Badiou - Wittgenstein's Anti Philosophy (2011)

WITTGENSTEIN'S ANT/PHILOSOPHY

ALAIN BADIOU

WITTGENSTEIN'S A NTIPHILOSOPHY Translated and with an Introduction by Bruno Bosteels

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This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess Programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London www.frenchbooknews.com First published in English by Verso 2 0 1 1 Translation and Introduction © Bruno Bosteels 2 0 1 1 Published first in French as L' antiphilosophie de WittBenstein © Editions Nous, Caen, 2009 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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CONTENTS

Translator's Introduction Preface

67

Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

73

2 The Languages ofWittgenstein Index

161 181

Translator's Introduction

I

In an earlier version of the first of the two essays that make up this short book, Alain Badiou sets the scene and tone of his analysis of LudwigWittgenstein's antiphiloso phy by borrowing a brief anecdote from Jacques-Alain Miller, the son-in-law and official editor of another great modern antiphilosopher, Jacques Lacan: Jacques-Alain Miller readily tells the story of the "little psychoanalyst" who, after being spat on every day in the elevator by some nobody, wipes off his jacket and sanctimoniously replies to a bystander who is surprised by his phlegm : "What do you expect? That's his symptom ." Miller thus seeks to point out the ominous abj ection that lies in wait for psychoanalysis when it is no longer anything else than a pious hermeneutic. 1 Alain Badiou, "Silence, solipsisme, saintete . L' antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein,"

Barca! Poesie, Politique, P'J'chana!fse 3 ( 1 994), p . 1 3 (all translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine). The whole opening passage of this earlier version is omitted from the version translated here. Badiou did not, however, delete all subsequent allusions to the original passage. This is another reason why, for the sake of the reader's comprehension, I have decided to dwell on it in the present introduction .

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At first sight, this would appear to b e a story with a fairly straightforward moral lesson, one that further more could easily be transferred just as it is onto philosophy-certainly as far as the European philo sophical scene is concerned . Indeed, many so-called continentg,Lphilosophers are also eager to go to work and be spat on in the elevator as part of their daily routine : "On this account, we could say that today there are plenty of 'little philosophers' who adore the fact that, as a symptom of our time, people hold the philosopher 's desire to be something vile or superfluous ."2 For Badiou, this common attitude is a result of the internalization of a flurry of attacks upon the philosopher's millennial pursuit of truth as an endeavor that, judged from the tribunal of world history, would be not just wrong or mistaken but rather harmful or downright abjecd "Faced with the proceedings that our epoch has initiated against us and upon reading the records of this trial , the major evidence of which is Kolyma and Auschwitz, our philosophers , shouldering the burden of the century and, ultimately, of all the centuries since Plato, have

2

Ibid. See the thesis (or non-thesis) of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who claims in

a chapter from his Heideaaer,Art and Politics, significantly titled "The Age's Modesty," that the philosopher after Auschwitz should abandon the desire of or for philosophy: "A very obscure imperative, going beyond or falling short of the mere refusal of what is dominant, commands that we let philosophy collapse within ourselves and that we open ourselves up to that diminishing, that exhaustion of philosophy, today. We must no longer have the desire to philosophize." Lacoue-Labarthe,

Art and Politics: The Fiction if the Political, Blackwell, 1 990), p. 5 . 2

Heideaaer,

trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil

TRA N S LAT O R ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

decided t o plead Builty."3 Thus , just a s psychoanalysis risks being reduced to a bland acknowledgement of the universal reign of the symptom in which each indf vidual can be seen as passionately attached to his or her own trauma,� so too philosophy-in the name of th-e- genocidal and totalitarian disasters that mark the long twentieth century-all too often accepts being confined to the melancholic proclamation of its own undesirability or the prophecy of its well-deserved and imminent end . In both cases, though for different reasons and adopting very different attitudes-phleg matic composure in one case and tragic-pathetic posturing in the other-such readiness to plead guilty to the charges laid at the doorsteps of the psycho analyst and the philosopher alike signals a remarkable intellectual forfeiture . Upon closer inspection, however, the impli�ations of Miller's anecdote are greatly complicated when the target of the attack is shifted from a psychoanalyst to a confessed philosopher. In the first place, we should consider the fact that the role of the analyst within clin ical practice to some extent always involves a conscious act of self-divestiture. Instead of clinging self-indulgently to the authority of the subject who is supposed to know, an authority conferred by the analysand as a result of the transferential process, the analyst must allow him or herself to become a little piece of waste 3 Alain Badiou, Manifestofor Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1 999), p. 28 (translation modified). On this occasion Badiou enters into a long dispute about Lacoue-Labarthe's thesis. 3

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or refuse (dechet), as Lacan was fond of repeating, most notably in his 1 967-68 seminar The Psychoanalytical Act. Technically speaking, the analyst in the end must come to occupy the position of the objet petit a: The end term of the analysis consists in the fall of the subject supposed to know and its reduction to the advent of this objet a, as cause of the division of the subject, which comes in its place. The one who, at the level of fantasy, with the analysand, plays the part with regard to the subject supposed to know, to wit: the analyst, is the one who at the end of the analysis comes to bear the fact of being nothing more than this leftover, this remnant of the known thing that is called objet a. 4 Only by thus being robbed of the last guarantee behind all imaginary ideals and symbolic mandates can the subject work through his or her own fantasies and come to terms with the fact that such fantasies are actually screens that hide (not another, truer or fuller reality, but rather) a substantial void. Unlike what might be the case for a philosopher, for an analyst to allow him or herself to be spat on in this sense does not fundamentally undermine the premises and aims of the psychoanalytical process; it merely gives this process a too phYSical-almost comical-interpretation while 4 Jacques Lacan, "Seminaire du 1 0 janvier 1 967," EActe psychanalytique. Seminaire 1967-1968 (unofficial transcript), p . 87. 4

TR A N S LAT O R ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

ridding it of the sustained clinical practice that is supposed to assure the analyst's self-effacing act. Even if we assume that the spitter in the elevator is actually not a nobody but someone who has undergone or is currently undergoing clinical analysis , the problem is really with the analyst who is seen as giving up all too quickly on his desire, to the point where psycho analysis, which is supposed to be a radical practice and potentially an even more radical theory of the inter-· vening subject, is indeed reduced to the level of a pious I. hermeneutlc. Today, of course, there is no shortage of thinkers Slavoj Zizek being one of the most outspoken among them-who would claim that philosophy itself entails a very similar act of radical subjective destitution . The hyperbolic doubt that leads to the assertion of the Cartesian cogito, especially, would be a direct precur sor to the subject's self-divestiture found in Lacan's psychoanalysis. And, in fact, Badiou himself reminds us , in Being and Event, that Lacan's programmatic return to Freud was doubled by a call for a return to Descartes. "What localizes the subject is the point at which Freud can only be understood within the heritage of the Cartesian gesture, and at which he subverts, via disloca tion, the latter's pure coincidence with self, its reflexive transparency," explains Badiou. He continues : .

The subject thus finds itself ex-centred from the place of transparency in which it pronounces itself to be: yet one is not obliged to read into this a 5


complete rupture with Descartes. Lacan signals that he "does not misrecognize" that the conscious certi tude of existence, at the centre of the caBita, is not immanent, but rather transcendent. "Transcendent" because the subject cannot coincide with the line of identification proposed to it by this certitude. The subject is rather the latter's empty waste. 5 Thus , assuming something that may be far from evident despite its being a common presupposition, including in Badiou's work-namely, that Descartes stands for the quintessential modern philosopher to whom Pascal can then be the corresponding antiphilosopher--we would be justified in extending the scope of our anec dote so as to examine the contemporary destiny of philosophy in its light. However, no sooner do we try to imagine that today's philosophers , too, frequently allow themselves to be spat on than we must also recog nize the fact that, among those lining up to do the spitting, psychoanalysts are often to be found at the head of the queue . After all , it belongs to Lacan to have revived the eighteenth-century term "antiphilosophy" for the purpose of defining the relation of his view of the Freudian field to what has traditionally been handed down to us as philosophy since at least Plato : "/ rise up in revolt, so to speak, against philosophy. What is sure is that it Alain Badiou, Being 2005), pp. 431-2.

5

and Event, .

trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum,

6

TR A N S LATOR ' S I N TR O DUCT I O N

is something finite and done with . Even if I expect some rej ects to grow out of it . Such regrowths are common enough with finite things ."6 This antiphilo sophical animosity, which is commonly found among psychoanalysts together with a fair amount of plain antiacademicism , creates a second complication for any self-professed philosopher who would wish to borrow the anecdote from Miller. 7 Following in Freud 's footsteps , Lacan in fact consid ers philosophy a form of psychosis. More specifically, 6

Jacques Lacan, "Monsieur A,"

different

accounts

of

Ornicar? 2 1 -2

Lacan's

(summer

antiphilosophy,

"L' antiphilosophie," rCEuvre

1980) ,

p.

17.

For three

see

Jean-Claude Milner, phi10sophie (Paris: Editions du

claire: Lacan, 1a science, 1a 1 995), pp. 1 46-58 ; Franyois Regnault, "L'antiphilosophie selon Lacan," CorifJrences d'esthetique lacanienne (Paris: Agalma, 1 997) , pp. 57-80; and Colette Soler, "Lacan en antiphilosophe," Filoz?Jski Vestnik 27. 2 (2006) , pp. 1 2 1 -44. More

Seuil,

recently, see Adrian Johnston, "This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy,"

Circle jor Lacanian IdeoloBJ Critique 3 (20 1 0) ,

pp.

S: Journal if the Jan Van Eyck 2-22 . The figure who has dealt

most extensively with the category of antiphilosophy in the wake of Lacan and Heidegger is the Argentine psychoanalyst Jorge Aleman. See, for instance, his Notas

antifilosOficas

(Buenos Aires: Grama,

2 006).

For a comparison with Badiou, see

Carlos Gomez, "El adversario y el doble en la filosofia de Badiou," Badioujuera

de sus limites, ed. Carlos Gomez and Angelina UZln (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2 0 1 0) , pp. 87-120. For an intellectual history of the original antiphilosophers, mostly reactionary and religiOUS thinkers who opposed the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, see Didier Masseau, Les Ennemis des philosophes: l' antiphilosophie au temps des Lumieres (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). 7 To defend his thesis that Lacan is essentially a philosopher who must be read

alongside Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, ZiZek goes so far as to suggest that Lacan is

targeting the bad kind of postmetaphysical philosophy. "In short, what is today practiced as 'philosophy'

are precisely different attempts to 'deconstruct'

something referred to as the classical philosophical corpus ('metaphysics,' 'logocentrism,' etc.)," writes Zizek. "One is therefore tempted to risk the hypothesis that what Lacan's 'antiphilosophy' opposes is this very philosophy qua antiphilosophy: what if Lacan's own theoretical practice involves a kind of return to philosophy?" See Slavoj Zizek, Tarryina with the Neaative: Kant, Heael, and the Critique . of ldeoloBJ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1 993) , pp. 3-4.

7

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philosophy is seen as a discourse of mastery based upon the complete disavowal of the fact of symbolic castration . ' Philosophy, as love of truth, presupposes that there is such a thing as a full order of being-of being not only as that which , throughout the history of metaphysics , is said to be the same as thinking but also as that which, in an almost hallucinatory manner, does all the speaking for the philosopher, without any lack or discontinuity. "What is the love of truth? It's something that mocks the lack in being [manq ue a etre] of truth . We could call this lack in being something else-the lack of forgetting, which reminds us of its existence in formations of the unconscious . This is nothing of the order of being, of a being that is in any way full ," Lacan thus argues in his seminar The Other Side if Psychoanalysis , in which he will also discuss the work of the early Wittgenstein . "The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted , it's the love o f what truth hides , which i s called castration ."g Philosophers do not want to know anything about the real of desire , which for Lacan is the impossibility of the sexual relationship as full enj oyment . They speak of the thought of being in a state of constant disavowal of the subj ect's desire that alone supports all speaking. This is why there seems to exist a structural analogy between philosophy and psychosis . "But how, then, does Freud define the 8

The Seminar
Jacques Lacan,

XVII,

2007), p, 52, 8

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psychotic position in a letter I have quoted many times( Precisely by what he calls , strangely, UnBlauben, not wanting to know anything about the spot where truth is in question ."9 The analytical operation , by contrast, also involves a constant questioning of the philosopher 's love of truth, which as a result is put in its place : not subsumed in the obj ectivity of a meta language but localized in the topology of the desiring subject . Philosophers and analysts , then , are not on trial in the same way ; they are not symmetrical targets of one and the same line of offence that both would be able to accept and internalize with comparable equanim ity. Rather, what we are witnessing is an ongoing battle between philosophers and antiphilosophers in which psychoanalysts predominantly prefer to join the camp of the latter against the former and in which, conversely, the more philosophers seek out the company of the analyst's discourse , the more they also tend to adopt an antiphilosophical stance with regard to their own field and discipline . This asym metry may be another reason why Badiou omits Miller's story from the present version of his analysis 9

Ibid. , p. 63. Freud speaks of

Unglauben

(translated as "disbelief"), to refer to

paranoid psychosis, in his "Letter 46" (dated May 30, 1 896) in

The Standard Edition '!fthe Complete PsychologicalWorks '!fSigmund Freud, ed.James Strachey, vol. I ( 1 8861 899): Pre-Psycho-Ana!Jrtic Publications and Unpublished Dr'!fts (London: Hogarth Press, 1 953), p. 23 1 . Lacan discusses this notion in, among other places, The Seminar '!f Jacques Lacan , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book V II: The EthiCS �f Psychoana!Jrsis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W W Norton, 1 992), pp. 1 30- 1 ; and in Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts '!fPsycho-Ana!Jrsis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: WW. Norton, 1 978), p. 238.

9

TRA N S L ATOR ' S I N TR O DUCT I O N

of Wittgenstein 's antiphilosophy-even though the reader will still find several traces thereof in the text translated below, as in the mention of the "little philosopher" who finds a measure of perverse glory in the other's saliva on his j acket . Finally, a third and by far the most interesting complication stems from the fact that, if psychoanalysis serves the agenda of antiphilosophy much more than that of traditional philosophy inherited from Plato, this is thanks to a certain insight that its clinical and thera peutic practice can provide into the complex intertwining of knowledge and desire, of truth and enjoyment, or of thought and the sexuated body. Among these instances there are both discomforting complicities and traumatic incompatibilities that the philosopher in general wants to have nothing to do with, in stark contrast to the antiphilosopher who expects to gain some of his most revealing insights from them and who for this very reason willfully subjects himself to their temptations as tests of his own ethical and existential integrity. This is the case even for those antiphilosophers who otherwise have only a modest acquaintance with the tradition of psycho analysis or who openly resist the possible influence of the Freudian school of thought. Suffice it to think of the trials and tribulations to which Wittgenstein subjects his own self at whim , isolating himself not only from his loved ones but also from the personal, economical and professional comforts afforded by his family in Vienna or his colleagues and friends in 10

TR A N S LATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

Cambridge . Perhaps the insight that results from such self-imposed hardships does not quite constitute a form of thought properly speaking, if by that we mean a theoretical or doctrinal proposition with a sense ; but nobqdy becomes an antiphilosopher without believing that some privileged type of meaning, sense, or knowl edge can be accessed through the ordeal of allowing oneself to be divested of the contented authority of pre-established truths. Whatever emerges from this process of self-divestiture, some of which is still captured even in the mock comical caricature of our anecdote, serves precisely as the necessary leverage for the antiphilosopher who wishes to expose and depose the lofty claims of his philosophical rival . For it is only based on this different kind of knowledge or meaning, which we could also describe as an affirmative kind of non-thought-for example, to use Wittgenstein's well-known formula tion from the Tractatus LOBico-Phi1osophicus, the silent non-thought that occurs in the "mystical element" of that which shows or manifests itself but cannot be said-that it is possible to treat as sheer nonsense, or as a sick and reactive form of non-thought, the philoso pher's masterful pursuit of truth.

11

II

Badiou's interest in the figure of the antiphilosopher is actually a fairly belated affair. 1o If, beginning in 1 992 , he devotes his seminar at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris to year-long investigations of four major antiphilosophers , Nietzsche ( 1 992-93), Wittgenstein ( 1 993-94) , Lacan ( 1 994-95) , and Saint Paul ( 1 99596) , this effort comes after an earlier attempt at defining the specificity of the philosophical act-an attempt that passes through a polemic with the figure who traditionally has been the arch-rival of the philos opher since Plato, namely, the sophist. Immediately after Badiou publishes Being and Event, the most systematic formulation of his proposal for giving philosophy a new beginning, this polemic with 10 See Bruno Bosteels, "Radical Antiplrilosophy," Filoz'!JSki Vestnik 29.2 (2008), pp. 1 55-87. In the case of Wittgenstein, two other proposals for an antiphilosophical reading adopt, respectively, a psychological and a mathematical approach; see Louis Sass, "Deep Disquietudes: Reflections on Wittgenstein as Antiplrilosopher,"

Biography and Philosophy,

Wittgenstein:

ed. James C. Klagge (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 200 1 ), pp. 98� 1 55; and Penelope Maddy, "Wittgensteinian Anti-Philosophy,"

Naturalism in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University 13

Press, 1 997), pp. 1 62�7 1 .

TR A N S L ATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

the sophists of our time defines the path followed most notably in ManifestoJor Philosophy as well as in several essays and talks collected in the volume Conditions. "Philosophy is always the breaking of a mirror," claims Badiou. "This mirror is the surface of language, onto which the sophist reduces everything that philosophy treats in its act. If the philosopher sets his gaze on this surface, his double , the sophist, will emerge, and he may take himself to be one ."!! Badiou's interest in Wittgenstein, too, emerges first and foremost in the context of this redefmition of philosophy over and against its constant mirroring and redoubling in sophis tics: "Just as Plato has the professionals of sophistics , at once bullheaded and bearers of modernity, as his inter locutors , so also does the attempt to radicalize the rupture with classical categories of thought today define what it is reasonable to call a 'great modern sophistics ,' linked essentially to Wittgenstein.m2 And 11

Alain Badiou, "Defmition of Philosophy,"

(London: Continuum, 2008), p. 25; also in

12

Badiou,

Manifestojor Philosophy,

Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran Manifestofor Philosophy, pp. 1 43--4.

p. 98 (translation modified). Badiou adds:

"The decisive importance of language and its variability in heterogeneous games, doubt as to the pertinence of the concept of truth, rhetorical proximity to the effects of art, pragmatic and open politics: so many features common to the Greek sophists and to any number of contemporary orientations, which explain why studies and references devoted to Gorgias and Protagoras have recently been multiplied" (ibid). Among such studies of ancient and modern sophistics in the context of French thought, Badiou is undoubtedly thinking of the work of Barbara Cassin, for example, in EIiffet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1 995); or Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard in Just

Gamine,

an extended (anti)Platonic dialogue written with Jean

Loup Thebaud, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1 985); or the "Protagoras Notice" and "Gorgias Notice" in The D!/ferend: Phrases in

Dispute,

trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1 988), pp. 6-8 and 1 4- 1 6.

14


so, if philosophy can and must begin again today with a Platonic gesture of foundation, as Badiou claims, then it must also restage the battle of the philosopher against the modern-day versions of Gorgias or Protagoras. It would not be an exaggeration to conclude, however, that this fir �t attempt at demarcation fails to strengthen the self-und erstanding of the act that would be proper to philosophy for Badiou . In any case, it does not lead to anything resembling the kind of painstaking engage ment with a thinker's work as we obtain in the present reading ofWittgenstein . Thus , beyond a few summary judgments that equate the great modern sophistics with the so-called linguis tic turn writ large in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic , Badiou's reply to the sophists rarely exceeds the level of inviting future investigations along the same lines : "Just as Plato wrote the GorBias and ProtaBoras for the maj or sophists , we should write the Nietzsche and the WittBenstein. And, for the minor sophists , the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less polemical, neither more nor less respectful ."1 3 Frequently, moreover, Badiou falls into the trap of merely drawing up lists of modern or postmodern 13

Badiou, "The (Re)turn of Philosophy

Jor Philosophy,

ltseIf," Conditions, p. 23; also in Manifesto

p. 1 37 (translation modified). The closest that Badiou has come to

serving up a sy stematic reply to the sophists is in his ongoing polemiC with the work of his friend and collaborator Barbara Cassin: first, in a short review-article of

EEjJet sophistique

under the title "Logologie contre ontologie,"

Poesie 78

(December 1 996), pp. 1 1 1 - 1 6; and then, more recently, in a little volume on Lacan coauthored by Badiou and Cassin, 11

"L'Etourdit"de Lacan

nya pas de rapport sexuel. Deux lefons sur

(Paris: Fayard, 20 1 0), pp. 1 0 1 -36.

