Alain Badiou – An Appreciation and Critique

Intro: The Event Horizon of Alain Badiou

Tonight, we shall screen a two-part lecture on the philosophy of Alain Badiou by one of his adept devotees, Justin Clemens. A good summary of Badiou’s philosophy of philosophy is laid out here. That will be followed by a short clip of Badiou himself lecturing in English (with a French accent, of course) on the nature of happiness.

One of the most influential of current philosophers of world stature is Alain Badiou. We have screened some videos about him and some of his ideas. But we have never given a full analysis of the reach and limitations of his overarching conception of reality. First, let us listen to the elaboration of his core concepts by Clemens, and then a taste of Badiou’s own presentation of a leading idea, and then, afterward, we will reflect on the Badiouian discourse from a Sat Yoga perspective.

Outro: Beyond the Event

There are aspects of Badiou’s thought and attitude that are extremely likeable, inspiring, and productive of further thinking in those who read his texts and follow his logic. But as with Lama Shabkar, we find coherence is always in superposition with incoherence. He expresses a deep love of infinite thought. But he does not recognize or attune to the Source of all such brilliant ideas and interpretations of the phenomenal world of multiplicity. Thus, he settles for a perspective from the shore of the Ocean of Consciousness. He can admire the horizon, the vastness, the uncapturable and untotalizable Whole. But he cannot let go of his localized view and become absorbed in the Infinite. For that would be the death of philosophy.

Badiou values finite immanent truths as the ultimate reality, while completely ignoring the infinite intelligence that must be responsible for the emanation and expression of those fractalized truths. Even more interestingly, Badiou falls into the very same limitation of infinite yet partial truth that he warns against—disparaging the infinite as a mere insignificant number within the glory of an infinity of infinities of numbers—precisely by worshipping mathematics as the ultimate essence of Being. Yet, he also knows that life is more than mathematics. His pantheon includes the lesser deities of science, politics, art, and love. But they are all conceived as mathematical forms, as if the skeleton of our Being is a complex mathematical equation that becomes expressed topologically as a holographic image without essence that we mistake for a world.

He does realize that all numbers, beginning with one, and the concept of number itself, derive from the absolute zero. But he does not take the next step—to inquire from what ultimate Source did this ur-concept of zero arise in human cognizance? You will remember that it did not come to consciousness in ancient Greece. It was unknown to Plato and Aristotle. It remained unknown through the middle ages in Europe—until the Sufi sages brought the zero from India to Iberia and ignited what would come to be called the Golden Age of Spain and then the whole European Renaissance. But the ur-concept of Zero arose in India millenia earlier, as the Name of God—Shiva.

This inconvenient truth cannot enter the Badiouian discourse, however, since the Zero that is Shiva is not a representation, as is the zero of mathematics. Shiva the Zero is the inconceivable Real. Badiou admits that according to set theory, his bible, indeed all numbers are only alternative names for the null set, meaning zero. Everything comes down to Nothing. There is creatio ex nihilo, but the creation remains nihil—though nihil unbound (to use the title of a book by another current philosopher, Ray Brassier)—which is boundlessly evolving. But Badiou does not ask who is the operator of this mathematical machinery. He does not recognize the underlying Intelligence that is functioning throughout the universe at every fractal level, creating and morphing meaningful designs; revealing the awesome beauty of infinite modalities and varieties; irrupting within us as overwhelming feeling states, living dramas, heroic journeys, each different in quality at every assemblage point on the spectrum of consciousness, but most gloriously, the feelings of love and joy; and the unaccountable presence of intelligent awareness in the first place.

Badiou does perceive the infinite truths findable in a world, but not the infinity of infinities within the Zero Point from which (or Whom) that world is being dreamed.

Badiou begins his philosophizing with the assumption that he must make a choice between the One and the multiplicity. Notice that he does not include the Zero as an option. He must repress this Truth in order to reach the multiple local and impermanent empirical truths that arise in the world, and thus he must reject religion entirely, even unthinkingly, assuming wrongly that it is a mere mix of myth, fantasy, poetry, sentimentality, folklore, irrational traditions, absurd dogmas, empty rituals, outdated ancient texts superstitiously interpreted, and priestly establishments dedicated to keep the population servile to the orders of the state. That may indeed describe the current condition of mainstream religion, but Badiou has clearly not read the works of the apophatic mystics, those who have attained the Real Zero Point—or else he has suppressed their inconvenient Truth as well.

On some level, he must know that he is thinking in bad faith. But to be a famous philosopher in the so-called twentieth century, one had to at least feign a commitment to materialism. This is the unspoken context within which a rising academic must make a forced choice of materialism over monism or mysticism in order to get ahead in his career. To become a full professor, to get tenure, to have one’s writings published in the politically correct journals and book publishing houses, one must toe the line—a line which descends into antiphilosophy disguised as philosophy.

Badiou does at least favor a rogue form of materialism: the dialectical materialism of Marx and its ruthless application by Mao. Of course, he knows that communism has already gone off the rails and become an anti-truth, a pipe dream that failed. Yet, he remains faithful to its impulse toward revolt. But what he cannot revolt against is the constraint of his own limiting paradigm.

The result is that he does genuinely feel nostalgia for the lost Real—the Presence of Pure Consciousness. But the closest Badiou can come is to genuflect before the monolith of Mathematics and movements that morph mass culture. Once the choice of this bad infinity is made, all other options are cut off. And then the world must be reinterpreted in accord with this new ontology, a pale proxy of the Real that thought can only represent from afar.

