elaborate rationale for Porphyry’s patently absurd allegorical reading of The Odyssey (Lardreau 1989, especially at 30–47).

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Index

Abderite, 80, 268 absconditus, 7, 9–10, 115, 122, 125–6, 132, 140 abstract art, 181–2 acceleration, 216–17, 219, 244n, 280 acedia, 54, 58, 61, 95–6 act of being, 127–31, 133–4, 139 Act of Union (Ireland, 1801), 284 actual infinity, 28–9, 35, 257 Adorno, Theodor W., 232, 245n, 276 Aeschylus, 289n aesthetic suspension, 230, 232, 235–7 aestheticism, 60 aesthetics, 22, 72, 96–7, 138, 180–2, 192, 207, 229–36, 241, 277–8, 280–1 affect, xv–xvi, 46–7, 52, 70–7, 79, 97, 109n, 234, 253, 267, 279 affirmationism, 46–7, 52, 59, 62, 168, 291–2, 293n; see also ontological dignity of the positive Agamben, Giorgio, 27, 51–3, 63, 64n, 94, 261, 288 aggressivity, 165, 169, 177, 191, 261 Agrippa, Menenius Lanatus, 205, 220 Alamut, 112–14, 119–21, 124, 132, 135, 141, 144, 148, 153n, 157, 259 aleatory reason, 265–6 Al-Haqq, 126–7, 132 Alphonsus the Magnanimous (Naples and Sicily, 1396–1458), 285 al-Sijistani, Abu Yaqub, 115 al-Suhrawardi, Abu al-Najib, 123, 128, 137, 139–40, 152 alternance, 167–8, 180, 182, 198 Althusser, Louis, xii, xiv, 35, 65n, 158–9, 206, 242–3 al-Tusi, Nasir al-Din, 115, 134, 154n anamnesis, 90–1, 135 ancestral time, 247–8, 251, 253–6, 262, 289n anterior death, 249 anthropocentrism, 39, 173–4, 247–9, 252–4

anthropomorphic time, 247–8, 253–6, 262, 289n anthropomorphosis, 117 anti-dialectical principle, 20, 43, 50, 94, 123, 128, 133, 147; see also materialist dialectics; unpositif anti-humanism, 35, 39–40, 174, 201n, 246, 249, 254 anti-incarnationism, 114, 132, 140, 242 anti-modernity, 42, 73, 98, 107–8, 187 antinomies, 70–1, 74 anti-philosophy, 15, 25, 64n, 163–4, 169 anti-schematics of historical reason, xii–xiv, 2, 5–8, 14, 30, 33, 82, 122, 142, 147–8, 160, 186, 204, 223, 267–9, 280, 289; see also intermittency apagogic reason, 240–1, 245n, 271 apocatastasis, 121, 154n apophasis, 114, 291 arche-fossil, 247, 251 archi-ethics, 25–7, 43, 65n Archimedes, 255 Arendt, Hannah, 78 aristocratism, 50 Aristotelianism, 125–6, 129, 137, 154n, 164, 175 Aristotle, 26, 125, 129, 137–8, 154n Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War (1407–35), 151 art as metapolitics, 229–36 Artaud, Antonin, 161 Ascendancy (Ireland), 284 Assassins, 153n Astarita, Tommaso, 285 Athenaeum, 196 atonal music, 39, 41 Auerbach, Erich, 234 Aurelius, Marcus, 240 Auschwitz, 51 autonomy, 118, 171–3 autonomy (of art), 231–2 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 125–6

317

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318

Intermittency

Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 115, 125, 129, 137, 140, 154n axiom of foundation, 39, 258–9 axioms, 25, 44, 254, 258–9 Badiou, Alain, xii–xv, 2, 15, 22, 23n, 24–68, 76, 82, 88, 93, 97–8, 105, 107–8, 109n, 124–5, 135, 143–51, 154n, 157, 162–3, 166, 199n, 208, 213, 223–4, 229, 249, 252–5, 257–8, 261, 263–4, 267–76, 278–83, 288, 289n Baillet, Adrien, 202, 205 Bakunin, Mikhail, 33, 217 Balso, Judith, 65n, 157, 290n Balzac, Honoré de, 234 banal infinity, 24, 40; see also actual infinity bare life, 27, 51, 53–4 Barham, Peter, 106 Barker, Jason, 64n Barnes, Djuna, 279 Bataille, Georges, xiii, 15, 110n, 280 Bate, Jonathan, 111n Baudelaire, Charles, 85–7, 90–2, 97, 103, 107, 160–1, 232, 279 Baudrillard, Jean, 255 bavardage, 87 Beck, Lewis White, 172 Beckett, Samuel, 47, 60, 63, 67n, 159–60, 224, 252–3, 270, 280–2 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 133, 135 Being, 9–10, 24, 27–9, 31, 33, 35, 39, 43–5, 124–6, 129–31, 133–4, 148, 154n, 249, 256–7 Being-there, 33, 37, 146 Benjamin, Walter, xiv, 2, 68–9, 82–98, 103–4, 106, 109n, 110n, 216, 226, 235, 238, 260–2, 270, 276, 284, 290n Bensaïd, Daniel, 1, 22n Berg, Alban, 40 Bergman, Ingrid, 238–40 Bergson, Henri, 250, 292 Berkeley, George, 154n Billah, Ma’ad al-Mustansir, 112 bi-polar disorder, 11, 23n Birnbaum, Jean, 168–9 Blake, William, 138, 152 Bloch, Ernst, 275–6 body, 39, 41, 45, 134–5, 149 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 63, 102, 189, 197 Borges, Jorge Luis, 152 Borromean knot, 163, 166, 262 Bosteels, Bruno, 33, 39, 50, 64n, 65n, 66n, 256, 262, 267, 271, 273, 275, 289n Bourdieu, Pierre, 203, 231 Bozorg Ummid, Hassan ibn Mohammed ibn, 113–14, 116–17, 119, 121 Brassier, Ray, 246–9, 251–6, 268, 279, 289n