15

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sophists-lists , such a s the following, that are eclectic at best: "Language games , deconstruction, weak thought, radical heterogeneity, differends and differ ences, the ruin of reason, promotion of the fragment, discourse reduced to shreds : all this argues in favor of a sophistic line of thinking and puts philosophy in a deadlock.'* Little is to be gained in terms of theoreti cal precision, I would say, if one and the same category of modern sophistics serves to encompass thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein , Derrida, Vattimo, Lyotard, Rorty, or Barbara Cassin-all of whom seem to be alluded to in this list. Finally, in the particular case that concerns us in the following pages, this venting of anti sophistic rage loses track of the important differences between the earlier and the later Wittgenstein . "Who are the modern sophists?" asks Badiou in an essay from Conditions also included in the English trans lation of Manifestofor Philosophy, before answering with a definition of modern sophistics that is almost entirely limited to the terms specific to the Tractatus: 14

, Badiou, "The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itse!f 'p. 20;

ManiJestojor Philosoph'y, p. 1 35 .

Occasionally, Badiou's use of the category of antiphilosophy also becomes loose and eclectic. In a text on Louis Althusser, for instance, he praises his former teacher because ''he was, unlike Lacan, Foucault or Derrida, who were all antiphilosophers, a philosopher." See Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Baures tfPostwar Philosoph'y, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2009), p. 89.Yet in the Overture to this same collection, Badiou salutes

all the authors discussed therein,

including Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, as

philosophers ("In my view, there is only one true philosophy, and the philosophies of the fourteen whose names find shelter in my little pantheon would not want anything more" [ibid., p.

ix]), whereas in the first essay on Wittgenstein below, he entertains the

hypothesis that Althusser may have been close to a modem antiphilosophy. Incidentally, this raises the intriguing issue of the absence of Marx (but also of Freud) from the list of antiphilosophers studied as such by Badiou.

16


Modern sophists are those who , i n the footsteps of the great Wittgenstein , maintain that thought is held to the following alternative : either effects of discourse, language games , or the silent indica tion , the pure "showing" of that which is subtracted from the clutches of language . Sophists are those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between'truth and error, or errancy, but between speech and silence , that is , between what can be said and what is impossible to say. Or again : between propositions endowed with sense and o thers devoid of it . 15 Modern sophists would be the direct inheritors of the fmal message of the

Tractatus,

which according to

Badiou runs counter to the very idea of philosophy. "In many regards , what is presented as being the most contemporary in philosophy is a potent sophistics ," he writes . "It ratifies the fmal statement of the

Tractatus

'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'-whereas philosophy only exists in defending, precisely, the fact that it sets out to say that whereof one cannot speak ."16 1 5 Badiou, "The (Re )turn of Philosophy Itself," p. 6; also in Manifestofor Philosophy, pp. 1 1 6- 1 7 (translation modified) . 1 6 Ibid. (translation modified) . In light of Paul Cohen's mathematical operators for producing a concept of the indiscernible, namely, that which falls under the concept of "generic" set, Badiou insists in Manifestofor Philosophy that Wittgenstein's conclusion in the Tractatus runs counter to the very nature and contemporary possibility of philosophy: "It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of ' there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties' ), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be 17

TR A N S L AT O R ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

Yet only a few lines later in the same essay, Badiou associates

the

principal

sophistic

operation-here

defined as the reduction of truth to an effect of language-with the idea of the rule as discussed in the

Philosophical InvestiBations. "The modern sophist attempts to replace the idea of truth with the idea of the rule . This is the most profound sense ofWittgenstein's otherwise ingenious endeavour," writes Badiou . He continues : "Wittgenstein is our Gorgias , and we respect him as such . The ancient sophist already replaced truth with a mixture of force and convention . The modern sophist seeks to contrast the force of the rule, and, more gener

ally, the modalities of the linguistic authority of the Law, with the revelation or the production of the true .»!7 Now we could almost say that Wittgenstein's inter

est for Badiou lies entirely in the minimal but crucial named. It must be discerned as indiscernible. We are no longer held, if we accept to be within the effects of the mathematical condition, to choose between the nameable and the unthinkable . We are no longer suspended between something whereof there is an elucidation within language, and something whereof there is but an ineffable, indeed unbearable 'experience,' unraveling the mind. For the indiscernible, even though it breaks down the separating powers of language, is nonetheless proposed to the concept, which can demonstratively pass legislation on its existence" (Manifestofor Philosoph)', p. 95). 17 Badiou, "The (Re )turn of Philosophy Itself," p. 7; ManifestoJor Philosoph)', p. 1 1 7- 1 8 (translation modified) . A similar statement appears in "Of an Obscure Disaster," in a passage in which Badiou once again associates his view of sophistics with the later Wittgenstein: "To assume, like the Greek Sophists did, or like Wittgenstein did, that rules are the 'basis' of thought-inasmuch as thought is subjected to language-inevitably discredits the value of truth. Moreover, this is the conclusion of the Sophists as well as of Wittgenstein: the force of the rule is incompatible with the truth, which is then only a metaphysical Idea. For the Sophists there are only conventions and relations of force. And for Wittgenstein, there are only language games." See Alain Badiou, "Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State," trans. Barbara P. Fulks, lacanian ink 22 (Fall 2003), p. 82. 18


distance that separates these two claims , which a s a result cannot both be ascribed equally to the sophistic tendency : either truth can be reduced entirely to the rules of linguistic legislation , or else silence interrupts the regime of the sayable , opening up a space for the ethical experience by way of some radical non-theoret ical act . For Badiou , this gap corresponds to the distance not j ust between the

Philosophical InvestiBations and the Tractatus LOBico-Philosophicus but also within the Tractatus

itself between , on the one hand , the general doctrines of the proposition , of the world, of names and of objects , from which a certain logical atomism derives its impetus , and , on the other, the doctrines of the unsayable , of types of nonsense, and of the mystical element, from which an affirmative kind of non thought can emerge . To capture this distance , though , requires that the study of the sophistic framework be supplemented with an analysis of the exact nature of antiphilosophy, as a result of which only the later Wittgenstein will appear to be a sophist , one who ends up proposing a kind of cultural anthropology centered on the irreducible diversity of language games and forms of life : "The further oeuvre-which is not really one , since Wittgenstein had the good taste not to publish or finish any of it-slides from antiphilosophy into sophistry."18 The analysis of the early Wittgenstein , on the other hand , gains a much sharper edge once it is

18 Alain Badiou, LOBies rfWorlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 542. 19

TR AN S L ATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

reformulated i n light o f a systematic account o f its nature as a possible form of antiphilosophy. We can also observe this shift of focus-from an initial and rather vague polemic with the tradition of so-called modern sophistics to a much more refined and painstaking engagement with antiphilosophy-in the changing ways in which Badiou discusses Lacan. At crucial points , further more, this discussion intersects directly with Badiou's and Lacan's respective understandings ofWittgenstein. At first, as in his

Theory ifthe Subject, Badiou addresses

the French psychoanalyst as someone whose treatment of language, subjectivity and desire is always on the brink of succumbing to a kind of linguistic idealism. What Lacan has to offer would constitute at best a structural dialectic , one that for all its materialist insistence on the element of the real cannot resist the pull of a modern form of idealism in which language-rather than God or human consciousness-is assigned a constituent role. "Language

=

structure : such is the constituent state

ment, which we should not confuse with this or that statement in the scientific discipline named linguistics , or better yet the one named-by Lacan- 'linguistery,''' concludes Badiou . "Even so, to the extent that it claims to expand all the way to the thesis : the world is discourse, this

argument in contemporary philosophy

would

Theory if the Subject the question of the status of philosophy as such

deserve to be rebaptized: 'idealinguistery."'19 In

19 Alain Badiou, Theory tfthe Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 1 8 8 . 20


i s nowhere addressed in detail , nor does Badiou engage in this book with either the sophist or the antiphiloso pher in Lacan--except briefly to vent his disapproval of the second of these aspects : "I do not approve , frankly speaking, of the disdain with which Lacan's sectarians regard philosophy, which they inscribe univocally in the register of the imaginary. They boast about being daring antiphilosophers. 1 rather see them protect the algebraic indivisibility of the object."2o Whether we agree with Badiou on this topic or not, for him the result of the Lacanian antiphilosophical dare would be a profoundly conservative blockage of the possibility of changing the structure of language i�elf. Even in Being

and Event, aside from pointing out once

more the nefarious effects of the linguistic turn , Badiou refrains from thematizing the different status of the discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis . He only acknowledges , as if in passing , the antiphilosophical

slant introduced into the doctrine of the intervening

subject by Freud and Lacan no less than by Marx and Lenin . "A post-Cartesian doctrine of the subj ect is unfolding : its origin can be traced to non-philosophical practices (whether those practices be political , or relat ing to 'mental illness' ) ; and its regime of interpretation , marked by the names of Marx and Lenin , Freud and Lacan , is complicated by clinical or militant operations which go beyond transmissible discourse ."21 Precisely

20 21

Ibid., p. 234. Badiou, Beina and Event, p. 1 . 21


insofar a s these operations claim t o g o beyond what is theoretically

transmissible,

their

proponents

also

frequently target the discourse of philosophy as the epitome of speculative theory mistaking itself for trans formative practice : "Marx announces the end of philosophy and its realization in practice . Lacan speaks of 'antiphilosophy,' and relegates speculative totaliza tion to the imaginary."22 There is no further discussion of this aspect of the doctrines of Marx , Freud , and their followers . In Beina

and Event,

Badiou admits that a truly

contemporary philosophy must be able to live up to the challenge of these theoretico-practical orientations , whether clinical or political ; but he does not go so far as to investigate the effects of this challenge for the status of the act of philosophizing as such. In the period between

and Event,

Theory if the Subject and Beina

Badiou in sum rarely engages in detail with

Manifesto Jor Philosophy that immediately follow in the wake of Beina and Event, his polemical comments are mostly limited antiphilosophy and , in works such as

to the familiar pair of the philosopher and the sophist as seen in the contemporary light of the linguistic turn . In 22 Ibid., pp. 1 -2. Marx and Freud are briefly mentioned as the thinkers responsible for a fourth, antiphilosophical orientation in thought-in addition to the constructivist, transcendent, and generic orientations. See the end of Meditation Twenty-Seven, "Ontological Destiny of Orientation in Thought": "It holds that the truth of the ontological impasse cannot be seized or thought in immanence to ontology itself, nor to sp eculative metaontology. It assigns the un-measure of the state to the historical limitation of being, such that, without knowing so, philosophy only reflects it to rep eat it" (ibid., p. 284). But neither Marx nor Freud is granted a sep arate meditation in Being and Event, or even a section or endnote in Logies '!! Worlds. 22

TRA N S L ATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

contrast, i n his contribution t o the conference

with the Philosophers,

held in Paris in

1990

Lacan

under the

auspices of the College international de philosophie and first published in

1 99 1

as part of the proceedings ,

Badiou begins to operate more systematically from

within the framework of Lacan's professed antiphilosophy. Even so , the fundamental question remains whether this antiphilosophy can be reduced to a form of sophistics : It is a question of knowing, once and for all , whether

antiphilosophy,

which

Lacan

openly

reclaims as his own , is necessarily a sophistic figure in our eyes . If this is

tpe case, it would force

us , no matter how much we may otherwise admire what this master contributes to the field of psychoanalysis , to oppose to its antiphilosophy the antisophistic argumentative rage that, since its origin , constitutes the

thumos,

the kernel of rage

and polemics of philosophy.23 2 3 Alain Badiou, "Lacan et Platon: Ie matheme est-il une idee?," Lacan avec fes phifosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1 99 1 ) , p . 1 36 . This article is also published in a shorter and slightly modified version as "Antiphilosophy: Lacan and Plato," Conditions, pp. 228--47. Lacan himself, in Book XII (as y et unpublished) of his Seminaire, titled Probfemes cruciaux pour fa p'9'chanalyse, affirms: "The psy choanaly st is the presence of the sophist of our time, but with a different status" (session of May 1 2 , 1 965) . Cassin quotes this affirmation twice in II n'y a pas de rapport sexuef (pp . 1 1 and 44). Yet as she subsumes Lacan under the label of sophistics, Cassin fails to measure the distance between sophistry and antiphilosophy that is so crucial for Badiou in his reading of Lacan. She thus claims that antiphilosophy for Badiou would be the name for "the common line Gorgias-Lacan" (ibid . , p. 95) , whereas Badiou himself, in his earlier review of Cassin's EFjJet sophistique, concludes: "Lacan with his real is closer to Plato than to Gorgias" ("Logologie contre ontologie," p. 1 1 5) . 23


Badiou i s convinced that this equation o f sophistics and antiphilosophy does not hold up in the case of Lacan. Thus , in the first version of his talk composed for Lacan

with the Philosophers,

Badiou proceeds to distinguish a

number of presuppositions that separate the psycho analyst from the sophist . Three presuppositions , to be precise : first, if Lacan's discourse cannot be reduced to the great modern sophistics , it is primarily because for him there exists at least

some

truth; and this truth is ,

moreover, never fully sayable but at best only "half

mi-dit, which also happens to be a homonym of midi, the "high noon" of affirmation or the said" (in French

hour of "the shortest shadow" according to the third great modern antiphilosopher, Nietzsche) . Second , for Lacan , contrary to the basic tenet of all sophists , logic can never be fully equated with rhetoric without producing some leftover or remainder; nor are language and reality ever fully coextensive , for there is always the horror of some point of the real that absolutely resists symbolization . Third and finally, Lacan's insist ence on the nature of truth as an operation or act , rather than as a rule for the evaluation of statements or propositions , also separates his take on philosophy from a purely sophistic understanding. For Badiou , in fact, these three features of Lacan's work are better dealt with under the heading of antiphi losophy. Perhaps this explains why, in the shorter version of Badiou's talk from included in

Lacan with the Philosophers

Conditions, the part concerning the limits of

Lacan's sophistry is omitted altogether in favor of an 24


exclusive focus o n his antiphilosophy. Besides, a s i n the case of the Wittgenstein of the

Tractatus,

the investiga

tion into the meaning of this last notion allows for a much more productive engagement with the enemies or adversaries of traditional philosophy than any mere updating of antisophistic rage ever could. Of course , according to Badiou , in every modern antiphilosophy there are always numerous sophistic elements ("every anti-philosopher is a virtual accom plice of sophistry," he argues in

Log ics qfWorldi4),

but

these elements are not the most important ones and they mainly concern the preliminary, negative , or diag nostic side of antiphilosophy. On the other hand , if antiphilosophers always have more punch than do sophists alone , it is because they do not limit them

selves to holding up a mirror in which philosophers see

their language reflected and emptied out of all truth value . Unlike the sophists , they actually disparage the philosopher's act in the name of another act, one that would be far more radical than anything the meta physical search for truth could ever hope to deliver. And , for Badiou, this antiphilosophical understanding of the act not only allows the diagnostic to give way to the disposition of a therapeutic counterpart, it is also uniquely capable of illuminating, by way of contrast , the act that would be specific to philosophy, namely, the seizing within thought of the truths that are produced in its own time . 24

Badiou, Logics tf Worlds, p. 544-. 25

III

Especially in his seminars on Nietzsche andWittgenstein, Badiou thus ends up proposing a triangulation between philosophy, sophistics , and antiphilosophy. Now there are three terms and not just two , as in the eternal pair ing of the philosopher and the sophist in Plato or for Badiou himself in his earlier work. One particularly fas cinating way of understanding this triangulation is by grasping the role of the sophist and the antiphi losopher

as

necessary

educators

(}f the

avowed

philosopher. For Badiou, both sophistics and antiphilosophy can be defined as rival discourses that put philosophy to the test of its own contemporaneity. The ultimate aim of engaging with these other discourses certainly consists in reassuring the intelligibility of the act of philoso phizing, but typically this act cannot demonstrate its actuality without taking into account the lessons of such rivals . The capacity of philosophy to be on a par with its time, in other words , depends on its capacity to endure both the ironies and sarcasms of the sophist and the accusations and insults of the antiphilosopher. 27

TR A N S L AT O R ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

I n the first case , this means that philosophy must b e able t o gaze at its own reflection in the mirror that the modern-day sophist seductively holds in front of it . No matter how superficial , this reflection nonetheless serves as an indispensable reminder both of the fact that the philosopher's discourse is caught in a constant battle among competing stylistic and generic arrange ments and of the fact that this discourse itself can only ever produce an empty concept of truth (or Truth) , without being able to produce any actual truths of its own . On the one hand , then , the role of the modern sophists consists in alerting the philosophers to the contemporaneity modern

of their

sophistics ,

discourse :

linguistic ,

"The

great

aestheticizing

and

democratic , exercises its dissolving function , exam ines impasses and draws the picture of what is contemporary to us . It is just as essential for us as the libertine was to Blaise Pascal : it

alerts us to the

singu

larities of the time ."25 On the other hand , the function of the sophist is not j ust stylistic or aesthetic but also ethical in nature . Were it not for the verbal j ousting matches with their rhetorical double that remind them of the emptiness of their conceptual operators , 25

Badiou,

Manifestofor Philosophy, p. 98. Badiou's mention of the antiphilosopher

Pascal in this passage is sy mptomatic of another constitutive aspect of his proposed triangulation of philosophy, sophistics, and antiphilosophy: for a sophist, the antiphilosopher is as excessively attached to truth as is the philosopher, albeit in the guise of a non-philosophical "truth" about the truth of philosophy. Both the philosopher and the antiphilosopher maintain too strong a notion of the act, whereas the discourse of sophistics is relieved of the burden of any such notion whatsoever.

28


philosophers might believe themselves capable of producing some substantive truths of their own , whereas truths can only come to them from the outside , namely, from the non-philosophical practices such as s cience or art or politics that are the material conditions of philosophy. "The figure of the sophist is at all times required if philosophy is to maintain its ethics ," Badiou thus warns . "Because the sophist is the one who reminds us of the emptiness of the category of Truth ."26 To ignore this reminder, by refusing to endure the sophist's company, always risks leading philosophy into the disastrous belief that it can redou ble itself as its own condition and become a science , an art , or a politics all by itself. For Badiou , this is why the different guises of the sophist must at all times be acknowledged and taken up again and again as part of the self- definition of philosophy. "The history of philosophy is the history of its ethics : it consists in the succession of violent gestures through which philosophy is withdrawh from its disastrous redoubling. To put it another way : philosophy in its history is but a desubstantialization of Truth , which is also the self- liberation of its act ."27 Where , then , lies the difference? If, rhetorically or discursively, philosophy and sophistry are indiscernible mirror images of one another, where lies the source of 26

Badiou, "The (Re)turn of Philosophy ltse!f'," p. 1 9; also in Manifesto for

Philosophy, p. 1 34.

27 Badiou, "Definition of Philoso p hy," p . 2 5 ; also in Manyestofor Philosophy, p. 1 44 (translation modified).

29


their fierce dialectical strife over questions of language , being, meaning, and truth? According to Barbara Cassin , a maj or expert in the tradition of classical sophistics and a close collaborator of Badiou , this battle concerns nothing less than the fundamental orientation of thought-what she calls "the decision of sense" from the ancients all the way to the moderns and postmoderns . This is the decision between the follow ing two options : either language is seen as possessing a univocal sense capable of capturing being in the discourse of ontology as the science of being qua being, or else language is equivocal from beginning to end , but then the discourse of metaphysics , or ontology, must be replaced with a generalized sophistics , or logology, in which there is no being except what the fictions of language have the power to create. For Cassin , Aristotle is the founding figure behind the

metaphysical

orientation ,

whereas

she

sees

Democritus as inaugurating the sophistic playfulness that reaches a well -nigh unreadable climax in Lacanian texts such as "L' E tourdit ." Upon this reading , the French psychoanalyst thus appears first and foremost as a sophist who confronts us with the decision of sense . Here is how Cassin defines the fundamental choice : On the side of philosophy, the sense of a word , given in its definition , says the essence of the thing, and this is why there cannot not be univoc ity : a "man" is a man. On the side of Lacan , the 30


unique sense, the one-sense, i s un-sense, that i s to say the-deprived-of-sense

(homophony

always

already enacts the equivocal) , or again : it is signi fication , but not sense . There is only sense that is equivocal and that is called "ab-sense ," escape from the Aristotelian norm of sense .

