To continue the reading of Badiou’s “The Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World” in relation to the question of the future of philosophy, we must outline and interrogate the dominant modes of philosophy today (hermeneutics, analytical, and postmodern), in order to come to a point of caesura, or a point of
interruption of these, and create a future
for philosophy, without limits, unbound.
We would, of course, err in assuming that any one thinker belongs to any one of these particular orientations, completely disjointed from another; nevertheless, in interrogating them we can locate the crucial points where they meet.
This crossroads, if you will, between the three orientations marks the fundamental
obstacle which any new philosophy must radically dismantle, overcome, and continue on, elsewhere, indefinitely.
The vicissitudes of philosophy today
Badiou outlines two common tendencies in these three orientations. It is notorious that these three orientations fail to adequately overcome the counter-facts (maybe naming them countering facts is a better expression, or, even better, concrete obstacles) of the world as it is, and, hence, are unable to step off their merry-go-round, repeating the same experiments over-and-over and falling into the traps of sophistry, nihilism, and obscurantism. What marks the contemporaneity of these three orientations are: the theme of the end and the predominance of the question of language.
The End. For all of these philosophies share the negative theme of the end of metaphysics, and some even go so far as to posit the end of philosophy itself (and, along with it, the end of history, the end of politics, etc.). In other words, what all three orientations share is a negation of thinking universality itself, a giving up on the desire(s) of philosophy to a limited domain of particular relativisms. Giving up on truth(s) we are drowned in the sea of the plurality of meaning. And so it is that these philosophies have given in to the obstacles countering the desires of philosophy. A sense of closure, finitude, and completeness mark these three orientations, and, along with them, a lack of hope for the future of philosophy. What does this or that mean? is the only fathomable questions these philosophers can pose in their relentless declaration of ends, while the question of truth is judged dead and sent to the gallows.
The Question of Language. Language today is the predominant positive field of inquiry in all three orientations, whether they be in the domain of speech acts, linguistic rules, or the fragmentation of discourses. Zizzy notes contra Russell that he doesn’t think that we can transcend the limits of language. The absence of metaphysics, then in these philosophies becomes a kind of linguistic anthropology. Linguistic anthropology, or, the logic of the finite human animal in relation to the limits of its language(s), where language is the transcendental term, and, yet, which cannot itself be transcended.
Logical Revolt
Badiou proposes two ideas, which are the names of starting points, for a new style of philosophy without ends and without obscuring thought by the question of language:
1. “Language is not the absolute horizon of thought. The great linguistic turn of philosophy, or the absorption of philosophy into the meditation on language, must be reversed. In the Cratylus, which is concerned with language from beginning to end, Plato says, “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things.””
Which is to say, to begin to think from the things themselves, and not from the words which we have attributed to those things. Thinking must not be limited to the language of its inscription. The fact, without being a fact, that there are things in the world which do not (yet) have names is enough to warrant the dismissal of the language rules and games we’ve created for ourselves. There are things in the world which words cannot describe. Any poet worthy of the name knows this very well. So, we must begin again from the things without words, from the unnamebale things which (are non)exist(ant), but which are not limited to their inscription in the closed domain of language, even if language is the necessary means by which we must interrogate the things. Of course, we cannot simply do away with language, but we cannot place limits upon language to express in a new style the thinking that philosophy is; philosophy is transmissible through language, it is address through language. On a side note, does not this excerpt from Plato indicate, precisely, his materialist thinking contrary to all those who wish limit him to being the philosopher of the Idea?
2. “The singular and irreducible role of philosophy is to establish a fixed point within a discourse, a point of interruption, a point of discontinuity, an unconditional point. Our world is marked by its speed…Speed is the mask of inconsistency. Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speed, will constitute a time of its own. This thinking, slow and consequently rebellious, is alone capable of establishing the fixed point, whatever it may be, whatever its name may be, which we need in order to sustain the desire of philosophy.”
It is to bring truth back into the praxis of thinking. Why is it that we scour at such a word as “truth”? Truth has nothing to do with the facts. Let the truth be told, no. Truths are not fixed, nor simply defined. Truths cannot be looked up in a dictionary nor in an encyclopedia. Truths are not simply the opposite of the lie. We are assaulted on a continuous basis every short and fleeting moment we yield to, without actually yielding, since we are rather trapped in, the violent discourses of mass communication. The first step, therefore, must be to radically distantiate from these discourses, to not let the speed of information, and the fetish of the cut-and-flash, shock-and-awe, of your preferred daily news show, distract from the desire of philosophy. To relax for more than just a second and think.
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And Badiou’s objective, of course, is nothing short of the unconditional foundation of a new doctrine of the subject upon the ruins of metaphysics and its criticism, coinciding with the positive demands that the world is asking of philosophy. Philosophy must not continue falling; it must, demands the world, “get up and walk”.
"Power itself has for along time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power-obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdoes of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning" p. 23