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bravura, 77, 100, 274 Brecht, Bertolt, 90, 222, 279 Breton, André, 55, 274 Britten, Benjamin, 135, 155n, 280 Browne, William, 288 Büchner, Georg, 212, 224, 230, 244n Buck-Morss, Susan, 95–6 Burke, Edmund, 244n Byron, Lord George Gordon, 97 Cabet, Étienne, 214 Calabrian Rebellion (1844), 285 Calvin, John, 141 Cambridge Platonists, 10, 23n, 143 canon formation, 282 capitalism, 14, 37, 51, 62, 66n, 81, 179, 219, 280, 288 casuistry, 78, 98, 107, 274 cataphasis, 291 catastrophe in permanence, 2, 82–7, 92–3, 95–6, 103–6, 140, 151–2, 175–6, 187–8, 193–4, 197, 238, 261, 270, 277, 287–8 categorical imperative, 119, 173, 175–7, 200n category theory, 259 Cathars, 154n causa noumenon, 171, 174, 178 causality, 264–6; see also implausible causality Caygill, Howard, 290n Celan, Paul, 49, 53, 274 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 222 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 229, 241–3 Chalier, Joseph, 227–8 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 60–1, 233 Châtelet, François, 158–9, 161, 199n Chinese history, 257 Churchland, P.M., 249, 254 climate change, 19 clinamen, 213 Coetzee, J.M., 279, 288 cogitor, 9, 118–20, 143–4, 267 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41–2 Colet, Louise, 59–60 colonialism, 19, 284–5, 287 communal solipsism, 250 communism, xiv, 1, 18–19, 21, 32–3, 42, 44, 163, 239, 271–2, 290n community, 131–2, 135–6, 139, 208, 210, 216, 220–1, 223, 231–2 complicity, 16, 169, 175, 195, 261 compossibility, xvi, 25 conatus essendi, 31, 65n, 110n, 118 condition of literature, 234–5 Connolly, Cyril, 2 Connor, Steven, 281, 289n

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Index Conrad, Joseph, 85, 279 consensus, 207–9, 219, 231 contemporary boosterism, 52, 279, 287 contemporary culture, xv, 51, 83–4, 207–12, 214, 231, 259, 261, 272, 277–9, 292n contemporary democracy, 45, 50–2, 63, 64n, 66n, 69, 81, 109n, 207–11, 213, 215–17, 220, 231, 244n, 260–1, 284 contemporary ethics (ethicism), 25, 49, 64n, 160, 207–9, 246 contingency, xiv, 24, 26, 31, 35–6, 38–9, 43, 51, 64n, 120, 161, 181, 186, 189, 192, 204–5, 211, 213, 220, 223, 247, 251–3, 256, 260, 264–6, 268–9 Copernican revolution (Benjamin), 88 Copernican revolution (Kant), 79, 109n, 171, 249 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 10, 57 Coptic Christianity, 158 Corbin, Henry, 13, 15, 23n, 117, 122, 130, 136–7, 154n, 155n, 158, 186, 199n Cornelio, Tommaso, 285 correlationism, 249–51, 253–4, 278, 281–2, 289n Costa, Pedro, 233 counter-Being, 68, 109n counter-finality, 19–21, 260, 263 counter-nature, 73, 75, 98 counter-phenomenology of Spirit, 122–3, 142, 230; see also anti-schematics of historical reason; Jambet, Christian counter-time, 89–91 Courbet, Gustave, 144 creative principle, 115–16, 119–20, 124, 126–7 Critchley, Simon, 170, 199n, 270 critical mortification, 92 Cromwellian campaign (Ireland, 1649–53), 284 Cudworth, Ralph, 143 Cultural Revolution (China), 33, 159–60 dark event, 133–5, 148–9 de Witt, Cornelis, 219–20 de Witt, Johann, 219–20 death-drive, 165, 168–9, 175–7, 188–9 death of philosophy, 25, 49, 64n death of the spirit, 114, 134–5, 142, 149, 273 decision, 17, 25, 30, 40, 48, 147–8, 170, 175–7 deconstruction, 37–8, 249, 275 Defoe, Daniel, 241 degradation, 131, 148–9 Deleuze, Gilles, xii, 64n, 66n, 110n, 189, 236, 250, 267, 292, 293n deliberation, 177, 193