28

If the philosopher always needs the sophist as an adversary, it is because the univocity of sense cannot be proven except negatively, by pointing out the contradiction that emerges as soon as one attempts to make any assertion at all that would deny it . In fact , were we to list all the adversaries whose "performa tive contradiction" has been put to the advantage of philo sophy in this particular manner, from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Jiirgen Habermas and Karl Otto Ape l , it would turn out that sophists actually have been the protagonists of another understanding of philosophy, but one whose origins still lie in ancient Greece . Cassin 's overarching aim in rqcognizing the protag onism of sophistics is to give the history of philosophy a different beginning by reverting the decision of sense away from the principle of univocity and back to linguistic equivocation . Unlike what happens in Heidegger 's history of metaphysics but in a similarly ambitious vein , this other beginning invites us to move not from Plato to the pre - Socratics but rather 28

Cassin, II n'y a pas de rapport sexueI, pp. 24-5 . 31


from Aristotle t o Democritus , Gorgias , o r Protagoras : "We could say that Cassin attempts a synthesis between Heidegger (there is indeed a Greek incep tion that destines and traverses us) and the linguistic turn (everything is language , and the philosophy closest to the real is a general rhetoric) . It is as the hero of this synthesis that Gorgias challenges the hegemony of Parmenides ."29 For Badiou , the philosopher certainly cannot ignore the power of seduction of the sophist's plea in the struggle between ontology and logology. For such seductiveness speaks to the necessity of taking into account the discursive framing of the philosophical act . Even if this act in the hands of the sophist is flattened out to the point of vanishing into the surface oflanguage alone , the mimetic rivalry in which metaphysics and rhetorics , or ontology and logology, exchange punches by imitating each other's resources nonetheless serves the purpose of alerting the philosopher to the linguistic singularities of his or her own time . Ultimately, Badiou 's obj ection to the sophistic argu ment is not one of moral indignation but one of intellectual disinterest, even boredom . As he writes in his review of Cassin 's work : What philosophy with Plato repudiates is not the paradox or the "immoral" complexity of the primacy of non-being, or of the sovereignty of 29

Badiou, Loaies cif Worlds, pp. 543--4. 32


language. I t i s o n the contrary the

easiness o f the

sophistic "solution." That non-being constitutes the rule for being is something flaunted by the sophists. But the difficult thing to do is not to state this and cheerily deduce from it the rhetorician's "democratic" legitimacy ; it is to manage to

think

this and mathematically to deduce from it the laborious existence of some truthS.3D Now, precisely, the sophist's discourse-though a great educator in terms of putting philosophy's contempora neity to the test ofits linguistic and stylistic protocol-is relieved of the ballast of any act whatsoever that might latch onto the existence of a truth outside the essential equivocation of language . From a political standpoint, moreover, the effect of this emptying out of the cate gory of truth is said to be profoundly conservative. "What we target in sophistics is the fact that , beneath its subversive appearance , in terms of thought it author izes only a technical variant of the conservation of linguistic and political resources ," writes Badiou. Even if one disagrees with this wholesale portrayal of the sophist's conservatism , in the �nd the challenge to philosophy that comes from this tradition does not hold Badiou's attention for long : "As Deleuze would have said , even though he did not believe in truth either, sophistics is not 'interesting' . . . Besides , this is the ultimate and principal argument for Plato. The sophist 30

Badiou, "Logologie contre ontologie," p . 1 1 4 . 33


i s not so much immoral a s h e i s fastidious : 'if h e . enj oys dragging the argument back and forth, then he's been carried away by something that's not worth much .

o f anyone ' s attentIOn.

' "3 1

In the case of antiphilosophy, the rivalry is of an alto gether different intensity. Not only does playful irony here give way to the argumentative violence with which the antiphilosopher adds insult to injury, but as a result of this upping of the ante the philosopher's response, too , must be different . It is no longer just a question of recognizing philosophy's empty reflection in the mirror of language but rather of willingly travers ing the experience of an existential ordeal . Unlike the sophists , antiphilosophers are not content with sending the message of metaphysics back to its sender with a smile ; they also directly target the messengers them selves and pelt them with insults . "And why should we always bless the abuse heaped upon us philosophers?" Badiou wonders out loud : Pascal declares us useless and uncertain , Nietzsche denounces each one of us as "the criminal of crim inals ,"Wittgenstein assumes that our propositions

31 Ibid . , pp. 1 1 5- 1 6 . The French term translated as "fastidious" is ennuyeux, which also means "boring," "bothersome" or "annoying." The direct quote is from The Sophist 2 59c, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M . Cooper (Indianapolis : Hackett, 1 997) , p. 2 8 3 . A s for the Deleuzian notion o f the interesting, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: "Only teachers can write 'false' in the margins, perhaps; but readers doubt the importance and interest, that is to say, the novelty of what they are given to read," in What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 99 1 ) , p. 83 . 34


and questions are uniformly nonsensical , and Lacan , hilariously, proposes to replace "ontology" with ''hontology.'' And then should we turn to our advantage this flagrant attempt to discredit philos ophy

once andfor a1l?32

Here too, though, the invectives contain valuable lessons for thinking through the specificity of the philosophical act. Thus , just as Lacan is an indispensable educator for any philosophy that seeks to be truly contemporary, so too Badiou proposes to see in Wittgenstein a hero whose cause should not be lost on the philosopher. "Lacan appointed himself as the educator of all future philosophers . A contemporary philosopher, for me, is indeed someone who has the unfaltering courage to work through Lacan's antiphilosophy," he writes in

Conditions; 33 and the same argument can be made for the two other great modern antiphilosophers , Nietzsche and Wittgenstein , who similarly prescribe a new duty to philosophy according to Badiou : Antiphilosophy

is

always

what,

at

its

very

extremes , states the new duty of philosophy, or its

32 Badiou, "Silence, solipsisme, saintete," p. 1 3 . These are the essay's opening words, right before the anecdote taken from Jacques-Alain Miller. Nietzsche calls the philosopher "the criminal of criminals" in "Law against Christianity," in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twiliaht '!f the Idols and Other Writinas, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2 5 . Lacan develops his pun on honte ("shame") and ontoloaie ("ontology") in Book XVII of his Seminar: The Other Side '!fPsychoanaIysis, p. 2 1 0 . 3 3 Badiou, Conditions, p. 1 29 . 35


new possibility i n the figure o f a new duty. I think of Nietzsche's madness , of Wittgenstein's strange labyrinth, of Lacan's final muteness. In all three cases antiphilosophy takes the form of a legacy. It bequeaths something beyond itself to the very thing that it is fighting against . Philosophy is always the heir to antiphilosophy. 34 The reason why this second rival discourse seems so much more interesting to the philosopher is that, whereas the sophist puts in place a generalized mimet ics from which all notions of the act of seizing truths have been subtracted , the antiphilosopher denounces the philosophical act in the name of another act, which puts the philosopher on alert in a unique way as to the occurrences-in art or politics or science-that define the contemporary moment . In order to unmask the philosophical seizing of truth as a nefarious subterfuge , antiphilosophers grab hold of the materials of their time with the claim that their treatment of these materials is capable of outperform ing the philosopher 's on all counts. Faced with a scientific invention , an artistic creation or a political experiment , they do not turn these materials toward eternity as universal ideas but rather absorb their singu lar force into the protocols of their own understanding of the act .

34

By

appropriating the force of these

Alain Badiou, "Who is Nietzsche?," trans. Alberto Toscano, Pli: The Warwick

Journal rjPhilosophy 1 1 (200 1 ) , p. 1 0 . 36


occurrences , the antiphilosophers can then rely o n this impulse to suppress the philosophical act by claiming to have access to a dimension that their rivals cannot fail to ignore . Ultimately, then , there is always an aspect of irrefu table radicality inherent in the antiphilosophical act, in response to which the philosopher is found to be as impotent as any master interpellated by the hysteric's rebuttal : "Whatever you say, that's not it ! " However, just as psychoanalysis begins by listening to the hyster ic's discourse , so too philosophy can strengthen its contemporary possibility by listening to the insults and provocations of the antiphilosopher, who puts it in touch with the events of its time. As Badiou says in an interview : This is why philosophers must constantly engage with the experiences of their time, have an ear for what happens , and especially listen to the antiphilosopher, because the antiphiloso pher is always busy saying to him , "But what you , the philosopher, are talking about no longer exists , or it doesn't really exist , and then there is this , which you don't talk about and which is essen tial ," and so on . That is a real convocation to one's time. 35

35 Quoted i n Bruno Bosteels , "Can Change B e Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou," Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 2005) , p. 254. 37


I n this race against time , the antiphilosopher may well occupy the position of the tortoise , whom no philo sophical Achilles will ever be able t o overtake. But for Badiou this does not make it any less urgent to listen to the voice of the antiphilosopher. The antiphilosophical act may not only seem to have won out in advance in this rivalry with the philosopher, it can also present itself as more radical than any of the scientific , artistic , or political events from which it appropriates the force of its radical impulse . In a sense, the resulting act pretends to be more radically s cientific than all existing science , more deeply aesthetic than all available works of art , and more profoundly political than any really existing politics. This is why Badiou calls the antiphilosophical act "archipolitical" in the case of Nietzsche ; "archiaes thetic" in the case ofWittgenstein ; and "archiscientific" in the case of Lacan . This does not mean that Nietzsche , Wittgenstein , or Lacan would be the ultimate refer ence points if we wanted to capture the essence of our time in terms of politics , art , or science. In fact , at least in the cases of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein , Badiou notes that for all their talk about politics and aesthetics , their knowledge of the actual events that occur in these domains is actually fairly limited , if not purely anecdotal. This is why an important concep tual distinction must be introduced between the nature of the act , on the one hand , and the subj ect matter, the materials or the bias from the point of which the act presents itself, on the other. A large 38


part o f Badiou's investigation into the nature of antiphilosophy

centers

precisely

on

the

tension

between these two aspects , the act and the subj ect matter, between which there is strange relation of disconnection and traversal. For the three maj or antiphilosophers , this distinc tion can be elaborated as follows : •

in Nietzsche's case the

subject matter is

art and

aesthetics (above all , Wagner) but the

act

is

archipolitical ; •

in Wittgenstein's case the

subject-matter is logic

and mathematics (above all , Frege and Russell)

act is archiaesthetic; in Lacan's case the subject matter is

but the •

the stuff of

love and desire (above all , after Freud) but the

act is archiscientific . Even though the subj ect-matter defmes the ostensible interests of the antiphilosopher, Badiou argues that this is not where the singular force of the act can be located. In the case of Wittgenstein , for example , the antiphi losopher certainly devotes the bulk of his work to the investigation of logic and mathematics , whereas his comments about art-music or the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for example---are indeed very limited ill comparison. Even so, the act or activity thatWittgenstein's antiphilosophy posits as the main point of leverage against the sinful nonsense of inherited philosophy

can

be of an aesthetic , or archiaesthetic , nature . 39

be said to


I n sum , whereas the rivalry with sophistics confronts the philosopher with the mime tics of a discursive protocol that puts philosophy in touch with the linguis tic singularities of its time , devoid of any act , the rivalry with antiphilosophy is rather one of act against act . There is always another, more radical act in regard to which the antiphilosopher maintains that there is a non-philosophical truth of the philosophical category of truth . For Badiou , no contemporary philosophy is possible without traversing this challenge , since sophis tics and antiphilosophy mark precisely the field in which this contemporaneity is determined .

40

IV

In several sessions from his unpublished seminar on Wittgenstein,

Badiou

illustrates

this

triangulation

between philosophy, sophistics , and antiphilosophy by discussing two older but still insightful readings of Wittgenstein, namely, Jacques Lacan's session of January

2 1 , 1 970

in his seminar

The Other Side if Po/choanalysis,

and Richard Rorty's "Keeping Philosophy Pure : An Essay on Wittgenstein," first published in

1 976 and reissued as part of the collection of essays Conseq uences ifPragmatism . These interpretations provide useful counterpoints to the one Badiou presents here insofar as he introduces Rorty 's take on Wittgenstein as that of a sophist, whereas Lacan reads Wittgenstein in a resolutely antiphilosophi cal key. Badiou's own aim is to carve out a path down the middle, with a philosophical reading of antiphilosophy that is equally distant from yet equally engaged with the other two---the sophistic and the antiphilosophical . Regardless of the label we wish t� affix to their respective positions , what is most striking in this confrontation is the fact that both Rorty and Lacan completely agree that the Wittgenstein of the 41

Tractatus


in th e end remains too much o f a philosopher. The difference is that for Rorty-as for many readers of the "American" Wittgenstein , including Stanley Cavell the Philosophical Investiaations provide us with a potential way out of this impasse, whereas Lacan , much like Badiou , prefers to dwell precisely on the impasses of the early Wittgenstein , whom he reads as possessed with a remarkable "psychotic ferocity" from which psychoanalysis still has a great deal to learn if it wants to live up to its antiphilosophical ambition . For Rorty, the strength of Wittgenstein's later work, exemplified in the enormous impact the

Philosophical

Investiaations have had and continue to have, lies in the fact that he does not propose an alternative solution for the typical "problems of philosophy" transmitted from Plato to Descartes to Kant, even up to and including the

Tractatus. As such, the later Wittgenstein would fall in line with a broadly understood pragmatist orientation of thought shared with the likes of John Dewey. "I want to argue that the later Wittgenstein belongs with Dewey as much as the earlier Wittgenstein belongs with Kant-that Dewey's debunking of traditional notions of philosophy, and his attempt to break down the distinctions between art and science, philosophy and science, art and religion, morality

and

science,

are

a

natural

outcome

of

Wittgenstein's critique of the Cartesian tradition," explains Rorty. In this account, philosophy is defined as one liter ary genre or cultural tradition among others, one that

furthermore may have outlived its usefulness or that nowadays in any case lies before us ready to wither away : 42

TR AN S LATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

On Dewey's view, "philosophy" a s what i s common to Plato , Kant , and the

Tractatus

is , indeed , a

distinctive cultural tradition-but it is not a

Each

(though its study is) . Philosophy in a broader sense-roughly, the sort of writing which gener alizes so sweepingly that one has no

other

compartment for it-is something else, but it is not a

Each

either. No

Each,

no metaphilosophical

problems about its subj ects and method-so no dilemmas of the sort I have been running through . Instead of spending more valuable time searching for some necessary first ground-whether in the order of things , in the faculties of the mind , or finally in the general form of language-it would be better to aban don the yearning for conceptual necessity altogether : "To stop using the concept of necessity would be to cease to try to keep philosophy pure , but that attempt, I think, has cost us too much waste motion already."36 Rorty's cost-efficiency analysis in the final instance converts the antiphilosopher into the proponent of a post-philosophical culture . By the latter is meant "a study of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various ways of talking which our race has invented" and which is closer to literary or cultur�l 36

Richard Rorty, "Keeping Philosophy Pure : An Essay on Wittgenstein,"

Consequences ofPragmatism: Essays 1 9 72-1 980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 1 982), p. 2 8 . More recently, see also th � excellent sampling of the "American" and / or "new"Wittgenstein, from Stanley Cavell to Cora Diamond, in the collection of essays The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000). 43


criticism than t o the ideal o f philosophy a s a pure science , for which Rorty reserves the capitalized noun Philosophy. "It looks , in short, much like what is some times called 'cultural criticism'-a term which has come to name the literary-historical-anthropological political merry-go-round" that many thinkers, including the Wittgenstein of the

Tractatus

as well as those

Wittgensteinians who seek to find in him the means to put philosophy on firm scientific grounds again as philosophy of language , wish to alight from in the hope of jumping "from philosophy to Philosophy."37 For the recently deceased author of

Consequences cifPraBmatism,

the whole point is precisely not to jump off but to stay as long as possible on the merry-go-round in question , without wishing to keep philosophy pure . In the eyes of Badiou , this pragmatist reading of Wittgenstein can be seen as the work of a sophist . It is a plea for an immanent cessation of philosophy-now reduced to being nothing more than a cultural tradi tion-in the way it has been handed down to us from Plato. This cultural tradition loses its distinctiveness in the same movement in which any pretension to truth vanishes together with the role of science , in particular mathematics , as a privileged condition for philosophy. "Science as the source of 'truth'-a value which outranks the mere goodness of moral virtue and the mere beauty of art-is one of the Cartesian notions which vanish when the ideal of 'philosophy as strict 37

Rorty, Consequences ifPraBmatism, pp. xxxviii and xl . 44

TRA N S LATOR ' S I N TR O DUCT I O N

science' vanishes ," concludes Rorty. "Wittgenstein's 'resistance to science' is , I believe , best interpreted as a resistance to the entire cultural tradition which made truth-the successful crossing of the void which divides man from the world-a central virtue ."38 To put an end to this tradition then demands the utter relaxation

or

loosening

up

of the

philosopher's

discourse, from which all strong remnants of the act of seizing truths must be released . On the other hand , insofar as Wittgenstein in the

Tractatus still harbors the

secret desire to overcome the truths of natural science with a higher grasp of the sense of the world, he remains on the lookout for some---e thical or aesthetic rather than doctrinal-virtue and , in this sense, he alternately can be called too much of a philosopher or too much of an antiphilosopher. For a sophist , in fact, both are equally guilty of holding onto a strong understanding of the act , which is precisely what a post-philosophical culture would teach us how to do without . And yet , according to Badiou , this reading of Wittgenstein-like any good sophistic interpreta tion-does manage to capture a crucial aspect of his thinking, namely, the question of style . For instance , rather than see it as a backhanded attempt to return us to a purer form of philosophy, Rorty proposes that we read the

Investigations

as a superb example of literary

satire. "Typically, attempts to overthrow the traditional problems of modern philosophy have come in the form 38

Ibid . , pp. 34--5 . 45


o f proposals about how we ought t o think s o a s t o avoid those problems ," writes Rorty. But this is precisely what the author of the InvestiBations does not do : "When Wittgenstein is at his best, he resolutely avoids such constructive criticism and sticks to pure satire ."39 Again , the choice before us can be said to coincide with the shifting mission behind the

InvestiBations,

Tractatus

and the

from a certain bygone dream of logical

atomism to the proposal for a post-philosophical culture. "Either Wittgenstein is showing how empirical means can be used to discover 'the limits of language ' (in which case philosophical error will be, of all things , a failure to gather enough facts) or he is somehow playing on our mixed feelings about the philosophical . tradition (now in the manner of a satirist, now in that of a parlor psychoanalyst) ."4o In all these instances, there can be no doubt that only the second option is productive in the eyes of Rorty. Wittgenstein's strength , which on this account consists in proposing a regime for the immanent cessa tion of philosophy, is inseparable from his work as a self-styled polemicist who gives up on the desire for the virtue of truth in all its variants . In this sense , he may well be an antiphilosopher but one who is at his best when he no longer aims for any radical act what soever, or when there no longer exists any binding principle or axiom in a strong sense, only the fictive

39 40

Ibid. , p. 34. Ibid . , p. 27.