The further consequence is that Badiou must reinterpret love according to mathematics, as if one falls (or rises) in love the way one accepts an axiom of geometry or the validity of a logical deduction. The consequences of this unfortunate choice to foreclose the Real Zero then spreads to the field of politics, which proliferates precisely because of the lack of love, that lack of the ability to integrate the zero of sameness and equality with the inevitable hierarchies produced by multiplicities. Badiou is haunted by the spectre of the full spectrum of consciousness, which shines like a rainbow coloring the world—but he cannot see the white light from which that rainbow derives its sustenance, nor can he recognize the archetypal imaginal intelligence that serves as its prism.

For Badiou, a truth heralds the return of the repressed. He calls it a sudden new vision of the nature of reality—but he admits that it is not reality that changes, but only one’s understanding. In other words, the intellect can contract or expand. The more it expands, the more of the Real that can be perceived and integrated into one’s understanding. The new vision itself, however, does not limit its own self-expression. Therefore, a download of divine light contains, at least in potentiality, an infinity of infinities.

The certainty that one has encountered a real truth comes from the fact that it can and will be expressed in every field of interest and will widen the field of fields to become all-inclusive. Thus, the vision that can become expressed mathematically can also be expressed in art, in political theory and practice, in new paradigms in the sciences, and in the capacity for more nuanced and profound intersubjective relationality, manifesting most decisively as the will to love.

But what is the reason for attempting to derive all these from mathematics? Why raise deductive reasoning to the level of a deity—especially when one has admitted that truth is always the intervention of an impossible event that falsifies all one’s prior well-reasoned beliefs? Badiou seemingly has no interest in wondering what inconceivable power is responsible for such an intervention. The whole question of the status of the phenomenon of synchronicity, let alone such further paranormal intuitions as déjà vu moments, remote viewing, past life memories, out-of-body and near-death experiences, or other even more mystical revelations, is elided, if not avoided. They are simply rendered as undecidable.

On the other hand, the very exemplar that Badiou chooses to demonstrate the power of faithfulness to an event is that of Paul on the road to Damascus, getting hit with the divine lightning bolt and the annunciation of the risen Christ. This event did not prove the Truth of Christianity, from Badiou’s perspective, but it did open the path to the creation of a world called Christendom—a world that is now gone, replaced by an atheistic and materialist world known as modernity.

This is indeed a world that worships mathematics, but only because it is the instrument of tyranny, social control, and hegemonic military force. Without mathematics, there would be no nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles, military satellites, digital surveillance, and all the other ominous applications of technology. A very threatening use of artificial intelligence now is the production of modes of deception—like altered photos and deep fake videos. The real function of AI, then, is to steal one’s soul. The native Americans felt that about having photographs taken of them. But now, one’s living image on video, one’s voice, can be stolen and used against one. Weaponized AI has purloined our last residues of trust in the Big Other. Now, there is no exit for the ego from doubt, suspicion, and paranoid anxiety.

To his credit, Badiou does concede that a fulfilling life is one in which new truths have been constructed and elaborated. But to receive a new truth, as Paul did, one must recognize the reality of grace. A new truth is precisely that which cannot be mathematized or symbolically constructed. What is constructed can only be a limited approximation.

New truth arises from “the Void of thought,” as Badiou terms it. Is that not the Zero Point of the Real? By resonating with that Void within one’s Being, one receives whatever is one’s destiny to grok. But Badiou will stay a safe distance from the Void—and leave it as a symbol pointing toward the unspeakable, in fact, unnameable, unknowable, and completely inconceivable Real that philosophy can pass by only obliquely, at the level of the systemically-bound symbolic.

The lost Real can never be attained. But at least we can be given new visions of That toward which we can strive, and by abiding in faithfulness to that Truth—and implicitly to the Void from which it descended into the mind and heart—one achieves happiness. But there is a caveat: the price of happiness is unsatisfaction. The more truth one perceives the more unsatisfactory the current world appears. Its failings become intolerable, and one is moved to act to change the world.

This is our life’s mission, declares Badiou (and I concur), one which is given only retroactively. But what Badiou keeps repressed is the fact that the world is really nothing, it is unreal, like numbers not attached to things, a thought without basis outside itself. Yet this is exactly the definition of a new truth. That new truth, if fully expressed, would be revealed as the ancient Truth of the Void. But that Truth would instantly annihilate the jouissance of philosophy itself, not to mention the ‘happy’ philosopher. Happiness, then, for Badiou, is the successful dodging of Truth (with a capital T) disguised as striving for a truth (small t) that keeps one anchored to an illusory world.

Badiou desperately wants immortality and eternity, but he believes one can only construct an artificial version of it—a map without a territory. And that must be enough for us. We must settle for a finite existence, though our most refined thoughts can sometimes touch the surface of the imaginal infinite. Our hearts, if we know love, can, at least once in a lifetime, perceive the infinite in the eyes of a finite other. Accepting such intermittent glimpses as our portion is happiness—but always minus satisfaction.

In sum, Badiou is the bad you, the auto-censored ego. But there is a Good You—revealed in the Void of thought, in the interstices of his discourse, when the thinking mind has been silenced by the power of grace and the heart awaits in stillness. That is the holy moment of the Coming of the Lord. And only the One Who is the Real Zero can dream the new multiplicity. This will not be our construction, but the annihilation of the logical system of cosmic unfoldment.