GIBSON PRINT.indd 319

319

democratic moment, 209–11, 213–14, 221–2, 230 Democritus, 33; see also Abderite Derrida, Jacques, xii, 37–8, 64n, 167 Descartes, René, 11, 76, 118, 202, 204–5, 215, 219–20 desire, 9, 30–1, 117, 131, 140, 164–6, 173, 177–8, 183, 188–91, 195 désœuvrement, 4, 8, 229, 280 Dessanti, Jean-Toussaint, 66n detective fiction, 158, 168, 291 dialectic of duration, 136, 259 dialectical materialism, 64n, 65n, 275 dialectics, xiii, 4, 8, 14, 19, 20, 44, 50, 74, 85, 94–5, 107, 123, 128, 133, 136, 163, 170, 222, 292 Dicker, Georges, 171 disagreement, 206, 244n disenchanted modernity, 286 disobedience, 119 Docetism, 114, 153n Dos Passos, John, 236 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 176, 234, 279, 286 doublure, 83, 110n doxa, 26, 30, 32, 58, 211, 257–8, 281–3, 291, 292n Dresden uprising (1849), 55, 217 duperie, 165, 169, 195 dynamism, 216–18 ecological criticism, 98, 111n ecstasis, xiv, xvi, 31, 108, 131, 267; see also epiphany; event; sublime education, 210–12, 216 egalitarian moment, 205–9, 211–14, 216, 221–3, 230 egalitarian presupposition, 211, 217, 220 egalitarianism, 120, 218, 232, 245n Eisenstein, Sergei, 240 eliminative materialism, 249 Eliot, T. S., 142, 279 empty set, 28 enclave culture, 208 end of history, 4–5, 8, 10, 12, 51, 81 end of interpretation, 88, 163, 282 energetics, 128 Enlightenment, 42, 47, 69, 75, 78, 80, 82, 166, 176, 183, 195, 201n, 244n, 270 Epicurus, 33, 200n epiphany, xvi, 10–11, 60, 100, 105, 108, 113, 116, 121–2, 130–2, 135, 138, 143, 147–8, 279, 283 equality, 1–2, 17, 44, 120, 155n, 205–12, 215–17, 220–1, 223, 236, 263 equivocation, 93, 102, 104, 166–7, 188, 280 eschatology, 43, 141, 155 esoteric interpretation, 119–20, 123

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320

Intermittency

esoteric Islam, 8, 114–16, 118–19, 122, 125, 127–8, 130–1, 135–6, 141, 272; see also Islamic gnosticism eternal return, 84–7, 91, 103, 167 ethico-teleology, 247–8, 270 ethics, 25–7, 31, 43, 77–8, 130, 135–6, 140–1, 155n, 160, 165, 176, 193, 200, 206n, 242, 252, 254, 269–71, 273–4 etwas, 74, 77, 81, 98 evaluation, 25–6, 41, 52–4, 63 événementialité, 36, 109n, 126, 154n event, xiii–xvii, 1–4, 6–9, 17–18, 20–1, 24, 26, 29–30, 36–41, 44–5, 49–51, 53–61, 64n, 65n, 66n, 69, 73–92, 94, 97–104, 108, 109n, 113–14, 116–17, 120–5, 130–3, 135–6, 139–41, 144, 146, 151, 154n, 155n, 157, 159–60, 166, 170, 179, 182–3, 205–8, 210, 212–13, 216–17, 219, 222–3, 225, 228, 231, 235, 238, 240, 253, 255–9, 261–7, 269–70, 273–4, 279, 281, 283–7, 289n evil, 42, 83, 116, 133–4, 175–6, 178, 193, 220 example, xv, 77 exceptionalism, 27, 44, 50–4, 84, 90, 94, 208–9, 211, 261–2, 274 existentialism, 260 existentiated world, 115–16, 154n existentiation, 6, 115–16, 120, 124–8, 154n exoteric Islam, 112, 114–17, 125, 127, 130, 272 experimentation, 72, 77, 80, 109n, 274 explosion of justice, 17, 87–96, 98, 107, 260 factiality, 251, 289n factum rationis, 69, 71 faille, 161, 165, 184, 262 Fanfernot, Julie, 226, 230, 235 Farrokhzad, Forough, 142 Fatimids, 112, 119 Feltham, Oliver, 64n, 66n, 268, 290n Feydeau, Ernest, 63 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 69 Ficino, Marsilio, 143 fidelity, xiii–xiv, 30–1, 40–1, 48, 60, 62, 135–6, 147, 270–2 Fielding, Henry, 241 figural representation, 234 figurative art, 181–2 figurative representation, 234 filthy truth, 165–6, 177, 189, 191, 193–4, 197–8, 261; see also death-drive FitzGerald, Edward, 288 Flaubert, Gustave, xv, 27, 43, 55–64, 93, 108, 198, 229–30, 232, 234–5, 243, 245n, 271, 275, 278–81 Flight of the Earls (Ireland, 1607), 284

GIBSON PRINT.indd 320

Florentine Neoplatonism, 10, 143 folk-psychology, 249 forcing, 46 Foucault, Michel, 12, 35, 39, 141, 174, 241–2, 244n, 291 Fourier, François Marie Charles, 62 fragment, 196 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), 151 freedom, 9–11, 17–18, 69, 72, 74–8, 81, 98, 109n, 114, 116–19, 124, 129, 131, 135–8, 140, 152, 154n, 169–70, 172, 174, 176–8, 194, 204, 235, 260, 291 French Resistance, 48 French Revolution (1789), 33, 42, 57, 59, 68, 75, 78–81, 97–100, 102–4, 109n, 189–90, 212, 227–8, 244n, 270, 290n French Revolution (1848), 62, 214 frequentialism, 265–6 Freud, Sigmund, 90, 139, 169, 176, 220, 245n, 249 Friedrich, Caspar David, 60 Friedrich II, King of Prussia (Frederick the Great), 189 Friedrich August II of Saxony, 217 Fukuyama, Francis, 81 future anterior, 30, 56, 66n Gailus, Andreas, 189–90, 193 Galgacus, 214 Galilei, Galileo, 10 Gandhi, Mahatma, 33 Ganjavi, Nezami, 142 gardiennage, 270–3 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 285 Gauche Ouvrière et Paysanne, 157 Gauche Prolétarienne, 157, 168 Gauny, Gabriel, 230, 235 genealogy, 12–14, 113, 142, 271 Gillespie, Sam, 25, 64n, 263–4, 266, 279 Glucksmann, André, 157 Godard, Jean-Luc, 47 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 188, 233 good, 1, 24–5, 44, 116, 133, 136, 140, 166, 175, 178, 215, 217, 223, 267–8 good will, 176 gradualism, 207, 245n, 283 Gramsci, Antonio, xv Great Famine (Ireland, 1845–52), 284 Great Resurrection (Alamut, 1164), 113–21, 125, 132 Great War (1914–18), 106 group-in-fusion, 17, 204 Guevara, Che, 33 hadith, 6, 23n half-saying, 166–7, 182, 192 Hallward, Peter, 33, 64n, 65n, 170, 203 Hamilton Grant, Iain, 246–8, 255, 289n