46


powers that comprise a rhetorical style . "If we stop thinking of Wittgenstein as the anthropocentric theo rist who said that necessity comes from man , and start thinking of him as the satirist who suggested that we get along without the concept of necessity, then we might have fewer dilemmas about what sort of disci pline philosophy was , but only at the cost of being dubious about its very existence .'>41 This last cost is one that Rorty is only too happy to accept , since to do otherwise-for example by crossing the void between man and the world or between being and event with the supposition of

some

truths-would amount to a

violent interruption of the cultural-democratic conver sation of humankind , or at least of the West . Whereas , in Rorty 's view, Wittgenstein thus invites us to relax philosophy to the point of indistinction , in

The Other Side cif P�choanalysis Lacan invokes the Tractatus as a jumping board from which to subj ect philosophy to an extreme tension . We can grasp some thing of the enormous difference in intensity between these

two interpretations by contrasting Rorty 's

conclusion , which is an allusion to paragraph the

1 33

of

Philosophical Investigations: "What gives Wittgenstein's

work its power is , I think, the vision of a point where 'we can cease doing philosophy when we want to ,">42 with the enigmatic statement that Lacan is said to have 41 Ibid . 42 Ibid . , pp. 35-6; cf. Wittgenstein: "The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to," Philosophical lnvestiaations, trans. G. E . M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1 968), p. 5 1 . 47


posted o n the wall o f his consultation room :

Ne devient

pasfou q Ui veut, "Not just anyone can go mad who wants to.'>43 As opposed to the sophist's proposal to loosen up the democratic conversation in favor of a post-philo sophical culture , we thus obtain the antiphilosopher's image of an almost aristocratic rarefying of discourse that borders on insanity. What fascinates Lacan in Wittgenstein is precisely the extent to which he displays , as do few other thinkers beside him , an excep tional capacity for madness-for psychosis , to be exact . This diagnostic concerns not so much the biographical

person

as

the

discursive

operations

involved in Wittgenstein's work . On the one hand , even though Lacan does not use the actual term in this part of his seminar, he clearly identifies a certain antiphilosophical operation in the

Tractatus Log ico-Philosophicus

that he has no trouble

recognizing as being close to his own . This operation consists in locating the exact source of the philoso pher's madness. Such an effort to put philosophy in its place always entails . detecting a form of crookedness. "Thus , this Wittgensteinian operation is nothing but an extraordinary parade, the detection of philosophical crookedness .''44 Philosophers are crooks insofar as they Jacques Lacan , f crits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton , 2 006) , p. 1 76 (translation modified) . 44 Lacan, The Other Side if P�choana9rsis, p. 6 1 (translation modified, with "crookedness" here and "knavery" in the following quotes translating canaillerie) . For an excellent comparative investigation ofWittgenstein and Lacan from a point of view that is close to Badiou 's , see Frans:oise Fonteneau, E fthique du silence. WittBenstein et Lacan (Paris: Seuil , 1 999) .

43

48


disavow the dimension o f desire that subtends all speech . The main subterfuge that philosophers use in order thus to obtain the illusion of obj ectivity is the reliance on a metalanguage . Lacan , though , not only shares with Wittgenstein the principle that there is no metalanguage , he also believes that this principle or leverage point is admirably pushed to its logical extremes in the

Tractatus.

At least in this regard , the

early Wittgenstein can be seen as a fellow antiphiloso pher to Lacan . He, too , unmasks the incredible stupidity of the philosophical act : "The stupid thing, if I may say so, is to isolate the factitiousness of 'It is day.' It is a prodigiously rich piece of stupidity, for it gives rise to a leverage point, very precisely the following one , from which it results that what I have used as a leverage point myself, namely that there is no metalanguage , is pushed to its ultimate consequences .'>45 Another way of formulating the antiphilosophical proximity between Lacan and the early Wittgenstein would be to show that for both writers , who are also similarly remarkable teachers, philosophy 's reliance on a metalanguage involves a betrayal of an ethical kind . It is not so much false or mistaken as it is sinful or dishon est . Finally, philosophy is an act of knavery or bastardry that consists in the belief that truth can be separated from the effects of language taken as such . "No truth can be localized except in the field in which it is stated ," says Lacan . Only crooks and knaves believe in truth 45

Lacan, The Other Side '?fPsychoanalysis, p. 6 1 . 49

TR AN S L AT O R ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

beyond o r outside language . "There i s n o other meta language than all the forms of knavery, if we thereby designate these curious operations derivable from the fact that man 's desire is the Other 's desire . All acts of crookedness are based on the fact of wishing to be someone 's Other, I mean someone 's big Other, there where the figures by which his desire will be captivated are drawn ."46 From the standpoint of the antiphiloso pher that Lacan recognizes in Wittgenstein , there is no language other than the language of desire , which also means language faced with the inconsistency of an order that is not-All . "There is no sense except the sense of desire . This is what one can say after having read Wittgenstein ," Lacan concludes . But the non philosophical "truth" of this desire , which is what philosophy conceals behind the supposition of a meta language , is not another notion of fullness but rather the impossibility of enj oyment, one psychoanalytical name of which is castration : "There is no truth except of that which the said desire hides of its lack, so as to make light of what it does find .'147 Why, then , does Lacan also ascribe a "psychotic ferocity" to Wittgenstein? If the structural analogy is between psychosis and philosophy, based on the fore closure of a crucial element of desire or enj oyment that then comes back in the real , does this mean that Wittgenstein in the end is not quite the antiphilosopher

46 47

Ibid. , pp. 6 1 and 62 (translation modified) . Ibid . , p. 6 1 (translation corrected). 50

TR AN S L ATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

that Lacan believes h e could b e ? "Here , in effect , one of the most assured discourses and something or other that is strikingly suggestive of psychosis concur so much that I am saying this on the sole basis of feeling its effect ," Lacan confesses , still referring to the early Wittgenstein . "How remarkable it is that a university like the English university made a place for him . A place apart , it's appropriate to say, a place of isolation with which the author went along perfectly well himself, so much so that he withdrew from time to time to a little house in the country and then returned to pursue this implacable discourse ."48 Here we come upon the limit of the compatibility between Lacan and Wittgenstein . The latter 's implacable discourse is indeed still premised on some kind of fullness that would be available-not to the propositional sense of what can be said but to the showing of the sense of the world-in what he calls the mystical element . The Wittgenstein of the

Tractatus,

in other words , is

still a crook whose antiphilosophical operation falls short of truly undermining the presupposition of some subj ect who is supposed to know. "For Lacan , this continues to be the desire for a total sense . And as a result , Wittgenstein too is finally a philosopher. He maintains the certitude of a possible access to full thought ," as Badiou explains . "He too forecloses that which in enjoyment is irremediably barred , under the name of the mystical element , or of God , or of the 48

Ibid. , p. 6 3 . 51


sense o f the world . Wittgenstein maintains that true thought is on the side of being. This is why one can find a psychotic ferocity in him . 'Psychotic ferocity' means : the paranoid certitude of he who believes in saving the integral truth."49 For Lacan , however, this does not mean that we should simply move on and replace the earlier with the later Wittgenstein . As an antiphilosopher, the psychoanalyst should stick as closely as possible to the leverage point offered in the

Tractatus, namely, that there is no metalanguage , but

with an eye on a radically different understanding of the act , which would be the psychoanalytical act that alone might cure us from psychosis : "As for the analytic operation , it is distinguished by advancing into the field in a way that is distinct from what is , I would say, found embodied in Wittgenstein's discourse, that is , a psy chotic ferocity, in comparison with which Ockham's well-known razor, which states that we must admit ,, only notions that are necessary, is nothing. 50 Finally, what Lacan appreciates in the

Tractatus

is the extent to

which its author is willing to erase himself from his own discourse : "Surely the author has something close to the analyst's position, namely, that he eliminates himself com pletely from his own discourse."5 1 This last affirmation may seem paradoxical , insofar as Wittgenstein concludes the

Tractatus by

reinserting himself as the ultimate

49 Alain Badiou, "Lacan , la philosophic, la folie," Conferences en Argentine et au Chili (author's unpublished typescript, October 1 994) , pp. 44--5 . 50 Lacan, The Other Side cifPsychoanalysis, p. 62. 51 Ibid. , p. 6 3 . 52

TRAN S L ATOR ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

referent o f all o f the book's propositions up t o that point , which as a result appear to be as nonsensical as those of traditional philosophy : "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way : anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsen sical , when he has used them-as steps-to climb up beyond them ."52 In reality, this reference to the singu larity of the subj ect of the enunciation is an integral part of the writerly style of each and every antiphiloso pher, from Kierkegaard 's diaries to Lacan 's seminars. Instead of pretending that the voice of being or some other objective order directly speaks through him , as philosophers gladly do in the well-nigh hallucinatory discourse of ontology, the antiphilosopher speaks only in the name of his own tormented subj ectivity, as torn between salvation and sin , or between saintliness and suicide , as is Wittgenstein . What is more , he is willing to fade away, or to become nothing more than a trace or residue-a little piece of waste-in his own discourse. In this regard , the antiphilosopher resem bles not only the analyst but also the poet who similarly accepts the absenting of the author as a necessary condition for the act of poetry. As Mallarme writes : 5 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LOOico-Phi1osophicus, trans. D . F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 200 1 ) , 6 . 54. See also Cora Diamond's reading of this important passage in terms of "what Wittgenstein demands of you the reader of the Tractatus, the reader of a book of nonsensical propositions," namely : "You are to read his nonsensical propositions and try to understand not them but their author; j ust so, he takes himself to have to respond to the nonsense uttered by philosophers through understanding not their propositions but them." Cora Diamond, "Ethics, Imagination, and the Tractatus," The New Wittaenstein, pp. 1 5 5--6 . 53


"Impersonified , the volume, t o the extent that one separates from it as author, does not demand a reader, either. As such , please note , among human accessorie s , i t takes place all b y itself: finished , existing."53 Is this not also the staggering ambition that is palpable in the

Tractatus? In the case of Wittgenstein , however, the operation of reducing the subj ect to a mere vanishing point that fades away into discourse does not go all the way down , at least not in the eyes of Lacan . In other words , the author of the

Tractatus is

not as radical or as insurrec

tionary an antiphilosopher as the psychoanalyst claims to be. In terms of our opening anecdote , we could say that Wittgenstein does not submit fully to the chal lenge of the othe r 's spittle in the elevator ; in his own terms , it is not exactly the subj ect but only his propositions that are allowed to drop completely, like the famous ladder after it has been climbed . And so, in light of this two-pronged settling of accounts , the following becomes the double task that 5 3 Stephane Mallarme, "Restricted Action," Divaaations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2 007) , p. 2 1 9. Wittgenstein, though, not only inserts a fundamental reference to the speaking I ("me") at the end of the Tractatus; he also famously hopes to find at least one reader for it: "Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it" (Preface) . Even so, Badiou is surely justified in what follows to compare the form and structure of the Tractatus to Mallarme's A Throw '!! Dice, while the antiphilosophical insistence on the need to change life would be more akin to Rimbaud. For a different take on Wittgenstein's role for contemporary poetics , see the canonical work of Marjorie Perloff, Witteenstein 's Ladder: Poetic Laneuaee and the Stranaeness '!! the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 996). And, closer to Badiou on the question of style, Antonia Soulez, Comment ecrivent Ies philosophes? (de Kant a Witteenstein) ou Ie style Witteenstein (Paris: Kime, 2003). S4


Badiou i s u p against in his reading ofWittgenstein . H e must first o f all come t o terms with the fact that, for a self-professed antiphilosopher

such

as

Lacan , the

Cambridge professor is still too much of a philosopher, whose prose shines forth with a streak of madness . And , second , he must also absorb the possibility that , for a pragmatist-sophist such as Rorty, the later Wittgenstein is no longer a philosopher but perhaps just a polemicist, whose writing brilliantly, if also loosely, revitalizes the tradition of literary satire . The point is to grasp these two orientations in tandem and apply them to the

Tractatus. Wittgenstein the

writer of

genius does indeed take whatever can be said about the world-in logic or in natural science-as the subj ect matter of this ambitious work, but from within the realm of the sayable that is thus exhaustively outlined , the ultimate aim o f th e operation i s t o traverse this material in the direction of a silent act or mystical element in which the psychoanalyst will have recog nized the psychotic excess of an unsayable plenitude .

55

v

Referring one last time to Miller's anecdote , we are now in a position to raise a set of concluding questions , all of which in a sense are prompted by a figure in the story that has not yet claimed our attention , namely, the bystander in the elevator who is surprised by the analyst's phlegm : •

Can this third party remain neutral or must he or she necessarily choose one of the sides involved in the spitting contest? Those of us who lay no special claim to being either philos ophers or antiphilosophers , for instance , are we by default bound to be treated as mere sophists , cultural relativists , or democratic materialists forever at the mercy of Badiou's unforgiving Platonism?

•

When all is said and done , is this battle fought on the exclusive terrain of philosophy or are there also lessons that non-philosophers in a generic sense can draw from this , for exam ple, about ways of grasping the political , 57


artistic,

scientific ,

and

other

events-or

acts-of our time? (After all , even Rorty agrees with Badiou that philosophy could be defmed in Hegel 's terms as "its own time apprehended in thought."54) •

What is the difference , anyway, between an act and an event? Are these two terms synony mous , as many a reader might have concluded from Z izek's work in its ongoing dialogue with Badiou (whom the Slovenian at one point calls "the theorist of the Act"55) ? If they are not synonyms , are they two different types of occurrence , or rather two different modes of treating one and the same type of occurrence , say, a musical performance o r a political revolt? What are the consequences of separat ing such modes or types by naming them either "philosophical" or "antiphilosophical"?

•

If Mallarme and Wittgenstein , for instance , both have their own definition of the act, what

54 Rorty, Consequences <1 Praamatism, p. xl. The quote is from G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy <1 Riaht, trans. T. M . Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 95 2 ) , p. 1 1 , just before the line about the owl o f Minerva. Badiou also affirms: " I have assigned philosophy the task of constructing thought's embrace of its own time, of refracting newborn truths through the unique prism of concepts," in Theoretical Writinas, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2004) , p. 1 4 . 5 5 Slavoj Zizek, Welcome t o the Desert <1 the Real! Five Essays on September 1 1 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002) , p. 1 0 1 . For a comparison of the notions of act and event, see Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Zizek, and Political Traniformations: The Cadence <1Chanae (Evanston: Northwestern University Press , 2009) . For a critique of Zizek's reading of Badiou, see my "Badiou without Zizek," Polyaraph 1 7 (2005), pp. 2 2 1 -44 . 58


d o we gain o r lose b y calling these acts "poetic" in one case and "archiaesthetic" in the other? Or, in the case of Lacan , by calling his defini tion of the act "archiscientific" rather than either "scientific" or "psychoanalytical"? Or fmally, in the case of Nietzsche , by calling his mad dream of an act "archipolitical" rather than speaking of a "grand politics"? •

In terms of the concrete intelligibility of a concrete situation , what are the effects of the introduction of all these prefixes with which the philosopher somewhat obsessively polices and draws the boundaries around the specifi city of his own act?

These questions obviously cannot be answered in the space of this introduction and I leave them to be devel oped elsewhere , by others or by Badiou himself. Here ,

I will limit myself to mentioning two contemporary voices that at a minimum might help us clarify the stakes that are involved . Stanley Cavell is the first to put us on track in a recent essay with the highly Badiouian- sounding title "The Wittgensteinian Event ." In this

essay, from

Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, he outlines a potential program of study that would seem to come extremely close to Badiou's orientation in his year-long seminars on antiphilosophy from the early 1 990s . What is more ,

although he prefers to talk of a "counter-philosophical" tradition in which to include not the earlier but the 59


later Wittgenstein , Cavell even provides a list o f exam ples almost identical to Badiou's , give or take a couple , based o n his personal predilection : It sometimes seems imaginable to me that the

InvestiBations

will come to be thought of as

belonging to a more or less honorable line of counter-philosophical works whose palpable philo sophical eccentricity ensures their marginality to a central philosophical curriculum-along perhaps with Montaigne's or Emerson's

Essays,

Pascal's

Pensees, Rousseau's Promenades, Friedrich Schlegel's FraBments, Kierkegaard's Philosophical FraBments, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, works ineradicably tinged with the philosophical whose life, nevertheless, largely depends upon their interesting those beyond the call of professional philosophy. 56 Cavell himself, however, promptly rej ects this line of study on the grounds that it would fail to grasp the genuine innovation of Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy : Such a development would , to my mind , lose a singular feature ofWittgenstein's later work (most famous from the InvestiBations), a feature of unfail ing fascination for me, which is precisely its 5 6 Stanley Cavell, "The Wittgensteinian Event," Philosophy the D

demand for an existence at once inside the profes sion

of philosophy

and

outside

of it . The

specification "at once" is critical in this formula tion ; it declares that something essential to the work's fascination is missed if one seeks to keep the palpably philosophical stretches , concerned with problems of meaning, reference , under standing, states of consciousness , language games , grammar, and so on , free from the patently and unembarrassed literary responses to itself, where we are asked to consider such matters as a fly trapped in a bottle, a beetle in a box , talk from a lion , the teeth of a rose. 57 I take these lines to imply that the use of prefixes such as anti- or counter- but also archi- , even when there exists a venerable line of thinkers for whom this usage might be justified , loses sight of the productive equivo cation that lies at the very heart ofWittgenstein 's own use of the term "philosophy," which in effect oscil lates-without visible discontinuity-between "palpably philosophical stretches" and "patently and unembar rassed literary responses to itself." To be sure, Badiou himself is perfectly aware of the double valence of the term "philosophy" forWittgenstein, 57 Ibid . Rorty, in his review of Cavell's own early work on Wittgenstein, at one point raises a similar criticism: "One would have thought that, once we were lucky enough to get writers like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche who resisted professionalization, we might get some criticism of philosophy which did not remain internal to philosophy." Rorty, "Cavell on Skepticism;' Consequences <1 Pragmatism, p. 1 8 1 . 61


as

ill

the following key statement from the

Tractatus,

repeatedly invoked in Badiou's essays below : "Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an act."58This claim obviously holds

both for Wittgenstein's own understanding of what

he does, including at the level of formal or even literary experimentation,

and

for the discourse traditionally

handed down under the name of philosophy. In both cases we are dealing first and foremost with practical interven tions rather than with purely theoretical or doctrinal statements. Now, introducing the term "antiphilosophy" into this debate certainly enables a helpful delimitation of the different values assigned to the act of traditional philosophy and the act of Wittgenstein's critique or denunciation thereof. The latter, after all , consists in uncovering the element of crookedness with which tradi tional philosophy claims

not to be an act but a theory. The

neologism "antiphilosophy" even enables us to grasp the moral or ethical hierarchy that is presupposed in this delimitation : traditional philosophy disavows its own nature qua act by nonsensically passing off non-thoughts as though they were thoughts , that is , as though they were purely doctrinal propositions endowed with sense, whereas the diagnostic of this tradition, which Badiou proposes to relabel antiphilosophical, shows the absurd ity hidden in this disavowal .