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Index Haqiqa, 10, 126–7, 131–2 Hardy, Thomas, 235 harmony, 168 Hašek, Jaroslav, 222, 279 Heath, Stephen, 60, 66n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xiii, 1–14, 23n, 32, 44, 50, 63, 85, 122–3, 125, 128–9, 132, 143, 154n, 159, 178–9, 182, 187, 204, 220, 223, 230, 250, 267, 270, 280 Heidegger, Martin, 11–13, 33–4, 49, 76, 123–5, 128, 137, 250–1, 273–4 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 79 hermeneutics of suspicion, 231 heteronymy (of art), 231–2 Hewlett, Nick, 209, 244n hierarchy, 141, 155n, 211–12, 218, 245n hierohistory, 8, 10, 135 Hill, Geoffrey, 280 historiality, 13, 123 historical Abgrund, 7, 76; see also void historical decomposition, 18, 20–1, 103–4, 131–2, 160, 205, 213–29, 279 historical delirium, 243 historical irony, 19, 22, 54, 245n, 261 historical materialism, 33–4, 65n, 110n, 159, 168, 204, 223, 231, 277 historical reason, 2, 7–9, 20, 29–30, 32–3, 44, 68, 122, 160, 186, 204, 267–8, 270 historicity, 2, 6–8, 13, 30–1, 42, 61, 70–2, 86, 98, 167, 179, 187, 278 Hobbes, Thomas, 154n, 175, 214, 226, 244n Hölderlin, Friedrich, 49, 69, 279–80 Holocaust, 242 Holy Roman Empire, 187 Hugo, Victor, 60–1, 155n human nature, 260, 262–3 Hume, David, 179, 201n, 251, 264–5, 268–9 Hundred Years War (1337–1453), 151 hysteresis, 3, 19–20, 22 imaginal world, 136–41, 152, 199n Imaginary, 163, 165 Imam, 10, 113–14, 117, 119, 124, 132, 135–6, 139 implausible causality, 185–6, 192 inconsolability, 49 inexistents, 33–4, 37–9, 43, 51–3, 87, 106, 145, 180, 260–1 infernal time, 85–6, 89–90, 103 intermittency, xii–xvii, 1–3, 8, 14–15, 20, 22, 24–34, 38, 43, 47, 61, 64, 68–70, 74–6, 79–83, 95, 97, 104–5, 107, 121, 126, 130, 133, 154n, 157–8, 160, 162, 168, 170, 174, 178–9, 182–3, 187, 195, 203–8, 211, 213, 220, 222–6, 229–30, 235–6, 242–3, 244n, 246, 252, 256, 258–9, 266–74, 277, 279–80, 284–6

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Internationale, 38, 270 intolerability, 17, 78, 161–2, 166, 198, 238–9, 243 Iraq War (2003–), 36 Irish history, xvi, 284, 287 irony, 53–62, 86, 93, 108, 159, 167–8, 182, 204, 245n, 271–2, 275, 278, 292 irraison, 251 Islamic gnosticism, 3, 6–11, 13, 112, 115, 117, 120–1, 123–8, 130, 132–3, 135, 137–42, 152, 153n Ismailism, 112–16, 119, 124, 131–4, 154n Jacobean drama, 270 Jacotot, Joseph, 211–12, 214–16, 224 Jambet, Christian, xii–xv, 1, 3, 6–15, 23n, 42, 65n, 79, 112–57, 159, 170, 223, 230, 256, 259–61, 267–9, 271, 273, 278–9 James, Henry, 279 Jaurès, Jean, 17 Jetztzeit, 88–9 Johnston, Adrian, 65n, 290n Jones, John, 107 journée, 10, 23n, 216 Joyce, James, 22, 58, 67n, 162–4, 166, 232, 263, 281 July Revolution (France, 1830), 23n, 60, 62, 214, 216, 224–6 Junger, Ernst, 169 justice, 1–2, 16–17, 24, 27, 44, 87–96, 98, 103, 107, 124, 140, 158, 162, 193–5, 197, 204, 217, 219, 223, 226, 229, 261–2, 268, 286 Kafka, Franz, 53, 86, 97, 184, 279 Kandinsky, Wassily, 182 Kant, Immanuel, xiv–xv, 5, 68–84, 88, 96–8, 100–1, 104–5, 109n, 118–19, 137–8, 162, 169–79, 182–3, 185, 194–6, 198, 201n, 232–3, 248–50, 264–7, 272, 278–9, 281, 286 Kantstreit, 83 Keats, John, 47 Kermode, Frank, 234 Khayyam, Omar, 288 Khosraw, Naser-e, 23n Kierkegaard, Søren, 40 Kievit, Johan, 219 King, Martin Luther, 33 Kleist, Heinrich von, xv, 69, 183–201, 253, 279–80, 286 Koestler, Arthur, 20 Kohan, Walter, 268 Kojève, Alexandre, xiii, 1–15, 23n, 44, 122 Kraus, Karl, 275