58 Wittgenstein, Traetatus Logieo-Phi]osophieus, 4. 1 1 2 (I have translated Tiitigkeit here as "act" rather than as "activity," following the example of Badiou who in turn relies throughout his study on the unpublished French translation of the Traetatus prepared by E tienne Balibar: "La philosophie n ' est pas une theorie, mais un acte" for Wittgenstein's "Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tiitigkeit'') . 62

TR A N S LATOR ' S I N TRODU C T I O N

Badiou's introduction o f the prefix "anti-" thus would merely seem to highlight a line of demarcation that already runs implicitly through Wittgenstein's use of "philosophy." The value of the prefix would be mainly heuristic and it could easily be discarded , like a ladder, once it has helped us uncover the tensions that are internal to Wittgenstein's use . And yet , adding a neolo gism where previously we only had a single ambivalent term could very well have the opposite effect from what the so-called antiphilosopher intended , namely, the effect of reaffirming the discourse of philosophy instead of submitting it to the implacable violence of a madman who lets Ockham's razor run amok and go wild on this same discourse . No sooner do we intro duce the term antiphilosophy than we also seem to give a strong aim or directionality to this razor's movement, with the focus shifting inexorably against the inherited discourse of philosophy. (Maybe the unsavory choice before us , as always , is between psychosis and neuro sis?) But this turning- against philosophy can always be understood as a gearing-up-toward , if not a kneeling down-before , the honorable tradition fathered by Plato or Parmenides. Barbara Cassin , in a set of pre-emptive answers to Badiou , gives voice to precisely this kind of obj ection. "Philosophy will always-already have won out over antiphilosophy as soon as it baptizes it 'anti ,' " she writes , echoing something of Cavell's skepticism regarding the reconstruction of a "counter-philosophical" line of works : 63


The philosophy / antiphilosophy binary will have been a pure product of philosophy, one that philosophy will present as always-already having a structuring effect . It is this effect of always-already (which authorizes the always-already of being or of Being, of truth or of Truth , of the real or the Real) that the second discourse, named "anti philosophy" by philosophy, renders manifest. 59 However, as we saw earlier, the discourse of logology also relies on the effect of an always -already, namely, the always-already structuring effect of the equivocal language enacted in puns , homonyms, and so on . How, then , should the reader respond to this gigantomachia in which philosophers , sophists , and antiphilosophers always already seem to have gained the upper hand over their adversaries ? The least one can d o a s a reader, I would propose , is measure the degree of rigor and commitment with which Badiou in his unpublished seminar and in the two essays that follow engages with the work of Wittgenstein . If, after that, the unsuspecting bystander 59 Cassin, "Post-scriptum sous forme de quelques propositions au futur anterieur pour repondre a ce qui suit," II n j a pas de rapport sexueI, p. 96. Cassin is here responding in advance to Badiou's reading of Lacan in his text "Les formules de ' L' E tourdit' " that immediately follows hers. Her own proposal would avoid such binarism: "What I call 'logology' rather than antiphilosophy loathes all binarism that always makes the other fall on the other side ,' thus reassuring the preeminence of the one (the one that will then be designated with the philosopheme : 'pure being as unbound multiplicity' ) according to the model of sense (all that is outside of sense possesses sense or is futile) from which it is precisely a question of separating oneself" ("Post-scriptum," pp. 96--7) . 64

TRA N S L AT O R ' S I N TRODUCT I O N

in the elevator still wishes never to have gotten involved in the spitting contest to begin with, there is always the option of next time taking the stairs. * * *

Just one terminological note might be in order to . what . "m · the uses 0 f "( non ) sense " and "meanmg exp 1 am follows. Whereas the German Sinn is easily translated in French as sens, in English this can be rendered both as "sense" and as "meaning." In the existing English language translation of the Tractatus LOBico-Philosophicus, "sense" is the commonly used rendering, but in many of Wittgenstein's well-known statements from letters and notebooks we also encounter expressions about life, the world, or God, for which his biographers Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk (profusely quoted by Badiou in their French translations) most often use . " an d not " sense " m . Eng 1·ISh . Rath er than "meanmg changing quotations from the existing biographies , I have kept their rendering even at the cost of a slight . 1 ogica . 1 d·Issonance b etween " sense " and "meantermmo ing," which is absent from the French where Badiou uses sens in all cases. Similarly, whereas in Germanic languages Unsinn or "nonsense" can easily be turned into the adjective unsinniB or "nonsensical ," E tienne Balibar (on whose unpublished French translation of the Tractatus Badiou relies throughout this book) opts for the etymologically unrelated absurde. I have restored this as "nonsensical" except where Badiou in his own 65


paraphrases seems to use absurde and even the noun absurdite, not as technical but as generic terms . To translate Badiou's common paraphrases depourvu de sens and doue de sens, I have opted for the symmetrical "devoid of sense" and "endowed with sense ." Finally, some Wittgensteinians have tried to decipher whether there is a significant difference between unsinniB and sinnios, here rendered as "nonsensical" and "senseless." But this distinction does not seem to carry much analytical weight in Badiou's interpretation. What matters is rather the overarching terminological configuration surrounding meaning, sense, and nonsense in Wittgenstein's work. For Badiou, certainly in the case of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, the debate between philosophy and antiphilosophy in effect can be concentrated in the different articulations and hierar chies between truth and meaning/ sense-or, in the case of Lacan, the slightly different articulation between truth, sense, and knowledge in the real . As for the references , I have tried to the best of my ability to track down and annotate the multiple quota tions for which Badiou does not provide any source . All footnotes and any possible errors therein are exclu sively the translator's responsibility. References to the Tractatus LOBico-Philosophicus will be given in the body of the text, with the standard numbering in parentheses.

66

Priface

Among the most interesting philosophers there are those whom I call antiphilosophers , taking my lead from Lacan . In the pages that follow, the reader will fmd the defmition I propose of them . The important thing is that I take them to be awakeners who force the other philosophers not to forget two points. 1 . The conditions of philosophy, i . e . , the truths to which it bears witnes s , are always contemporary to it. It is in the confusion of their own time that philosophers construct new concepts , and they cannot diminish their alertnes s , be content with what is already there , or contribute to maintaining the status quo, without at the same time falling prey to the worst possible risk for the fate of their disci pline : its absorption or incorporation into academic knowledge . The antiphilosopher recalls for us that a philosopher is a political militant , generally hated by the powers that be and by their servants ; an aesthete , who walks ahead of the most unlikely creations ; a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man ; a savant, who frequents the most violently paradoxical developments of the sciences ; and that it is in this effervescence , this in-disposition , this rebellion , that philosophers produce their cathe drals of ideas . 67

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The philosopher assumes the voice of the master. Philosophers are not, nor can they be, modest partici pants in team work, laborious instructors of a closed history, democrats given over to public debates. Their word is authoritarian, as seductive as it is violent, committing others to follow suit, disturbing and converting them . Philosophers are present, as such, in what they state ; even if this presence is also that of an exemplary submission, they do not subtract themselves from the duty of reason. Antiphilosophers , for their part, have an absolutely singular way of placing themselves vis-a-vis these two points. They claim to be the contemporaries not only of the truths that proceed in their time but they also make their own life the theater of their ideas , and their body the place of the Absolute . This is true from Pascal, "joy, joy, joy, tears of j oy," to Nietzsche, "I am . . . some thing decisive and doom-laden standing between two millennia."! From Rousseau, "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator," to Lacan, "I hereby found . . . by myself, as alone as 1 have always been . . ."2

2.

See Blaise Pascal's "Memorial," a text sewn into his clothing that he is said to have carried with him at all times, in Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London : Penguin, 1 995), p. 2 8 5 ; and Nietzsche, letter written from Nice, France, to Reinhart von Seydlitz, on February 1 2, 1 88 8 . See Selected Letters if Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 969), p. 284. 2 These are the opening lines in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Corifesis ons, trans. J. M . Cohen (London: Penguin, 1 95 3), p . 1 7; and Lacan's opening statement from June 2 1 , 1 964, in his "Acte de fondation de I' Ecole Frans:aise de Psychanalyse," published in 1 965 by the E cole Freudienne de Paris and reissued in the Annuaire ( 1 977), pp. 78-86. 68

WITTGENSTEIN ' S ANTIPHILOSOPHY

From Kierkegaard, " I have nothing but my life, and 1 am happy to put it at risk whenever a difficulty arises ,"3 to Wittgenstein, as we will see in greater detail below. For the antiphilosopher, the pains and ecstasies of personal life bear witness to the fact that the concept haunts the temporal present all the way to include the throes of the body. And as for not being a drudge, a mere tutor, a grammar prig or a pious guardian of temples and institutions , this is a duty to which the antiphilosopher devotes himself with all the extreme violence of his opinions about his peers, the philo sophers. Pascal against Descartes , Rousseau against the Encyclopedists , Kierkegaard against Hegel , Nietzsche against Plato, Lacan against Althusser: each antiphilo sopher chooses the philosophers whom he hopes to make into the canonical examples of the empty and vain shell of a word that for him is philosophy. For all these reasons , 1 devoted my seminar for some years to the great modern antiphilosophers . First Nietzsche, then Wittgenstein, and then Lacan . After which, carrying out the great leap backward, 1 concluded with Saint Paul , the inventor of the antiphilo sophical position-unless this honor belongs to Diogenes , or even to Heraclitus. The first part of this little book, essentially conse crated to the unique masterpiece that is the Tractatus, is thus the result of the second seminar of this cycle . 3 S0ren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fraaments, in The Kierkeaaard Reader, ed. Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Ree (Oxford: Blackwell, 200 1 ) , p. 1 60 . 69

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Published first in 1994 in the journal Barca! (Toulouse, no. 3 ) , this part has been considerably revised to give way to a slender volume in German, published in 2007 by Diaphanes under the title Witt8ensteinsAntiphilosophie, translated by Heinz Jatho. The second part, which deals with the language, or rather the languages , or the styles , ofWittgenstein, was originally the subject of an intervention in the seminar that Barbara Cassin held at the College International de Philo sophie on the topic that has always been her passion: the linguistic place where what conventionally goes by the name "philoso phy" comes to find a home . This intervention was subsequently redacted for publication in the j ournal of the College, Rue Descartes (no. 2 6 , 1999) . If these texts have been dormant for a long time, it is because I envisioned composing a triptych: the text on Wittgenstein's styles would have functioned as a caesura and a mediation between the analyses of the two most important "books" (the second never having become a book, at least not during Wittgenstein's life time) of this tormented antiphilosopher: the Tractatus on one hand, and the Philosophical Investi8ations on the other. Some desperate, discouraging attempts , taken up again from an ever-greater distance, have not produced anything of interest concerning the Investi8ations. To tell the truth, as my readers moreover will be able to see for themselves , I do not really like this later book, and even less so, I must say, what it has become, to wit: the involuntary, undeserved guarantee of Anglo-American grammarian philosophy-that twentieth-century form 70

WITT G E N ST E I N ' S ANTIPHI L O S O P H Y

of scholasticism , as impressive for its institutional force as it is contrary to everything that Wittgenstein the mystic , the aesthete , the Stalinist of spirituality, could have desired. Can we fmally conclude that Wittgenstein was punished for his own sins? Too much arrogant skepti cism , too much scabrous virtuosity, too much futureless deconstruction, too much attention given to syntax , at the expense of Ideas. And the gravest of all , the tempta tion to which antiphilosophers gladly succumb, in the first place Nietzsche, who knew nothing about it, but also, more underhandedly, those who like Pascal or Wittgenstein began by being geniuses at it: the ability to despise mathematics , reducing it, in regard to what is morally serious and existentially intense, to a mere child's game . The contempt for mathematics is some thing from which no philosophy can lift itself up again . This is why I stop my reading ofWittgenstein's work at the Tractatus, where this contempt is already present, but mixed still with admiration . I have already presented my Saint Paul . Here then you have, more cursory, my Wittgenstein . When I have the time, I will complete these portraits with those of Nietzsche and Lacan . Without giving up completely on the idea of one day doing the same for the great classi cal-which also means Christian-antiphilosophers : Pascal, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard . July 2008

71

1

Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

It is certainly not unreasonable to hold thatWittgenstein has been a hero of our time. But only if we rigorously examine if which

cause he

has been the hero , how he

held up this cause , and how he lost himself in the impossibility-poorly masked by a kind of speculative insolence--of the unprecedented act whose promise he cherished .

I In November

1 9 14,

Wittgenstein is at war. He has

already seen the line of fire . His activity as a soldier is strangely attuned to his maxim according to which it is vain to produce philosophical propositions , given that what matters is "the clarification of propositions"

(4. 1 1 2) .

Let us translate this into military language :

the point is not to shoot but to clarify the shot. And so Wittgenstein , who will later become an "observer" to correct the traj ectory followed by the bombs, takes 73

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care of a searchlight on board a gunboat . His base is in Krakow. Here he finds the crucial final works of Nietzsche , the ones from

1 88 8 ,

above all

The Anti

Christ. At this time he notes in his j ournal : "I am strongly affected by his hostility against Christianity. Because his writings too have some [part of] truth in them ."l Our first question will be the following : what is this "part of truth" whose existence Wittgenstein recog nizes in the imprecations of Dionysus against the Crucified? And our second one : what can Wittgenstein mean by Christianity if despite this "part" he feels deeply hurt by the anti-priest legislation of the fury from Turin? These are decisive questions if we consider that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein , each in his own turn , have set the tone for the twentieth century in terms of a

certain

form

of

philosophical

contempt

for

philosophy.

1 Quoted in Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig, 1 889- 1 92 1 (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1 98 8 ) , p. 2 2 5 . Hereafter cited as McGuinness. 74

W ITT G E N STEIN ' S ANTIP H I L O S O P H Y

II What Nietzsche and Wittgenstein share in common I will designate with a term introduced by the third great and fascinated detractor of philosophy from the last century, Jacques Lacan : antiphilosophy. The word is out . But not as an isolated one , because if it is true that the elucidation of this term defines the stakes of this whole text for which Wittgenstein will be our teacher, we are not for this reason free of the burden temporar ily to fix the boundaries of its power. Antiphilosophy, from its origins (I would say from Heraclitus , who is as much the antiphilosopher to Parmenides as Pascal is to Descartes) , can be recog nized by three j oint operations :

1.

A linguistic, logical, genealogical critique of the

statements of philosophy; a deposing of the category of truth; an unraveling of the pretensions of philosophy to constitute itself as theory. In order to do so, antiphilo sophy often delves into the resources that sophistics exploit as well . In the case of Nietzsche, this operation bears the name "overturning of all values ," struggle against the Plato-disease, combatant grammar of signs and types .

2.

The recognition of the fact that philosophy, in

the fmal instance , cannot be reduced to its discursive appearance , its propositions , its fallacious theoretical exterior. Philosophy is an act , of which the fabulations about "truth" are the clothing, the propaganda , the lies. In the case of Nietzsche , it is a question of discerning 75

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behind these ornaments the powerful figure of the priest, the active organizer of reactive forces , the one who profits from nihilism , the captain who enjoys resentment . The appeal made , against the philosophical act,

3.

to another, radically new act, which will either be called philosophical as well , thereby creating an equiv ocation (through which the "little philosopher" consents with delight to the spit that covers his body) , or else, more honestly, supraphilosophical or even aphilosophi cal .

This

act

without

precedent

destroys

the

philosophical act , all the while clarifying its noxious character. It overcomes it affirmatively. In Nietzsche 's case, this act is archipolitical in nature , and its directive says : "To break in two the history of the world ."2 Can

we

recognize

these

three

operations

in

Wittgenstein's oeuvre? By the latter we will understand the only text that he deemed worthy of public exposure during his lifetime : the

Tractatus� The rest, all the rest, it is

convenient not to grant it anything more (and this is all the better, considering everything that gradually crumbles therein) than the status of an immanent gloss, a personal Talmud . The answer is surely positive : 2 A well-known remark from Nietzsche 's final letters. For example, in a draft letter to Georg Brandes from early December 1 8 8 8 , or in the letter to Franz Overbeck from Turin, on October 1 8 , 1 8 8 8 : "This time-as an old artilleryman-I b.':ing out my heavy guns; I am afraid that I am shooting the history of mankind into two halves," in Selected Letters .'!J Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 3 1 5 . In addition to his 1 992-93 seminar at the E cole Normale Superieure, Badiou, under the title Casser en deux l'histoire du monde?, also devoted an important lecture to this defmition of the archipolitical act in Nietzsche, as part of the conference cycle Les Conferences du Perroquet (December 1 99 2 ) . [Tr. ] 76

WITT G E N STEIN ' S ANTI P H I L O S O PHY

1.

Philosophy is divested of all theoretical preten

sions , not because it would be an embroidery of approximations and errors-which would still be conceding too much to it-but because its very inten tion is vitiated : "Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical" its purpose

(4 . 003 ) . It is typical of antiphilosophy that is never to discuss any philosophical theses

(like the philosophers worthy of that name who refute their predecessors or their contemporaries) , since to do so it would have to share its norms (for instance , those of the true and the false) . What the antiphiloso pher wants to do is to situate the philosophical desire in its entirety in the register of the erroneous and the harmful . The metaphor of sickness is never absent from this plan ,

and it certainly

comes

through when

Wittgenstein speaks of the "nonsensical ." Insofar as "nonsensical" means "deprived of sense ," it follows that philosophy is not even a form of thinking. The defini tion of thought is indeed precise : "A thought is a proposition with a sense"

(4) .

Philosophy, then , is a non-thought . Moreover-this is a subtle but also crucial point-it is not an

ciffi rmative

non-thought , which would cross the limits of the prop osition endowed with sense in order to seize upon a real unsayable . Philosophy is a sick and regressive non

because it pretends to present the nonsense that is proper to it within a propositional and theoretical reaister. thought,

The philosophical sickness appears when nonsense exhibits itself as sense , when non-thought imagines 77

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itself to be a thought . Hence , philosophy must not be refuted , as if it were a false thought; it must be judged and condemned as afault

if non-thouBht, the gravest of

faults : to inscribe itself nonsensically into the protocols (propositions and theories) reserved for thought alone . Philosophy, with regard to the eminent final dignity of affirmative non-thought (that of an act that crosses the barrier of sense) , is 2.

BUilty.

The fact that the essence of philosophy does not

reside in its sick and fallacious appearance in the form of propositions and theories , but that it is first and foremost on the order of the act , is something that Wittgenstein proclaims , in 4 . 1 1 2 , not without letting an equivocation surface between inherited philosophy, which is nonsensical , and his own antiphilosophy : "Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity." The general value of this assertion nonetheless becomes clear if we relate the desire of philosophy to the activity of the sciences . Everyone will agree that philosophy is concerned with the final ends , with what is higher, with what matters to the life of human beings . However, none of this is of any concern to the theoreti cal activity properly speaking, which takes the form of propositions (endowed with a sense, or even better, true propositions , that is to say, science : "The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science" [4 . 1 1 ] ) . Perhaps it is regrettable (especially to those who believed that they could fmd a positivist in Wittgenstein , or even an analytical and rationalist philosopher) , but it is beyond doubt that "propositions 78

WITTGEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHIL O SO PHY

can express nothing that is higher" (6 . 42 ) . And better yet : "We feel that even when all

possible scientific ques

tions have been answered , the problems of life remain completely untouched" (6 . 5 2 ) . In the general aspira tion that induces its existence , philosophy, devoted as it is to the "problems of life ," is intrinsically different from any scientific or theoretical figure . It is subtracted from the authority of propositions and of sense, and for this reason destined at the same time to take the form of the act . Simply put, there will be two types of such an act . One , which is infrascientific and nonsensical because it attempts to bend non-thought by force into the theoretical proposition , is the philosophical sick ness proper. The other, suprascientific , silently affirms non - thought as a "touching" of the real . It is the authen tic "philosophy," which is a conquest of antiphilosophy.

3 . It is thus necessary to come to the announcement of an act of a new type, which simultaneously overcomes the philosophical sickness , undoes the regressive act by which one searches nonsensically to incarnate the "prob lems of life" in theoretical propositions , and affirms , this time beyond science, the rights of the real . In order better to distinguish this act from all that is forced and maniacal about the philosophical act, Wittgenstein rather describes it as an element, as that in which the authentic non-thought dwells . But already Nietzsche proceeded in the same way in order to transmit to us the powers of the Great Noon, of "saintly affirmation": one did not pass through the hall ways of the will in its narrow, programmatic, and moral sense ; one was "transported" by radiant metaphors . 79

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Wittgenstein, too, is condemned to metaphor, because the act must install an active non-thought beyond all

meaningful propositions , beyond all thought, which also

means beyond all science . The one he chooses articulates an artistic provenance (visibility, showing) with a reli gious one (mysticism) : "There are, indeed , things that

make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical" (6 . 5 2 2 ) . cannot be put into words . They

The antiphilosophical act consists in letting what there is show itself, insofar as "what there is" is precisely that which no true proposition can say. If Wittgenstein's antiphilosophical act can legitimately be declared archi aesthetic, it is because this "letting-be" has the non propositional form of pure showing, of

clarity,

and

because such clarity befalls the unsayable only in the thoughtless form of an oeuvre (music certainly being the paradigm for such donation for Wittgenstein) . I say archi aesthetic because it is not a question of substituting art for philosophy either. It is a question of bringing into scientific and propositional activity the principle of a kind of clarity whose (mystical) element is beyond this activity and the real paradigm of which is art. It is thus a question of firmly establishing the laws of the sayable (of the think able) , in order for the unsayable (the unthinkable, which is ultimately given only in the form of art) to be

situated as

the "upper limit" of the sayable itself: "Philosophy [that is , antiphilosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought"

(4. 1 1 4) .

And : "It will signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said"

(4. 1 1 5). 80

Here we observe that

WITTGEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHIL O SO PHY

the antiphilosophical act comes down to tracing a line of demarcation, as Althusser would have said in the wake of Lenin . And it is very well possible thatAlthusser's project, under the name of "materialist philosophy," came close to twentieth-century antiphilosophy. The difference being that for Althusser it was the proximity of revolutionary politics , under the partisan name of "taking sides ," that silently educated the clarity induced by this separating act, while for Wittgenstein, under the name of the "mysti cal element," it is rather a mixture of the Gospels and of classical music. In any case, there can be no doubt that the three constitutive operations of all antiphilosophy can be retrieved in Wittgenstein , which does j ustice to his discovery of a "part of truth" in Nietzsche 's work, his greatest predecessor in this matter. This part of truth then enters into a dialectic with the obvious differences : •

To the genealogical ruin of philosophical state ments in Nietzsche , to the evidencing of types of power supporting them , and thus to an analytic of the lie as a figure of vital impulse, there

corresponds

in

Wittgenstein

the

evidencing of an absurdity, which entails the forcing of the linguistic sphere of sense by nonsense. For Nietzsche , metaphysics is will to nothingness ; for Wittgenstein , it is the nothingness of sense exhibited as sense . The sickness bears a name : for Nietzsche , it is 81

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•

•

3

B ADI O U

nihilism ; for Wittgenstein, perhaps worse, gassing or babbling. For Nietzsche, the hidden philosophical act is the exercise of the typological power of the priest. For Wittgenstein, it is the erasure of the line of partitioning between the sayable and the unsay able, between the thinkable and the unthinkable ; it i s the will to non-clarity about limits. It i s thus also, and here Nietzsche would agree, the blind, properly unchained exercise of a language deliv ered over to the dream of not being interrupted by any rule, nor limited by any difference. For Nietzsche, the announced act is archipoliti cal, since the pure affirmation is equally the pure destruction of the earthly power of the priest. For Wittgenstein, it is archiaesthetic, since the principle (which is itself unsayable) of all clarity regarding the limits of the sayable proceeds from the possibility of gaining access to the artistic paradigms of pure showing, which also means access to the saintly life as inner beauty: "Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same" (6.42 1 ) . And, better yet, this belated, almost testamen tary declaration (after many abandonments and wanderings what is essential comes back) : "I think 1 summe d up my attitude to philosophy when 1 said: philosophy ought really to be writ ten only as a poetic composition ."3

LudWig Wittgenstein, Culture a nd Value, ed. G. H . von Wright, trans. Peter 82

3

Here , though, is what Nietzsche and Wittgenstein do

not share : the second is "strongly affected" by the first 's hostility toward Christianity. The connection of Christianity to modern antiphilo sophy has a long history. We

can

easily draw up the list of

antiphilosophers of strong caliber: Pascal , Rousseau, Kierkegaard , Nietzsche, Wittgenstein , and Lacan . What catches the eye is that four of these stand in an essential relation to Christianity : Pascal , Rousseau , Kierkegaard , and Wittgenstein; that Nietzsche 's enraged hatred is itself at least as strong a bond as love , which alone explains the fact that the Nietzsche of the "letters of madness"

can

sign indifferently as "Dionysus" or as "the

Crucified"; that Lacan, the only true rationalist of the group , but also the one who completes the cycle of modern antiphilosophy, nonetheless holds Christianity to be decisive for the constitution of the subj ect of science, and that it is in vain that we hope to untie ourselves from the religious theme, which is structural in nature . Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 984) , p. 2 S . 83

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The

true

question

B ADI O U

consists

in

knowing

what

"Christianity" is the name of in Wittgenstein 's antiphil osophical arrangement . It is certainly not the name of an established , or instituted , religion . This is , moreo ver, never the case , not even for Pascal , whose hatred of the Jesuits is clearly aimed at everything in religion that takes the form of a

reality. The "religion" of antiphi

losophers is a material they grab hold of at a distance from philosophy so as to name the singularity of their act . Wittgenstein 's references to Christianity are first of all literary and Russian : Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The Gospel itself is grasped as such an oeuvre , the possible example of a principle of clarity as to what the saintly life , that is , the beautiful life , can be. In truth , "Christianity" names a clarification of the sense of life , which is also the sense of the world (since , as per

5 . 63 ,

"I am my world") . It can then be distrib

uted along two axes :

1.

Obj ectively, we know that the sense of the

world does not belong to what can be said , which , in the form of the proposition or of theory, is only scien tific. Thus the sense or meaning of the world , situated out of reach of the sayable , can be represented as tran scendent (external to the world) . And as a result the name of God is appropriate for it . In a notebook from

1 9 1 6 , Wittgenstein

writes : "The meaning of life , i . e .

the meaning of the world , we can call God ."l We find 1

Quoted in Ray Monk, LudwiO Wittoenstein: The Duty if Genius (New York: 84

W I T T G E N S T E I N ' S \. N T I P H I L O S O P H Y

Tractatus. For example 6.43 2 : "God does not reveal himself in the world," to be completed with 6 .45 : "Feeling the world as a limited the same disposition again in the

whole-it is this that is mystical ." Christianity will be the most accomplished aesthetic form for showing that which , under the name of God, agrees with the feeling of the limits of the world .

2.

Subj ectively, Christianity designates life ordered

in accordance with its unsayable meaning , the "beauti ful" life , which is the same as the saintly life . It is synonymous

with happiness . Wittgenstein

already

noted this in his j ournal , talking about Nietzsche . Indeed, he continued : "Christianity is the only

sure way

to happiness."2 The word "happiness" here deSignates life with meaning (the world practiced according to its meaning or sense, which is , as was the case for Pascal , absent from the world itself) . The whole difficulty (tied , as we will see , to the

since there is no sense if sense, nothing obliges us toJollow the path if sense, or if happiness; nothing obliges us to Christianity. In absence of any metalanguage) lies in the fact that,

his j ournal Wittgenstein continues as follows : "But what if someone spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless . But why not lead a senseless life? Is it ignoble?"3 We clearly see that under the word "Christianity" a Penguin, 1 990) , p. 1 4 1 . Hereafter cited as Monk. Quoted in McGuinness, p. 2 2 5 ; and Monk, p. 1 2 2 . 3 Ibid.

2

85

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battle without norm is raging between sainthood (happiness) and abj ection (nonsense , the ignoble , suicide) . In this battle , for which science (that which delivers sense

in

the world) is entirely useless , we can

find support only in the aesthetic feeling (the ugliness , which is

seen ,

of life without God) and in the infinite

clarification of the sayable , of which we can hope that it nurtures a silent experience of the limits of the world and gives us access to happines s . I n the first direction, Wittgenstein multiplies the self-examinations of his conscience and considers , as Pascal does for the misery of the human condition , the frankly unaesthetic side of his soul . The texts on this point are legion . Let me cite a letter to Russell from

1 9 1 4:

"My life is FULL of the ugliest and pettiest

thoughts imaginable (this is not an exaggeration) . . . My life has been one nasty mess so far."4 With no less than three brothers who committed suicide , he who would also declare that since the age of nine "he continually thought of suicide ,"5 focuses on suicide as the elemen tary, almost atomic form of sin (and if Christian sainthood defines happines s , it is logical that suicide , that legitimate consequence of unhappiness , would be the quintessential Evil) . In a notebook from

1 9 1 7,

talking about Dostoevsky : "If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then 4 Letter of March 3, 1 9 1 4, from Skj olden , Norway, to Bertrand Russell, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H . von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 974) , pp. 53-4. 5 McGuinness, p. 50. 86

WITTGEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHILOSO PHY

suicide i s not allowed. This throws a light o n the nature of ethics , for suicide is , so to speak, the elementary sin ."6 Here we see the Wittgenstein of the perpetual

corifession .

This Wittgenstein is

not

formally

opposed to

Nietzsche , who must cite himself equally often in order to appear as the exemplification of his act . Suffice it to look at the

methodical function of Ecce Homo.

Besides , antiphilosophy requires that the antiphilos opher be constantly exhibited as an existential Singularity. There is no exception to this requirement. From Pascal 's "Memorial" to the inclusion , at the heart of Lacan 's seminars , of his personal and institutional fate ; from Rousseau 's

Corifessions to "Why I am a Destiny" by

Nietzsche ; from Kierkegaard and Regina 's tribulations to Wittgenstein 's battles with sexual and suicidal temp tation , the antiphilosopher climbs in person onto the public stage to expose his thought . Why? Because as distinct from the regulated anonymity of science and in opposition to everything in philosophy that claims to speak in the name of the universal , the antiphilosophi cal act, which is without precedent or guarantee , has only itself and its effects to attest to its value . The antiphilosopher thus necessarily speaks

prop er name,

in his

and he must show this "proper" as real

proof of his saying. In effect, there is no validation and no compensation for his act except immanent to this act itself, since he denies that this act can ever be 6

Ibid. , p. 1 57. 87

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justified in the order of theory. It is moreover in such a way that Wittgenstein conceives of any true act : "There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment , but they must reside in the action itself"

(6 . 42 2 ) .

The biographical impulse , the taste for

confession , and even in the end a highly recognizable infatuation that commands the "writerly" style of all antiphilosophers (if you go back to the list, there is not a single one who is not a master of language) : these are the necessary consequences of the most intimate antiphilosophical certainty, the one that consists , against millennia of philosophy, in the duty to announce and practice an active salvific break in one 's own name only. This is something the bilious philosopher can then translate , if he so wishes , into the exclamation "All mad ! ," which is not ungrounded, except that he comes up against the sentence that Lacan is said to have inscribed on the wall of his waiting room : "Not just anyone can go mad who wants to."7 In any case , with these subj ective displays , we still find ourselves in the "part of truth" common to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche . But the real movement is very different, even opposed , which explains why the "Christianity" of the one can name an act that the other would rather situate as part of everything attached to the priest that must be crushed beneath the hammer blows , and , thus , as part of the crushing of Wittgenstein himself, who in 7

See Lacan,

Eecits, p.

1 76 (translation modified) . 88

1918

WITT GEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHI L O S O PHY

confided t o a friend i n captivity : "I 'd most like t o be a priest , but when I ' m a teacher I can read the Gospel with the children ."g This is because Nietzsche believed he was able to maintain that the value of his archipolitical act was situ ated beyond Good and Evil , whereas the archiaesthetic act that Wittgenstein announces remains normed , even if in the register of the unsayable , by the coupling of these values. True , it is excluded to sa)' Good and Evil (or to say Christianity, or to say Beauty) : "It is clear that ethics cannot be stated"

(6.42 1 ) .

But it is precisely the

co-belonging of Good and Evil to what sustains itself only in silence that makes our soul into a constant theater-the real place, without concept, of a balancing act of sainthood and abjection, of the beautiful life and suicide . The question that only the act can settle, without any admissible proposition , is the following : why choose Christianity rather than suicide? Why choose the sense of the world, whose name is God , rather than the end of the world, which is the same thing as the end of life, or the end of sense? The whole point being, and this is deci sive ifwe want to understand the opposition to Nietzsche , that death stands outside of the world as much as God : "So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end"

(6.43 1 ) . Or, with more precision : "Death is not an event in life" (6.43 1 1 ) . The archiaesthetic act is the one that decides for God against death . For Nietzsche , however, 8

Quoted in McGuinness, p. 274. 89

God is on the side if death ,

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whereas the archipolitical act must decide for Life against God . This displacement depends entirely on the fact that Wittgenstein 's ontology allows for a sense of the world (or of the subj ective totality, which is the same thing) to be outside of the world . While for Nietzsche , not only does nothing exist outside of the Whole of life , but also

there is no sense of the totality,

or

of life , for one fundamental reason , which is that "the value of life cannot be evaluated ."9 With the aim of living up to the dignity of their antiphilosophical act, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are both absolutely devoted to solitude and at the same time both seek to

show this solitude . Yet they go

about

this in opposite directions . The first exhibits the saint hood of an unevaluatable affirmation ; and the second , the sainthood of someone who reno�ces the unsaya ble and ignoble authority of death in favor of "the . " mystic al e I ement . As to the second basis for Wittgenstein 's aesthetic "Christianity," namely, the unremitting clarification of the sayable , the work "on the side of thought" of the sublime powers of non-thought, we know that he has consecrated the essential part of his life to this task, by relentlessly going back to a very particular set oflogical and mathematical materials. For all this is accessible to 9 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twiliaht '?! the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1 990), p. 40: "Judgements, value-judgements concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true : they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms--in themselves such judgements are stupidities. One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishingfinesse, that the value of life cannot be evaluated [abgeschatzt)" (translation modified). 90

WITTG E N STEIN ' S ANTIPH I L O S O PH Y

saying. And Wittgenstein was a magnificent "sayer," a voluble, sarcastic and violent teacher. Before taking up this aspect, I will make two remarks : 1 . For Wittgenstein, this work is not the most important. For it is less the act itself than the always unachievable description of what is situated beneath the mystical element, beneath what the "tracing" of the act gives us access to. We should never forget what Wittgenstein, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker in 1 9 1 9 , writes in regard of the Tractatus: "I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it."l0 2 . The theory of the world and thus also the theory of the proposition (since a proposition has sense only by registering an intraworldly "state of affairs" and, as a result, 5 . 6 : " The limits if my lanauaae mean the limits of my world") fill most of Wittgenstein's book. But they are unreadable if we omit the active question that traverses them : what should the world be so that we may silently enact that which brings us in accord with the divine sense of the world? This question alone makes clear that Wittgenstein's ontology is indivisibly a thought of being and a thought of saying. It is also this very question that situates the entire endeavor in between "idealism" and "materialism ," since the simul taneous seizing both of the composition of the world and of the composition of the propositions that say the 1 0 Undated letter to Ludwig von Ficker quoted in McGuinness, p. 2 8 8 ; and i n toto i n the Prototractatus, e d . B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg, and G. H . von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 97 1 ) , pp. 1 5- 1 6 . 91

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composition of the world does nothing else than trace the line of demarcation between that which can be said of being and that which cannot. There is no paradox whatsoever in Wittgenstein's claim, in 5 . 64, that "solip sism , when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism ."

92

4

Academics on all sides are delighted by the fact that Wittgenstein, in the "second" part of his oeuvre (a part which, in truth, has remained without oeuvre) , would have abandoned the ontological construction of the Tractatus. And yet, it is in this ontological construction that we ought to situate Wittgenstein's radical effort to render p ossible the sovereignty of the mystical element. We must therefore engage with it, all the more so inso far as all the grammarian and analytical accounts , the "linguistic turn" and other university glosses (if we think of all that was Wittgenstein's torment, of his bottomless contempt for the professorial function, of the shame he felt for indulging in it! He must have felt as punished as the Great Emperor in Hugo 's Les Chatiments upon hearing that Napoleon III is succeeding him) , have caused us to lose sight of the fact that what we had here was one of the rare contemporary attempts axiomatically to lay the grounds for a doctrine of substance and of the world . The fact that Wittgenstein's ontological construc tion somehow operates in a tight to-and-fro movement 93

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between "what is" and "what is said" is appropriate for the goal he sets himself: the valorization, against the restricted space of scientific propositions , of the mysti cal element, which manifests itself but cannot be said . There is no doubt a specular relationship between the theses on being and the theses on the proposition . This link is contained in the notion of the picture, which is introduced axiomatically : "We picture facts to ourselves" (2 . 1 ) . These pictures are on the order of language . But in the final instance it is that which is not in the picture that is ''higher,'' having an authentic value . The point of being that is "truest" is not captured in the specular relationship in which the ontology of the world and of language is constructed . It is obtained there where "something," which is precisely not a thing, comes up as a remainder of this relationship. This idea of the "remainder" can be found in every antiphilosophy, which certainly builds very subtle networks of relations but only to track down the incompleteness in them and to expose the remainder to its seizure by way of the act. This is precisely where antiphilosophy deposes philosophy : by showinB what its theoretical pretension has missed and which in the end is nothing less than the real . Thus , for Nietzsche, life is that which appears as a remainder of every protocol of evaluation . Just as, for Pascal, Grace is entirely subtracted from the order of reasons ; for Rousseau, the voice of conscience from the preaching of the Enlightenment; for Kierkegaard, existence from the Hegelian synthesis. And for Lacan, we are familiar with 94

WITTGEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHIL O S O PHY

the theme o f jouissance and the Thing to which it is yoked, which the philosopher cannot and does not want to know. What remains to be seen, though, is whether, of this real, the antiphilosopher offers us anything other than a flabbergasted vanishing act, or whether his act is not, like woman for Claudel, a promise that cannot be kept. Unless it is a question of womanhood all along in this story, precisely woman about whom we will immediately agree that philoso phy has no ambition whatsoever to speak, but about whom we can also wonder whether to this day displayed as she is in the series of nouns (faith, anxiety, life, silence , enjoyment . . . ) with which antiphiloso phy, with the exception of Lacan, has pinned her down-she has done any better than to disappear. The antiphilosopher would wave the specter of the femi nine in front of the eyes of the philosophers who, loyally, foreclose this specter from their thinking maneuvers , educated as they are on this point by science. This goes some way toward explaining the striking misogyny that characterizes all antiphiloso phers : the unconscious woman serves them only to pin some banderillas on the philosopher's thick neck. Which . · " among men." H ave we ever IS , after a11 , an exp1 anatlOn seen more detestable people, in their explicit declara tions about women, than Pascal (did he ever notice one other than his sister?) , Rousseau ( Emile's Sophie ! ) , Kierkegaard (the neurosis of marriage ! ) , Nietzsche (let's not even go there) or Wittgenstein (with, on this topic, the half-frankness of a half-homosexuality)? 95

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Supposing that the real remainder of philosophical theories , from the point of view of desire, must be sought on the side of the feminine , the fate reserved for this remainder is certainly more enviable when one is called Plato, Descartes or Hegel , to the point where we could consider the relationship to women another distinctive feature : the more flagrant the misogyny, the more we are in the vicinity of antiphilosophy. This would also shed an intense light on the case of Kant, whose declarations about women are hair-raising and whose tortuous goal can easily be summarized as follows : to give a philosophical form to antiphilosophy itself; to show philosophically that the philosophical pretension can only stir up air; to sublimate the moral act , which is doubtlessly aphilosophical , with regard to the phenomenal miseries of knowledge . From this we can infer, since for him the remainder bears the name "noumenon," that a Kantian desire always addresses a noumenal object. This is , strongly concep tualized, the old certitude of the "mystery" of the feminine . In Wittgensteinian language, "woman" is that of which we cannot speak, and which we must there fore pass over in silence .

96

5

For Wittgenstein as for Spinoza, the primitive name of the "there is" is "substance ." The resemblance stops there, since Wittgenstein will "atomize" substance . Substance is in effect composed of objects , and a funda mental feature of objects (2 . 02 ) is that they are absolutely simple. We should immediately make two remarks : 1 . Substance is the name of being, and thus the name of the "there is ." It is not the name of the world, or the name of what there is (or of what is the case) . The statement 2 . 024 of the Tractatus specifies that "substance is what subsists independently of what is the case," whereas the famous first statement declares that "the world is all that is the case ." We must therefore distin guish between "real" existence, or being, whose name is substance , and "occasional" existence, or "what is the case," whose name is world . We will also say that a world is an even tal effectuation of an eternal being. The major ontological problem , very close to the Leibnizian problem of the passage from "possible" worlds (contained in divine intelligence and thus eternally 97

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existent) to the "real" world, consists in knowing what correlation exists between the world and substance. 2 . The objects , or atoms , that make up substance lead us immediately into the vicinity of the "remainder" that thought stumbles upon. An object as such, suppos edly isolated, cannot be thought. Only a combination between several obj ects , which is called a state cif ciffairs, is thinkable. The object is thus solely what we must suppose to render possible a combination of objects , or a state . Thus , 2 . 0 1 2 1 : "There is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others . If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs , I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations." The major ontological problem in this case consists in determining what exp oses the multiplicity of objects to thought, if the object itself is unthinkable. Or: how do we know that a state of affairs (a relation) refers to a multiplicity of objects for whose combination it provides , if we do not have any access to the individuality of obj ects? This second problem is all the more acute insofar as Wittgenstein, immediately separating himself from Leibniz, posits that obj ects , the simple atoms that make up every state of affairs , are indiscernible : "If two objects have the same logical form , the only distinction between them , apart from their external properties , is that they are different" (2 . 02 3 3 ) . This violates Leibniz's "principles of indiscernibles" more radically than is the case, for example, in Lucretian atomism . Because for the latter, beyond the essential qualitative difference, 98

WITT GENSTEIN ' S ANTIPHI L O S O PH Y

which structures the "there is" (the difference between the void and the atoms) , there exist, among the atoms themselves , differences of "type" tied to the form . Wittgenstein's substance, a s eternal form o f being, is only the contingent juxtaposition of identically unthinkable obj ects. The two ontological problems (relationship between substantial being and the eventality of the world; access to the multiple if the elements of this multiple are unthinkable and indiscernible) cannot be solved unless we pass "on the side" of the linguistic reflection, on the side of the picture that we form for ourselves of what exists. The crucial point is that objects , which can be neither thought nor described, are represented in the picture, or, which amounts to the same thing, in the proposition. "Represented" means the following: to an obj ect, such as it is engaged in a combination or a state, there corre sponds a name. Statement 2 . 1 3 : "In a picture objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them ." Statement 3 . 2 2 (which merely specifies the linguistic nature of the picture) : "In a proposition a name is the representative of an obj ect." Our access to unthinkable objects, thus , happens by way of nomination. We will be careful to note that naming is not a proposition, it is not a description and, consequently, it is not a form of thought. All it does is secure an "element" in the picture that corresponds to the object and on the basis of which thought-not of the obj ect but of the combination of objects in a 99

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proposition-is rendered possible : "Objects cannot be named. Signs are their representatives . I can only speak about them : I cannot p ut them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are" (3 . 2 2 1 ) . Conversely, the combination of obj ects , or state of affairs , can be described in the picture (by a proposi tion that combines several names) , but it cannot be named : "Situations can be described but not Biven

names" (3 . 1 44) . This opposition between nomination (representation without thought of objects by a sign) and descrip tion (signifying picture of the combinations of objects in a proposition) is completely disjunctive : that which can be named (the substantial atomic object) cannot be described , and that which can be described (the combi nations of objects or states) cannot be named . It is the ontologico-linguistic substructure of another disjunc tion, the one which gives us an opening onto the mystical element, and which opposes the showing, or the "manifesting," to the saying: "What can be shown, cannot be said" (4. 1 2 1 2) But what exactly is a state of affairs? The metaphor combines the classical atomistic theme of the collision and the linguistic theme of the chain : "In the state of affairs objects fit into one another like the links of a chain" (2 . 03 ) . It is essential to see clearly that a state of affairs is not necessarily captured within the world (the world as evental set of every thing that is the case) . A state of affairs is a possibility of substance, a multiple-combination that "is" eternally. Some of these combinations go on to exist in a world . 1 00

WITT G E N STEIN ' S ANTIPHI L O S O P H Y

Once the objects that compose these possibilities are represented by names , the combination of objects , or state, is represented by a proposition . This proposition, which inscribes a combination of objects (which is "in" the substance but which does not exist [does not happen] necessarily in the world) , will be called an elementary proposition . The elementary proposition concentrates all the problems relative to the connec tion between being and picture, and finally between substance and the world . It will be an issue of sense and of truth.