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322

Intermittency

La Fontaine, Jean de, 190 Lacan, Jacques, xiii, 15, 35, 39, 64n, 119, 122, 124, 154n, 161–70, 174, 176–80, 184, 188, 191–2, 198, 199n, 200n, 245n, 260–3, 268, 289n lack, 15–16, 140, 161–2, 165, 167, 184, 199n, 261 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 49, 196, 290n Laforgue, Jules, 279 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 60–1 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi de, 285–6 Lardreau, Guy, xii–xv, 1, 15, 22, 42, 98, 154n, 157–201, 223, 255, 257, 260–3, 268, 272–3, 291–3 Laruelle, François, 249 Law, 71–5, 119, 172, 176 Lazarus, Sylvain, 66n, 157 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 247, 281–3 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 51, 53, 154n, 168, 248, 267, 291–2, 293n Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 158–9, 162 Lepenies, Wolf, 267, 279, 288 Lesage, Alain-René, 235 Leskov, Nikolai, 235 Levi, Carlo, 286–7 Levinas, Emmanuel, 64n, 127 Levinson, Marjorie, 98, 196 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 66n Lévy, Benny, 157 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 158 Lewis, Bernard, 153n likelihood, 292 limit of realism, 234 limit-thought, 174, 176–7, 179, 272, 274 literary realism, 234 literature as thought, 253, 279–84 Liu, Alan, 98 Livy (Titus Livius), 205 Locke, John, 154n logic, 27–8, 33–40, 43, 45–8, 258–9 Lohse, Heinrich, 198 loss, 10–11, 133–4, 143, 283 Louis XVI, 204 love, 2, 26, 30–2, 41, 44, 55–6, 63, 105, 121, 166, 272 Lucretius Carus, Titus, 33, 213 Lukács, György, 241, 275–7 lumpenproletariat, 203, 215, 221, 244n Lyotard, Jean-François, xii, 50, 66n, 241–2, 245n, 246, 249 Maass, Joachim, 196 Mahler, Gustav, 270 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 38, 45, 47, 66n, 82, 147, 245n, 253, 258, 274, 279–80, 282–3 Mandela, Nelson, 33 Mandelstam, Osip, 22, 243, 274

GIBSON PRINT.indd 322

Manichaeanism, 16, 116, 126, 133, 154n, 259, 263 manifest image, 249 Mann, Thomas, 56, 197, 201n, 218 Mannerism, 270 Maoism, xiv, 33, 125, 154n, 157, 159, 161 mark, 28, 254, 267 Marx, Karl, xv, 4, 12, 14, 19, 23n, 32, 37, 58, 109n, 110n, 125, 144, 154n, 159, 161–2, 179, 187, 203–5, 214–15, 220–3, 229–30, 243n, 244n, 267, 270, 277 Marxism, xiii–xiv, 14, 19, 21, 33–4, 44, 52, 65n, 95, 155n, 158–9, 169, 199n, 206, 235, 243, 275–7, 280 Marxist science, 34, 155n, 158–9, 203–4, 229 masses, 67n, 159–60, 170 materialism, 18, 25, 29, 32–3, 181, 200n, 207, 223 materialist dialectics, 43, 223, 257 mathematics, 25, 27–8, 34–5, 37, 45, 66n, 125, 146–7, 173, 249, 252–3, 255, 265–6, 289n maximum, 183, 200n, 270 May, Todd, 206, 220, 244n, 259 McLuhan, Marshall, 254 Meillassoux, Quentin, 64n, 246–54, 263–6, 268–9, 279, 289n melancholic-ecstatic conception of history, 10–11, 131–3, 136, 142–3, 146, 148, 151, 223, 259, 267, 280, 283, 285; see also intermittency melancholy, xiv, xvi, 7, 11, 23n, 47, 49–50, 52–3, 62, 66n, 82, 87, 92, 105, 110n, 130–2, 134–6, 146, 149, 151, 169, 206, 223–4, 226, 228–9, 241–3, 244n, 245n, 257, 267, 279, 288 meliorism, 80, 208, 223 Melville, Hermann, 53 Meridionale, history of, xvi, 284–7 Meryon, Charles, 85 messianism, xiv, 7, 11, 14, 97, 109n, 110n, 112–14, 117, 119–20, 124, 130–3, 135, 138–42, 148, 157, 275, 290n metahistory, 6–9, 13, 121–3, 125, 135, 153, 170, 256 Metaphysical Deduction, 170 metastructure, 257 Michel, Natacha, 157 Michelet, Jules, 226–9, 236 militant, 160–1, 273 Mill, John Stuart, 240 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 157 Milner, Jean-Claude, 154n mimesis, 181, 192, 227 minimalism, 25, 43, 49, 95, 108, 110n, 166, 170–1, 173, 175–7, 183, 195–6, 200n, 262–3, 268, 270, 272