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6

First of all, why is a proposition that describes a possi ble state of affairs said to be "elementary"? Because states of affairs are strictly independent from one another, closed in on themselves , multiples without relation. Perhaps this is the most important ontological statement: "States of affairs are independent of one another" ( 2 . 06 1 ) . There is a primitive atomism of objects , which are "simple," but a second atomism of states , which, though complex, have no connection whatsoever between them . It is thus legitimate for the proposition drawing up the picture of a state to be considered an elementary proposition . As a description (or picture) of a possible state of affairs , the elementary proposition is-provided, of course (and this is not the clearest point) , that we iden tify the names of objects that figure in it-immediateljr comprehensible : it has a sense. The delicate issue is properly to understand that sense is not a catenary if the experience if the world. Indeed, a proposition that describes a possible state of affairs (and thus an intrasub stantial combination) has no need, in order to be 1 03

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endowed with sense, for this state of affairs to "exist" (to happen) . Sense is a category of (eternal) being. The result is that from the simple fact that we really under stand a proposition we can infer that it establishes a picture of a state of affairs which "is ," that is to say : which i s eternally detained in its substantial or possible value, or again : which can happen . This is something the book underscores very early on in statement 2 . 203 : "A picture contains the possibility of the situation that it represents . " Then, if we remember that thought is nothing else than the proposition endowed with sense, we will understand in the same way : "A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is possible too" (3 . 02 ) . This possibility, in the guise of a state of affairs described by the proposition (which means presented in the picture) , constitutes the ground of being of sense : "What a picture represents is its sense" (2 . 2 2 1 ) . Finally, a particular �ase of the possible is reality : a state of affairs is certainly possible if it "happens" and, thus , if it is part of the world . An elementary proposi tion that describes a state of affairs that participates in the reality of the world will be called true. It will be said to be false if it describes , not nothing, in which case it would have no sense , but a state which is (substantially) , without for this reason happening (existing as a state of the world) . Wittgenstein's ontology, concentrated in the doctrine of the elementary proposition , is an ontology of the virtual . The being of "there is ," as substance 1 04

W I TT G E N S T E I N ' S A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y

composed of simple and indiscernible objects , is not constrained to exist (to ex-sist) as world-that is to say, as we will see, as subj ect. Withdrawn in the worldly inexistence of its being, a state (combined multiple of objects) is for this reason no less representable in a picture, and consequently thinkable in the guise of a proposition endowed with sense. For this proposition to become true, or for it to be "averred," means only that the state it describes "happens." But this truth is in sum more or less indifferent, from a properly onto logical point of view, since the fact that a state "happens" is strictly contingent . Contrarily to what happens in Leibniz, for whom the existing world is the best of all possible worlds , for Wittgenstein, a world (or a subject, it is the same thing) maintains only a relation of chance to its substantial ground . Being is indifferent to that which, of being, happens as world : "For all that happens and is the case is accidental" (6 .4 1 ) . Wittgenstein is as opposed to the principle of sufficient reason as he is to the principle of indiscernibles. We know that this prin ciple holds : "It is in the nature of things that every event has prior to it, its conditions , prerequisites , suitable dispositions, whose existence makes up its sufficient reason" (Leibniz, Fifth Writing in Resp onse to Clarke) . ! For Wittgenstein, no event (and the world is nothing but events) has the least sufficient reason to be prefer entially attached to its substantial being-possible. Wittgenstein operates , in the best antiphilosophical 1

See Badiou's discussion in Beine and Event, pp. 3 1 5-2 3 . 1 05

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style , an inversion of the classical values attributed to sense and to truth . One can indeed easily believe that sense is a question of experience and convention, whereas truth, attached to being as being, is �ncoun tered only beyond worldly donation . This is precisely why philosophy holds that there are "eternal truths." But now we have Wittgenstein attributing eternity to sense (as propositional picture of substantial states) and developing a strictly empiricist and contingent doctrine of truths. Indeed, insofar as a proposition is true only inas much as it describes a state that "happens ," or a state of the world , and insofar as the world, as collection of events , is given over to contingency, there is no other means to verify that an elementary proposition is true except to compare it with reality, with the observable "it has happened": "In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality" (2 . 2 2 3 ) . Truth i s simply a matter of empirical observation . Sense, on the other hand, rooted in the substantial eternity of possible-multiples , of combinations of objects , is readable in the very structure of the propo sition, in the immediate fact that we understand it independently of all external verification. It is clear that, after Nietzsche, though with different means and following opposite strategies , Wittgenstein partici pates in the powerful tendency that, in the twentieth century, has sought to depose truth in favor of sense. The act that animates this tendency, we do well to recognize, is what articulates itself as antiphilosophy. 1 06

7

It is no doubt time for us to synthesize how this construction has worked in the service of antiphiloso phy while at the same time, animated by the spirit of philosophical resistance, marking our differences , or at least the risks to which Wittgenstein exposes us. Everything that is at play, of course, depends on the line of demarcation traced between thought and non thought, since it is Wittgenstein's strategic goal to subtract the real (what is higher, the mystical element) from thought, so as to entrust its care to the act which alone determines whether our life is saintly and beautiful . In order to achieve his goals , Wittgenstein must give a particularly narrow definition of thought. This is striking from the very start. Thought, indeed, is the proposition endowed with sense, and the proposition with sense is the picture, or the description, of a state of affairs. The result is a considerable extension of non thought, which is unacceptable to the philosopher. In non-thought there is first of all the primordial operation of the naming of simple obj ects. 1 07

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Wittgenstein's antiphilosophical orientation on this point is very clear: if the names of objects were to envelop a thought, we would have a relation on the order of both lan8ua8e and thou8ht to the intimate composition of substance, which accordingly would weaken the need for the silent act. Wittgenstein does not clarify this question of names , which has been the topic of strong debates in philoso phy since at least the Crao/lus. I can certainly understand that in the proposition names represent obj e cts combined in the state of affairs , described by the prop osition in which these names appear. But what I do not understand is how the unthinkable difference cif objects

comes to be represented by the difference attested to by the names. Here, a fissure slips into the specular construc tion that brings face-to-face the multiple of objects (on the side of substance) and the multiple of names (on the side of the proposition, or of the picture) . If objects violate the Leibnizian principle of indiscernibles , how is it that names , which are there only as signs of objects , obey this principle? Because it is certain, no matter what the extent of homonymy might be, that two indis cernible names ultimately are the same. Names , as opposed to objects , are not identified by their external relations . They have a dense intrinsic identity. As a result, one begins to doubt whether nomination as such might be a non-thought . And in fact, we can and must maintain that there is a practice of language that is entirely dedicated to namin8 as thou8ht, that is , poetry. The poetic act indeed is neither descriptive 1 08

WITT G E N STEIN ' S ANTI P H I L O S O PHY

(even if it practices description) nor "monstrative" in the sense of the mystical element (even if it practices suggestion) . It aims rather to organize a verbal totality (a poem by itself composes a proposition) in such a way that a presence-of-being be named by this totality, whereas nothing in ordinary language named this . Poetry is the creation of a name-of-being that was previously unknown. The sole axiom of poetry is : "Everything that participates in being, whether simple or infinitely multiple, has a name . The difficulty lies in inventing it ." It is not for nothing that poetry, for this unheard-of invention, uses the maximal resources of the difference, including sonorous , between the names from inherited language . Either poetry is a thought, as philosophy declares , and then naming must b e reintroduced into thought, or else naming, as Wittgenstein wishes , is not a thought, and then poetry is stripped of all thinking functions and is nothing more-something I find extremist and unac ceptable-than a verbal instance of silence . Secondly, in non-thought, there also figures the impossible . Indeed, every proposition endowed with sense, and thus every thought, immediately attests to the possibility of the state it describes. We can again see the antiphilosophical advantage of such an interdiction : if the impossible is thinkable, it is not guaranteed that there is a possibility of the unthinkable . Now this possi bility is a must for the antiphilosopher, who seeks precisely by way of an unprecedented act to cross the recognized frontier between the thinkable and the 1 09

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unthinkable . Let me add that it is the idea that "all" is thinkable which, for the antiphilosopher, constitutes the unsupported theoretical presumption of the philos opher, which makes the latter's alleged act into , an imposture. But not everything is clear either in regard to this old question of the impossible and its possible thought. I understand very well that the possible is given sense. What I understand less is what we must comprehend under the impossible, even if it is on the order of non thought. Rather than forbidding that it be thought, it seems to me that Wittgenstein forbids all beinB to the impossible. For if a state of affairs, by the sole fact that it is substantially (which also means that it can be described in an elementary proposition) , can happen (which means that the proposition can be true, insofar as it makes sense) , it is clear that the impossible is not representable qua state of affairs. This amounts to saying that it is void, because what is-substance-is composed of objects (for which the words "possible" or "impossible" are devoid of sense) combined in states of affairs. Or again : as in any ontology of the virtual (Deleuze 's is no exception in this regard) , to be impos sible means purely and simply not to be (and not only not to be thinkable) . Now, there are at least two forms of thought that are originarily suited for the impossible : mathematics and politics. The first, because its point of the real is to literalize that which all thought leaves behind as a remainder (as impossible proper) to its field of 1 10

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determination; all thought, even and above all itself (mathematics) , in the previous state of its develop ment. Thus , the incommensurable (Eudoxus) , the curve reducible to a set of segments (Archimedes) , the vanishing quantities (Leibniz and Newton) , the indis cernibles ( Galois) , the infinitely great (Cantor) , the infinitesimals (Robinson) , etc. As for politics , it draws its value only from the prescription of a "possibility" for a situation that the immanent norm of this situation defines precisely as impossible-an impossibility that, moreover, is required for the situation to be consistent in the first place. This is evident when we think of the execution of the King in 1 793 (which Kant, by the way, considered explicitly to be unthinkable) , or of the directive "all the power to the soviets" in 1 9 17, or of Mao 's maxim, which is intrinsically impossible, or even absurd, that the weaker can vanquish the stronger. If the requirement of a mise-en-scene of the archi aesthetic act implies that the impossible also be the unthinkable , or even that the impossible be void, we will have to conclude that neither mathematics nor politics are forms of thought. For to hold that they are capable of thought requires that we grant the impossi ble a minimum of being. Alas , at the cost of misunderstanding both politics and mathematics , this is precisely what Wittgenstein, for whom the end governs the means , ends up by saying. In the case of mathematics , he does so explicitly (and after the Tractatus with a fierceness worthy of a better cause) : "A proposition of mathematics does not express a thought" 111

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(6 . 2 1 ) . In the case of politics , he proceeds in a more dispersed but no less clear manner, as we will see . Philosophy, whose thinking conditions defInitely include, aside from the poem, both mathematic � and politics , will discern in Wittgenstein's preliminary extension of non-thought the exorbitant price to be paid so that there may occur-if it is at all possible the dice throw of the "mystical element." Finally, the third fIgure of non-thought, after nomi nation and the impossible, is nonsense . This category is central to antiphilosophy because, as we have seen, the absurdity of nonsense is what serves to stigmatize philosophy (or metaphysics , if one absolutely must) . For this reason, though, it is no less delicately handled, since for Wittgenstein there are two resimes '?! sense. Let us examine statement 6 . 4 1 : The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is , and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists and if it did exist, it would have no value . If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental . What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental . It must lie outside the world .

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What can sense be, when one talks of the "sense of the world" (and we know that the name of this sense or meaning is God)? Certainly not the same sense as the one that is implied in the idea of a proposition endowed with sense . Because a proposition has sense from the moment it describes a state of affairs. However, it belongs to any state of affairs whatsoever that it can happen, and thus , that it can exist in a world . As a result, the sense of a proposition is always susceptible to being linked to an intraworldly reality and thus to an accidental reality, which "is as it is."What Wittgenstein tells us then is that such a sense is without value. In sum : all value detained by a proposition is devoid of any value whatsoever. Besides, this is the result already established in statement 6 . 4 : "All propositions are of equal value." For if they are all of equal value, it is because none has a "special" value, which would valor ize the sense of which it is the bearer. By contrast, the "sense of the world" has a higher value. Its equivalence with the sense of life authorizes us even to grant it a supreme value and to name it God . But, of course, this sense that has a value cannot reside in the world, nor can it be said by a proposition . Let us add that the idea of value , for Wittgenstein , clearly excludes the contingency that marks the eventality of the world . What is in the world is accidental, and its sense is without value, but the sense of the world, which has value , must be "non-accidental ," which requires that it "lie outside the world ." We must therefore sharply distinguish two 113

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acceptations of the word "sense": the intraworldly sense, devoid of value (and devoid of value particularly

because it can sustain a truth, that is, a proposition statinB "what is the case") , and the sense-value, entirely separated from truth (because it has nothing to do with what is the case) , the ultimate name for which is God . But then two problems emerge : •

If the sense-value is the sense of the world, and if there is also sense (though without value) in the world, should we not admit that in actual fact there is a sense <1 sense? And even, more precisely, since it is the power to be "captured" in a true proposition that fixes the intraworldly sense (true = what happens , the accidental) , is there not a sense <1 truths? And does this sense of truths not subsume by its own necessity (the non-accidental) the contingency of truths? For the philosopher that I am , though, the idea that truths , appar ently contingent, are enveloped by a necessary sense-especially if, as is the case in Wittgenstein , this idea is not the stake of an argument, if it does not obey any proposi tional discipline, if it is subordinated to the pure and silent act-is the exact theoretical difinition <1reliBiousfaith . It would then be no coincidence whatsoever if "Christianity" names this sense-value, which at one and the same time oversees, valorizes, and deposes 1 14


•

the sense-truth . And the unprecedented novelty of the antiphilosophical act would in the end only be a return to this ancient belief from which the whole philosophical effort was meant to extirpate us. If there are two acceptations of the word "sense," there also must be two acceptations of the absurd (of nonsense) . We will then ask of Wittgenstein the antiphilosopher: in what sense does he understand "nonsense" when he declares that such is the status of philosophical (metaphysical) questions and propositions?

lbis point is extremely convoluted. We said before that the absurdity of the philosophical act, for Wittgenstein, depends on some kind of forcing of language 's capaci ties. Philosophy pretends to hold in the form of the proposition that which cannot fmd entry in it. But what is this? Obviously, it is a question of hypotheses about the sense of the world. We can thus say that the nonsense of philosophy is the result of its belief that it can force the unsayable sense ( God , if you want) to say itself in the form of propositional sense. Or again (and this is the most important) : philosophy is that which presents the ''higher'' sense, which lies outside the world, as if it were a state of affairs that a proposition can describe and, thus , as if it were susceptible to truth. In the fmal instance,

philosophical nonsense consists in believinB that there is a possi ble truth if (the) sense (if the world), whereas there is onljr a possible (divine) sense if (scientiflc) truths. 1 15

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From this point of view, "nonsense" IS III fact constructed as an impossible link between the two acceptations of the word "sense ." This obviously brings us back to the decisive point: antiphilosophy declares the (unsayable) sense superior to sayable sense, a sense which is thus also superior to all possible truths , and accuses the philosophical act of wanting to invert this hierarchy, by subjecting to the rules of truth that which, while giving these rules their sense, in reality cannot be made to comply with them . Everything revolves around what is without a doubt the crux for both the philosopher and the antiphiloso pher: the relation between sense and truth. In this aspect they are both distinguished from the sophist (something the late Wittgenstein has often become) , for whom :

1.

2.

There are not two regimes of sense ( the sense of the world and the intraworldly sense) but a single, intraworldly space, dominated by polysemy. There is no truth .