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Index Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, 190 modern casualty, 105–7 modern disenchantment, 88, 93 modern fate, 85–6 modern literature, xv–vi, 3, 12, 22, 47, 49, 54–5, 63, 69, 82, 87, 97, 104–5, 142–4, 149–51, 185, 229–36, 252–3, 266, 273–5, 278–84 modern science, 33, 97, 152, 246–9, 252–3 modern shock, 85–6, 90–1, 103, 106 modern uncanny, 21, 106 modernity, xiv, xvi, 3, 12, 14, 42, 47, 68–93, 96–7, 101–8, 109n, 151, 179, 185, 187, 214, 217–18, 246–9, 264, 271, 277, 279–80, 289 Mohawks, 52 monde atone, xiv–xv, 48–9, 51, 53–9, 258, 270, 274, 279, 287–9 money, 199n morality, 160–1, 168–78, 180, 183, 193–6, 197, 200n, 201n, 238–40, 272 More, Henry, 143 Musil, Robert, 252–3 Mussolini, Benito, 286 mutation, 39 Naipaul, V.S., 52 names, 58, 213–14, 254, 272 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 66n, 196 narration, 184, 227–8 natura naturans, 6 nature, 98–102, 105, 107, 172, 176, 180–1, 183, 247–8, 255–6, 264–5, 267 Naturphilosophie, 247, 255 Nazism, 12, 42 Neapolitan Enlightenment, 285 Neapolitan Republic (1799), 285 Neapolitan Revolt (1820), 285 Neapolitan Revolution (1848), 285 negation, 4–8, 10–11, 16, 20, 46, 203–4, 243n negativity, 28, 47, 54–5, 59–60, 64n, 83, 129, 147, 171, 173, 176–9, 181–3, 192, 195, 198, 222, 230, 270, 274, 280, 291–2 Negri, Antonio, 22n neo-Kantianism, 69 neo-liberalism, 158, 209 Neoplatonism, 10–11, 115, 121, 126–7, 131, 134–5, 154n neo-realist cinema, 236–41 Newton, Isaac, 166, 200n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 25, 28–9, 46, 78, 85, 87, 109n, 110n, 141, 247, 250, 260, 267, 271, 276 nihilism, 93, 248–9, 251–4, 261 Nizaris, 112–19, 122, 127, 153n

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nominalist recession, 292 Norris, Christopher, 254 noumenon, 171–2, 174, 179 objects, 35–8 objet a, 161 obscure subject, xiv, 41–2, 258 occultation, 10, 124, 130–32, 135, 141, 145, 153, 271; see also historical decomposition; remainder ochlos, 219–21 One, 11, 24, 27–8, 115–18, 120, 122–33, 140–1, 143, 154n ontic question, 181, 184, 192–3 ontological dignity of the positive, 278–80, 283 ontological disgust, 193, 195–7 ontological mediocrity, 169, 193, 198 ontology, 6, 27–9, 33–40, 43, 46–7, 53–4, 114, 125–8, 132–3, 139, 183, 249, 253, 255–9, 265, 269, 279, 289n Opium Wars, 288 Origen, 154n Ortega y Gasset, José, 241 Orwell, George, xv, 1–3, 20–2 Osborne, Peter, 290n Oshima, Nagisa, 169 Pamuk, Orhan, 279 Papacy, 257 Paris Commune, 33, 36, 39, 45, 55, 62, 144, 149, 152–3, 155n, 243n, 258, 274 Parnassianism, 144 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 33 partage, 230–4, 237–9, 241, 245n pathology, 109n, 173, 200n patience, 147, 272 Penal Code (Ireland), 284 Pensky, Max, 110n Percennius, 213 perseverance, 273 perspectivism, 29, 281 phenomenology, 3, 8, 13–14, 35, 46, 65n, 113, 122, 154n, 279 phenomenological objectivity, 35 phenomenology of the spiritual fact, 13, 113, 121, 141–2, 154n phenomenon, 171–2, 174, 179 Phillips, James, 184–5, 189 philosophization, 168, 291–2 ‘philosophy’, 64n philosophy as folly, 159, 163, 167–8 Picasso, Pablo, 182, 280 Pitt, William (the Younger), 103 platitude, 54, 58, 61, 66n, 270 Plato, 4, 31–2, 115, 125–6, 140, 154n, 203–4, 209–10, 223, 235, 244n, 257, 259 Platonic polloi, 203

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324

Intermittency

Platonism, 6, 10–11, 41, 43, 60, 121, 124–5, 136, 147, 155n, 259, 291 plenitude, 4–5, 8, 95–6, 207–8, 248, 260, 279, 290n Plotinus, 115, 126, 135 Pluth, Ed, 30, 64n, 259, 271, 290n points, 40, 48, 56 political mourning, 216, 218–9 politics as bouffonnerie, 84 populism, 209 Porphyry, 292, 293n positivity, 47, 52, 55, 62, 145, 159, 206, 222, 240, 242, 245n, 278–80, 283, 290n post-colonialism, 33 postmodernism, 53–4, 95, 189, 206, 224, 233, 244n, 250, 277, 284 Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu, 206, 244n Poussin, Nicolas, 181 practical reason, 69, 73–4, 77, 109n, 170, 173, 200n practico-inert, 18–21, 54, 260 pragmatism, 14, 246, 269 predestination, 141, 169 prehistory, 44, 86, 110n, 220, 277, 280 presentism, 14, 198, 246, 250 pre-Socratics, 25 probabilism, 265 progressivism, xiii–xv, 14, 44, 62–3, 67n, 89, 92, 95–6, 122, 179, 187, 189, 198, 206, 211–12, 215, 220, 223, 228, 244n, 255, 259, 263, 267, 270, 280, 284, 286 Prokofiev, Sergei, 280 proletariat, 19–20, 37, 160, 203, 208, 215, 221, 225, 243n, 244n prophetic truth, 8–9, 87, 110n, 118, 120, 122, 138–9, 143, 152, 271 Proust, Françoise, xiii–xv, 1, 15, 68–111, 130, 170, 179, 206–7, 223, 259, 260–1, 267, 273–6, 278, 286 Proust, Marcel, 90–1, 133, 135, 142, 284 providence, 141 quiddity, 129–30, 154n Quintilian, 54

Real, 15, 122, 162–4, 166–71, 174, 177–8, 180, 183, 192 Reason, 7, 69–73, 134, 137, 168–9, 172–4, 176–9, 183, 198, 200n, 206, 214, 217 remainder, 2–4, 18, 27, 44–5, 47–8, 50, 52–3, 58–9, 62, 81–4, 92, 94, 97, 102, 104, 113, 124, 130–3, 135–6, 140–1, 150, 157, 160, 182, 205–8, 212, 214, 217, 224, 226–7, 235, 255–7, 261, 263, 268–70, 272–4, 279–80, 283–9; see also catastrophe in permanence; monde atone Rembrantsz, Dirk, 202, 204–5, 214, 219–21 repetition, xvi, 42, 57–8, 83–4, 89, 92, 100, 103–4, 140–1, 166, 214, 264 republicanism, 109n, 206, 211, 269–70 resistance, 68, 108n, 109n, 125, 271, 274–5, 280 Resurrector, 114, 116, 136, 153n revolt, 7, 161, 196, 205, 225–6, 242, 286 revolt for twopence, 170, 182, 185, 193 revolution, xiii, 18–21, 44, 81, 124, 144, 166, 203–4, 208, 217, 280; see also French Revolution; Russian Revolution Rilke, Rainer Maria, 212–14, 216, 227, 230 Rimbaud, Arthur, xv, 143–53, 253, 279, 289n Risorgimento, 237 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 252–3 Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de, 103 Rolin, Olivier, 157 romanticism, 31, 59–60, 67n, 97, 196, 279 Rose, Gillian, 95–6 Ross, Kristin, 143–6, 148, 153, 155n Rossellini, Roberto, xv, 236–41, 245n, 288 Roubaud, Jacques, 133 Rousseau, Achille, 212 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 80, 82, 162, 224 Royle, Nicholas, 111n RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary), 163–6, 257, 262, 268 Ruby, Christian, 206, 220, 244n Rumi, Jalal ad-Din, 11, 143 Russian Revolution, 18–19, 33, 41

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 247 Rabelais, François, 292 Rancière, Jacques, xii, xiv–xv, 15, 22, 43, 51, 65n, 68, 97–100, 155n, 202–45, 259, 261, 267, 271–3, 278–80, 284 rarity, xiii–xv, 2–3, 15–16, 18, 26, 30, 33, 43, 50, 61, 64n, 68, 75, 82, 88, 95–6, 178, 193, 198, 206–8, 211, 215, 224, 226, 230–1, 240, 243, 244n, 246, 252, 256–61, 263, 265–7, 269, 275, 279, 289n; see also frequentialism Rawls, John, 261 reactive subject, xiv, 41–2, 258, 283

Sabbah, Hassan-i, 112 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de, 119, 176 Sadra, Mulla, 12, 120, 127–31, 137–41 St Francis of Assisi, 53, 241 St Paul, 29, 64n Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de, 62 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 60 sans-part, 205–6, 208, 233, 244n, 260–1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 14–22, 40, 45, 48, 128, 203–5, 214–15, 221, 223–6, 243–4n, 260, 262–3, 279

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Index satanic modernity, 86, 94, 103, 270, 278; see also catastrophe in permanence Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 247, 255, 289n Schematismus, 6–7, 14 Schiller, Friedrich, 232 Schlegel, Friedrich, 196 Schmitt, Carl, 66n Schoenberg, Arnold, 38, 40 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 48, 134, 218, 250 science fiction, 158, 168 scientific image, 248–9, 254 Sebald, W.G., xv, 287–9 Second Empire (France), 45, 85–6, 258 second event, 90–2 secular historicism, 14, 277 Sékommça, 160 self-interruption, 146 Sellars, Wilfrid, 248 semblance, 160–2, 165–6, 168–9, 177, 180, 182–5, 187, 193, 198, 261 sensibility, 70–80, 98, 110n, 183 series, 16–18, 81, 87, 205 set theory, 28, 39, 65n, 154n, 258, 266 sexual relation, 165, 188–9 Shakespeare, William, 31 Sharia law, 112, 114–17, 119–21, 125–6, 128, 130–1, 136, 153n, 259 Shelley, Mary, 283 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 97, 279 Shi’ism, 112, 115, 153n shock-defence, 86, 238 Sicilian Vespers (1282), 285 simulacrum, 42, 57–9, 214–19, 224, 272 singularity, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 31, 36, 45, 57, 79, 113–14, 120–1, 123, 128–30, 183, 256, 262, 268–9, 272 sinthome, 163, 262 site, xvi, 36, 64n, 256, 289n Smollett, Tobias, 241 social democracy, 50–2, 209, 215–17, 244n, 277, 280, 292n socialist realism, 47, 181 sociology, 214, 259 solar view of history, 76 Sophocles, 262, 289n sovereign amnesia, 118 Spanish Civil War, 20–1, 81 species annihilation, 247 speculative realism, 246–56, 260, 262, 266 Spinoza, Baruch de, xv, 31, 110n, 141, 219–20, 257; see also conatus essendi Spirit, xiii, 3, 6, 7–8, 10, 98, 122–4, 132, 134–6, 139, 142, 181–2, 192–3, 198, 220 split-time of modernity, 285; see also stellar view of history spots of time, 105, 277 Spyck, Hendrik van der, 219

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325

Stalin, Joseph, 18–19, 22, 274 State, 5, 8, 18, 32, 48, 163, 257, 267 stellar view of history, 75–6, 130, 178; see also anti-schematics of historical reason Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 279 still life, 181, 192 Stoicism, 135 strategy, 217, 219 Strawson, Peter F., 173–4, 184–5 strong reading, xvi, 282–3 structure, 28 subject, xiii–xiv, 17, 26, 29–30, 32, 35, 40–2, 48, 50–1, 56–8, 62, 75–80, 97–8, 100–1, 104, 114–15, 117–20, 130, 133–6, 138, 142, 145, 163–5, 168–9, 176–80, 189, 191, 213, 217, 221, 224–6, 230, 233, 240, 254, 259, 261, 267, 270–3, 276, 280, 282–3, 288 subject-effect, 161–2, 165 sublime, xv, 69, 72–5, 78, 81–2, 98, 100, 106, 109n, 134, 274 Suhrawardi, Shahab al-Din, 12 Sullivan, Roger J., 171 Sunnis, 112, 115 survival, 175–6 suture, 30, 47, 55, 252 syncopation, 168 Syriac Christianity, 158, 291 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 213–14 Taine, Hippolyte, 240 techno-mutancy, 255 teleology, 43, 236 tense worlds, 48, 60 terror of history, 49, 150; see also intolerability Thatcherism, 221, 287–8 theology, 4–5, 12–14, 65n, 78, 85, 110n, 112–17, 120, 141, 143, 174, 179, 246, 250–1, 256, 259–60, 269, 275–8, 280, 290n, 291 theoreticism, 65n Thermidorean, 66n thesis, 88 Thibaudet, Albert, 62 thing, 35–8 thing-in-itself, 137, 171, 174, 183–4, 186, 200n, 249 third antinomy, 69, 72–3, 81, 86, 88, 98 Third Republic (France), 45, 258 tone of history, 78–9, 102 topological space, 41 Toscano, Alberto, 154n, 275–6 totality, 7–8, 24, 44, 76, 94, 122, 127 Toussaint L’Ouverture, FrançoisDominique, 33 Transcendental Aesthetic, 69–70, 170 transcendental apperception, 170

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326

Intermittency

Transcendental Deduction, 73, 170, 184–7, 192 transcendental idealism, 171, 184, 187, 192, 200n transcendental object = x, 74, 81, 98, 101 transcendental schema, 170 transmission, 135–6, 153, 155n, 270, 272–3 Trauerspiel, 89–90, 92, 226 trauma theory, 53, 238 Tromp, Maarten Harpertszoon, Admiral, 219 Trotsky, Leon, 154n truth, xiii, xv–xvi, 2, 8, 24–7, 29–33, 39–51, 53, 55–63, 64n, 66n, 87–8, 93, 110n, 113–22, 126–7, 130–1, 135–7, 141–3, 145–7, 153, 155n, 166–7, 173, 182, 192, 205, 211–12, 240–1, 243, 251–4, 257–9, 263–4, 267–8, 272–5, 281, 283 truth-procedure, 2, 31–3, 40–2, 45–6, 48–50, 56–9, 62, 146, 253, 256, 271–2 types of change, 36 Unamuno, Miguel de, 241 undecidability, 146–8 Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste, 157 United Nations, 287 universalizability, 171, 175, 194 universals, 10, 26, 32, 46, 79, 87, 120, 122–3, 125, 127, 139, 175–6, 194, 211, 232, 250 unpositif, 222, 228, 279, 283–4; see also remainder ut pictura poiesis, 181 utilitarianism, 179, 280 utopianism, 61, 121, 155n, 207–8, 212, 228, 232, 236

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Valéry, Paul, 33, 130 Varèse, Edgard, 232 Vattimo, Gianni, 290n veracity, xiii, 168, 291–2 Vietnam War, 106 vigilance, 274 violence, 16–17, 103, 260 vitalism, 65n, 246 void, 10, 27–30, 39–40, 44, 57, 101, 117, 122, 131, 178, 212–13, 247–9, 253–7 Voltaire, 51, 63, 275 voyance, 144–6, 148 wager, 30, 32, 159–60, 182, 270–1, 279 Wagner, Richard, 31, 42, 55, 217–19 waiting, 78, 122, 124, 136, 155n, 204, 271, 273–4, 280–1 Waldensians, 285 Waldheim, Kurt, 287 Wars of Religion (France, 1559–76), 151 Weber, Max, 276 Weimar Republic, 90 Wells, H.G., 252–3 Whichcote, Benjamin, 143 Wille, 171–3, 175–6, 179 William of Orange, 219 Willkür, 172, 186 Wilson, Douglas, 111n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 25, 27, 45, 250 Witz of history, 78, 274 Woolf, Virginia, 252–3, 279 Wordsworth, William, xv, 42, 68–9, 97–108, 111n, 212, 214, 230, 255, 277, 279–80 worlds, 35–40, 44–8 Wu, Duncan, 111n Zanj, 9 Žižek, Slavov, 63, 166, 169, 199n, 263, 275, 290n

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