To the "inversion of values" typical of all antiphilosophy (to affirm the superiority of sense over truths) , the philosopher will raise two objections : First of all , it is not exact to say that philosophy "submits" sense to truth . The profound philosophical thesis , manifest as early as in the Platonic doctrine of the Idea of the Good as trans-ideal norm of truths , holds that truths have no sense whatsoever, that they make 1 16

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a "hole" in sense . It is the antiphilosopher who requires , for all truth, the previous condition of sense (in order for a proposition describing a state of affairs to be true, it is first necessary that it make sense , or that it describe a possible state of affairs , and then one verifies whether this state of affairs "happens") . Philosophy does not follow such a requirement, and as a result, contrary to what Wittgenstein believes , the philosophical form (the theSiS) is not the form of the proposition . It rather combines resources borrowed from those procedures of truth that are most clearly disjointed from sense (if "sense" means description of a state of affairs) : mathematics (para digm of senseless truths) and poetry (thinking nomination of the unnamed) . Antiphilosophy can discredit the philosophical act only by fabricating such a restrictive and unwieldy doctrine of truth that it may seem absurd indeed to see in it the recourse of all possible thought (or non thought) . This way of proceeding is already in place with Pascal , who seems to ignore the fact that Descartes delivers truths to the radical absence of sense, insofar as he makes them depend , even when they are mathematical , on an undecipherable divine freedom . It is equally active in Nietzsche , who fore closes the anonymous and indifferent dimension of truths , the better to mock their reactive and moral "value ." But, as it happens , it is the antiphilosopher who speculates about the "value" of truths . For the philosopher it is quite enough to endure that there are 1 17

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some.Yes , the philosophical act touches upon nonsense, but it is the nonsense of truths . And it is because it remains subordinate to sense that the antiphilosophi cal act is without truth . Secondly, even if we grant Wittgenstein that philos ophy produces propositions devoid of sense, we will ask him to explain how it happens that such pro positions exist . It is assured that a proposition happ ens, it is in the world . As Wittgenstein says : "A propositional sign is a fact" (3 . 1 4) . How should we characterize, as a fact, the (philosophical) proposition that is devoid of sense? On this point, Wittgenstein is far from showing the scruples that philosophers show when they treat (and they are always bound to do so) the delicate question of the existence of the sophistic saying. This question alone leads Plato, in the Sophist, to creative developments that are terribly complex . We would like the antiphilosopher to treat the existence of nonsensi cal (philosophical) propositions with the same liveliness, the same inventiveness , as that which pushes the philos opher to do justice to the existence of purely rhetorical (sophistic) propositions. What does Wittgenstein refer us to? To the "confusions" of ordinary language, to homonymies, to the interferences among different functions , to the example (elaborated by philosophers since the dawn of history) of the word "is ," which "figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence" (3 . 3 2 3 ) . And he concludes in all tranquility: "In this way the most fundamental confu sions are easily produced (the whole of philosophy is full 118

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of them)" (3 . 324) . So the problem of propositions · " easy"1. devOl·d 0f sense IS Let us make a little entry into this "easiness." When I say that a proposition is devoid of sense, I form a prop osition . This proposition describes a state of affairs , namely the (philosophical) proposition devoid o f sense, here treated as pure fact. This requires "devoid of sense" to be : 1 . An immediately understandable property, which can be attributed to this state of affairs (the philo sophical proposition) , which means that there is a sense to the fact of not having any sense, that "nonsense" belongs , like everything that can be thought in the form of a proposition, to the register of sense ; 2 . A substantial possibility for the combination of objects of which the proposition "this proposition is devoid of sense" is the linguistic picture. Which amounts to saying that a nonsense must be rooted in the eternal being of objects , as the singular combination of indis cernible obj ects. Plato addresses this type of question-tied as far as he is concerned to the ontological status of the soph ist's mimetic saying-with an exemplary seriousness. He is thus led to revise his doctrine of being in such a way so as to make room for a "support of being" of non being. One can hardly say that Wittgenstein, in arguing against philosophical propositions , makes a comparable effort. The "easy" linguistic confusions he invokes aside from the fact that from a distance they are responsible for the mediocrities of "ordinary language 1 19

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philosophy"-are not even consistent with his own ontology. The only other path-if one does not want to engage in the rigorous examination both of the sense of nonsense and of that which supports it in the eternal being of objects-would be to affirm that philosophi cal propositions are forms of strict "nonsense," words without consequences , material sequences that are linguistically incomprehensible . Thus , to affirm that philosophy is not "nonsensical ," but void, in the precise sense that it does not form propositions at all . But in that case the antiphilosopher would be deprived of all critical subject matter, of the capacity to present his act as a break, as well as a relay, with regard to the philosophical act. Aside from the fact that it would be rather difficult to comprehend how it happens that whole centuries have understood the philosophical propositions . In the end, the triple instance of non-thought (naming, the impossible, nonsense) meets the obstacle of the triple existence of the poem , the matherne, and philosophy itself. Nevertheless , we are far from having exhausted Wittgenstein's resources. For the opposition between "sense of the world" and "intraworldly sense," which underlies the chiasmus between philosophy and antiphilosophy on the question of sense and truth, refers ontologically speaking to the difference between what is "necessary" and what is accidental . Now, if a state of affairs ''happens'' in the world in an absolutely 1 20

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contingent fashion, there nonetheless exists a figure of necessity if the form "world" as such . And this necessity confers another status upon truth than its purely empirical status. This problem , which is the problem of logic and of its ontological basis , requires that after the elementary proposition we examine the complex proposition . Occupying two thirds of the Tractatus, this movement from the simple to the complex is inscribed in the antiphilosophical strategy in the following way: insofar as there are "eternal truths ," non-accidental and non empirical, which can take the form of propositions (and finally there are some, namely, the propositions of logic) , they have no counterpart whatsoever in the real. Consequently, the real does indeed concern the act, and not the proposition . The point is to prepare oneself for the mystical element by the voidinB of eternity inscribed in the logical propositions . This preparation culminates in the two statements that follow :

6 . 1 : "The propositions of logic are tautologies." 6 . 1 1 : "Therefore the propositions of logic say nothing."

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8 What is a complex proposition? Since the elementary propositions describe combi nations of objects (states of affairs) , one could easily imagine that complex propositions describe combina tions of states. To the simple unity of objects there would correspond the simple unity of names ; to a combination of objects (a state) , there would corre spond an elementary proposition; and to a combination of states , a complex proposition, articulating several elementary propositions among them . The essential ontological difficulty of this arrange ment, in which elementary propositions are to complex propositions what names are to elementary proposi tions, lies in the fact that while objects can be combined (if they have "external relations") , states cannot . We have already seen that a state of affairs is absolutely inde pendent. The Statement 2 . 06 2 indicates in all clarity that, even as concerns the fact of , 'happening," that is , of existing (of being of the world) , states have no relation whatsoever among themselves : "From the existence or non-existence of one state of affairs it is impossible to infer the existence or non-existence of another." States 1 23

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of affairs are independent in the order of (substantial) being, and without any correlation in the order of (worldly) existence . Thus , a complex proposition i s in no way destined to present a picture of an intrinsic combination, whether ontological or evental, among states of affairs. Supposing that complex propositions can secure a necessity (something non-accidental) , in no case would it be a question of a "real" necessity, which would desig nate effective, substantial or worldly combinations between multiples of obj ects . What then can be the sense of complex propositions? At first, a complex proposition is absolutely nothing else than a juxtaposition of elementary propositions , with each one of them describing a state of affairs . As long as one remains at this level, any such juxtaposition has sense, which is nothing else than the "sum" of elementary descriptions. Hence, the complex proposi tion has no interest whatsoever if one relates it to the eternal being of objects and of their combinations . It is a simple enumeration of states . The complex proposition becomes interesting when one examines the existence of states in reality (in the world) . That is to say, when one takes into account the capacity of propositions to be true or false . Take for example an elementary proposition p, which describes a certain state of affairs. And take the elemen tary proposition q, which describes another state . The juxtaposition of p and q could be said to be "true," with 1 24

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both the state of affairs described by p and the state of affairs described by q having "happened," or being observable in the world . Thus , we could distinguish a "type" of complex proposition (here, the conjunction "p and q") by the way in which it attributes a truth value to the complex proposition in function of the truth-value of the elementary propositions . This is the crucial statement: "Elementary propositions are the truth-arguments of propositions" (5 . 0 1 ) . It is essential to note that in this whole affair, the "and" (in p and q ) refers to nothing real, and thus has no sense in and of itself. What we have are the states described by p and q inasmuch as they "are" eternally, and inasmuch as they " exist" in the world (or not) . The logical signs (and, or, implies , etc . ) are only the helpful means to register that a certain juxtaposition of elementary propositions possesses, with reBard to the

existence or inexistence if the states that these prop ositions describe, a certain truth-value . Or again, as Wittgenstein says : "There are no 'logical objects ' or 'logical constants ' (in Frege 's and Russell's sense)" (5 .4) . This means that there is no ontology of logical connectors : they do no more than "punctuate" the value of the juxtaposition, when grasped from the viewpoint of the world, and thus from the viewpoint of the true (or the false) : "Signs for logical operations are punctuation-marks" (5 . 46 1 1 ) . Another example : the atomic proposition p describes a certain state of affairs. What can we say of the proposition "not-p"? It refers to the same state of affairs, the one described by p . Or, as Wittgenstein says (4.062 1 ) , with 1 25

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regard to the propositions p and not-p, "there corre sponds to them one and the same reality." Except that p affirms the existence in the world of this referent, whereas not-p affirms its inexistence. From the point of view of the world, it is evidently not possible that the state described by p "is the case" and at the same time is not the case. So the complex proposition "p and not-p" is false. In general , a complex proposition is a group of elementary propositions such that, when one knows (by empirical observation) the truth or falsity of the elementary propositions (the existence or inexistence of the states they describe) , one will draw a result as to the value of the complex proposition, in terms of knowing whether the "group" of elementary proposi tions is , or is not, a partial descrip tion 1 the world. Wittgenstein calls this result a truth-operation, and one can thus say: "All propositions are results of truth operations on elementary propositions" (5 . 3) . If a complex proposition is true, it inscribes as partial description of the world a set of elementary proposi tions according to their truth or falsity. It is for this reason that a true complex proposition is scientific, and that "The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science" (4. 1 1 ) . In passing one will have noted a typical corifi nement of "complex" truth in the register of "natural science," evidently destined, on the one hand, to discredit philosophy (which claims to treat the true elsewhere than in natural science) and, on the other, to exalt, by way of the act, the mystical element, which is sense of sense, and never truth. 1 26


Here we are approaching a delicate turning point. Its point of departure is the following: a true (complex) proposition or one bearing on the world is siBnaled by thefact that it could befalse. Indeed, the world is "all that happens" (or "all that is the case") , and, we also know, what happens is pure contingency. Thus if a complex proposition is true, among other things , because the elementary proposition p that figures therein is true, this means that it is true because it is the (observable) case that the state described by p is in the world . But there is no (substantial, ontological) necessity for it to be there . It could thus be the case that it is not there, and that consequently the initial complex proposition is false . A scientific proposition, which is a partial description of the world, takes its truth from the (contingent, empirical) observation of the existence or inexistence of states that it implies based on elementary propo sitions. No one has pushed the famous theme of the contingency of the laws of nature further than Wittgenstein, and for antiphilosophical reasons that are only too evident (scientific truths are without inter est) : scientific statements are accidentally true . From the point of view of substantial and eternal being, they have no particular value ; they could be other than what they are. " If I say for example p and not- q :' this proposition is true (scientific) insofar as I observe that "it is the case " that p and "it is not the case that q ." A proposition is part of the science of nature based on the fact that I 1 27

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observe the existence or inexistence of the states concerned . But nothing in the proposition itself indi cates to me that it is true, hence scientific. I must make the detour through the pure chance of the world . What should we make then of those complex propo sitions , if they exist, that are true independently if the reality if the world, independently of what happens? Let us take the example of the complex proposition " p or not-p ." The "or," without real referent, signifies only the following : I consider the state described by p , and I affirm that i t either happens (exists i n the world) or else it does not happen . It is clear that the world, whatever it is, and precisely because it is on the order of the event, requires that it be one or the other (contrary to eternal substance, where the possibility that this table is yellow is a combination of objects that is compossible, even if without any link, with the possi bility that it not be yellow) . But if one "happens ," the other does not happen . As a result, the proposition "p or not-p" is true wholly independently of the question of knowing whether the state described by p exists or not. And as a consequence, independently of what the world is. We finally discover a necessity : that of the truth of certain complex propositions. A proposition that is necessarily true, whatever the world may be, and thus whatever the (accidental, contingent) value of the atomic propositions that figure in it may be, will be called a tautolosy. These are the propositions that secure an order of necessity subtracted from the radical 1 28

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contingency o f the truth o f scientific statements (in the sense of natural science) . This order is logic : "The propositions of logic are tautologies" (6 . 1 ) . But if' what necessity is this the necessity? Evidently it is not a necessity of the world, or in the world. And this for the good reason that tautologies say nothinn of the world . And rightly so ! To say something of the world is always to affirm (or deny) that this or that state ''happens.'' Now the truth of a tautology in which an elementary proposition p figures is precisely indifferent to this point, because it must always maintain itself, whether one supposes that "it is the case that p" or one supposes the contrary. Whence the fundamental state ment: "The propositions of logic say nothing" (6 . 1 1 ) . In fact, there is no necessity of the world, or in the world . This is a constant theme of Wittgenstein 's : "There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened" ( 6 . 37) . But there is necessityJor the world, there are (empty) laws imposed on states as soon as they happen , or not . For example , i t i s a necessity that the state described b y p , i f it happens in the world , cannot not happen . Whence the tautology "p or not-p" (the "or" is strict, exclu sive) . Or again , it is a necessity that if the state described by p is the case , and if the state described by q also is the case, then it is impossible that the case of q forbid the case of p . Whence the tautology "p and q implies that not- (q implies not-p) ." All this is indiffer ent to the fact of knowing whether or not all these states happen in the world . 1 29

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Let us anchor the vocabulary, at some distance from Wittgenstein's , which is not always stable . Let us call the ''being'' of a state its substance (a combination of obj ects) . It is in describing this being that the elemen tary proposition has sense . Let us call the "existence" of a state the fact of happening, the fact that it is the case in the world . It is by rightly affirming existence that the proposition is true (by wrongly affirming it that it is false) . An existence is never necessary, it must be observed, and the true propositions that are linked to the observations of existence are scientific. Tautologies , which are necessary, are not linked to any observation of existence . Nonetheless , they are also not laws of being (because in being, or substance , the state p and a state that is "existentially" incompat ible with p can perfectly co-be) . Tautologies are laws , not cif what exists but cif existence . Let us understand by this that it is for every possible world, for worldhood (or existence) in general , that statements like "p and q implies that not- ( q implies not-p)" impose themselves . These necessary statements , which show what Wittgenstein calls the "scaffolding" of the world (and which is something other than what exists in it) , bring the gap between sense and truth to its culminating point. Indeed, the price they pay for their necessity is not having any sense : "Tautologies and contradictions lack sense" (4.46 1 ) . This much is assured, since tautol ogies describe no world in particular. Finally, the world is on the one hand absolutely 1 30

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accidental and lawless i n the singularity o f its exist ence . But, on the other, it is logically prescribed, in the sense that the sole fact of existing carries with it certain logical constraints . Let us add that these constraints are devoid of sense, whereas sense reigns in the chance of the world . The split distribution is said as follows : "Outside logic everything is acciden tal" (6 . 3) . Tautologies thus stand in a definable rapport to the world, which is that of prescribing to it its "form" qua world, through an empty legislation of existence (of ''happening'') in general . This prescription is not a saying; it is a showing of the laws that constrain all saying, since all saying describes a world and tautologies are true for "every" world. Statement 6 . 1 24, which deserves to be meditated upon at length, recapitulates the function of logic with regard to being and existence . Being is invoked here from the angle of names ; exist ence, from the angle of the world : The propositions of logic describe the scaffold ing of the world , or rather they represent it . They have no "subj ect-matter." They presup pose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense ; and that is their connection with the world . It is clear that something about the world must be indicated by the fact that certain combinations of symbols-whose essence involves the possession of a determi nate character-are tautologies . 131

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This "something" is the fact that there are laws of exist ence, indifferent to what exists , and in which a truth is encapsulated in a proposition from which all sense is lacking.

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9

Someone then will say: What are you, philosopher, complaining about? Look at how Wittgenstein recog nizes the existence of truths devoid of sense, senseless truths. But you claim that such is the central point of the philosophical act. Where then is the polemic? Where is the antiphilosophy? The philosophical style ignores the complaint. It is the antiphilosophers who never stop complaining about the fate the world reserves for them ! Look at Rousseau's neglects , at Nietzsche 's insults ! I am not complaining about anything. It is with suspicion that I consider these tautological truths , and this for three reasons : 1 . First of all, the fact that the propositions of logic are devoid of sense and yet true and necessary is exactly tied to the fact that they say nothing, that they are indeed purely logical, that is to say, empty. Now, philosophy thinks that there are propositions deprived of sense, true and necessary, but which say a point of the real . The para digm of such propositions can be found in mathematics, which says being qua being. My first question is 1 33

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therefore : What status does Wittgenstein attribute to mathematical propositions? And in particular, what is the relation between a logical proposition and a mathe matical proposition? This point is always a major line of demarcation between philosophy, on the one hand, and antiphilosophy and sophistics, on the other. 2 . Wittgenstein 's construction of logic as the science of existence in general (non-worldly science of the world-form) is impressive . But it does not go all the way, and this halting point remains motivated by the desire for a "non-theoretical" act. Let us summarize our findings : •

•

•

Being is unthinkable , since we have no thought whatsoever of objects. We can only name them. Existence has laws that can be thought: the logical propositions . But these laws have no sense whatsoever. What exists (the world) is entirely contingent.

In my view we must raise the following question : what

is the relationship between beine and the laws if existence? For if the radical contingency of the events that make up the world separates this world absolutely from its substantial being, then it is almost certain that, by contrast, the fact that there are necessary laws of exist ence (hence, of the eventality of the world) indicates a correlation between being and existence-an ontolo gical prescription, not about the world , but about the worldhood of the world . The partitioning that 1 34

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Wittgenstein introduces between chance on the one hand (scientific propositions) and necessity on the other (logical propositions) is incomplete . We must also think logical necessity as that which, for the being of the world, informs the chance of the world . In short: Wittgenstein leaves the ontological conditions of his logic in the dark. We will thus ask what these condi tions are, in the understanding that the motivation for this lacuna is all too clear: if logic stands under the condition of being, we can no longer sustain absoluteljr that it is devoid of sense. The result is that it is not onljr in the logical void that a hiatus opens up between sense and truth, but perhaps this hiatus has a theoretical form as well (whereas for Wittgenstein , it would seem , "logic is not a body of doctrine" [6 . 1 3]) . 3 . Wittgenstein's general arrangement indicates three irreducible "intellective" dimensions (I say "intel lective" because "thought" for Wittgenstein is only one case, and not even the best one) : • •

•

Intellection of the laws of existence : logic. Intellection of the world (or of what exists) : natural science. Intellection of the sense of the world, or of the sense of what exists , or of value : the mystical element, silent and devoted to the pure act.

We see that the saying (the propositions endowed with sense) situates itself between two non-sayings : the logi cal one, devoid of sense, which nonetheless inscribes 1 35

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itself in propositions (tautologies) ; and the aesthetic (or moral) one, which, for its part, is radically rebel lious to all propositional inscription . The question then will be what common feature there is , from the point of view of substantial being, between the two figures of showing, or of non-saying: the one which is quasi-propositional, logic , and the one which is silent and which gives way to the antiphilosophical act . To cut to the chase : we will ask, directly following the lead of Lacan 's teaching, if there is a lonie cif the act. These three questions will structure the whole final part of my argument.

1 36

10

The simple question "Is mathematics a form of thought?" subterraneously organizes the debate between philoso phy and antiphilosophy. Why? Because if mathematical propositions think, then this means that there exists a saying without experience of the obj ect, an a-subj ec tive and regulated access to the intelligible ; that being is not necessarily foreclosed from all proposition; that the act itself is perhaps of a theoretical nature . The antiphilosopher absolutely rejects all of this . Whence the general line of antiphilosophy on this point, which holds that mathematics is not a form of thinking, but a calculation . And, via its "calculating" dimension, or as pure operation on signs , the invariable maxim becomes: mathematics is a variant of logic. Wittgenstein declares this with his habitual brutal ity: "Mathematics is a logical method" (6 . 2 ) . Throughout the continuation of his "career," Wittgenstein will prove himself extraordinqrily stub born in his resilience against the idea of mathematics as a singular form of thinking. To this end, he-who knew the question quite well-will employ means of the 1 37

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most provocative superficiality, giving such inexact and meager versions of the most profound and ingenious theories (particularly those of Cantor or Godel) that his most fervent flatterers are sometimes disconcerted by this and have to devote powerful volumes to attempts at a justification . This fierceness is the result ofWittgenstein's convic tion-in which he is justified-that, since Plato, mathematics has been the decisive support for what he considers to be the greatest imposture : the metaphysi cal imposture. To reduce mathematics to the common denominator, to show by all means , including the lowest ones, that there is nothing in mathematics that one cannot find in any "language game" whatsoever, preferably the most futile, is an ungrateful and endless job, but the game is worth the effort: one thus will preserve the rights of "ordinary language philosophy" as a substitute for the nefarious seizure of truths , which is proper to the philosophical act. As the late Wittgenstein becomes a sophist, the essential procedures consist in relativizing, suspending, anthropologizing mathematics , making it into a conven tional game that in the last instance depends on our linguistic habits. A passage from the notes published with the (particularly ironic) title Remarks on the Foundations if Mathematics will illustrate this point. We will notice that after the constantly affirmative style of the Tractatus there follows a constantly interrogative style, which is the quasi-physical marking of the moment when one form of antiphilosophy, tired of 1 38

WITT G E N STEIN ' S ANTIP H I L O S O PHY

silently waiting in vain for its unprecedented act, loses itself in a suspended chatter borrowed from sophistics . We will also see that at the end of this riddling, it is not the firm virtue of criticism that invades us but a kind of opaque vertigo : Imagine set theory's having been invented by a satirist as a kind of parody on mathematics. Later a reasonable meaning was seen in it and it was incorporated into mathematics. (For if one person can see it as a paradise of mathematicians , why should not another see it as a joke?) The question is : even as a j oke isn 't it evidently mathematics?And why is it evidently mathematics?-Because it is a game with signs according to rules? But isn't it evident that there are concepts formed here--even if we are not clear about their applications? But how is it possible to have a concept and not be clear about its application?! In the Tractatus, the line followed is both more radical and more consistent . It comes down to desingulariz ing mathematics by identifying it with the vacuity of logic . The reasoning relies entirely on the fact that, 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein , Remarks on the Fou ndations
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according to Wittgenstein, a mathematical proposition is always an equation : "The logic of the world, which is shown in tautologies by the propositions of logic , is shown in equations by mathematics" (6 . 2 2 ) . But an equation says nothing about its two members , it is not interested in the question of whether it is the case or not. Thus , to establish an equation, we have no need to look at the world, which proves that mathematical propositions have no sense : "The possibility of proving the propositions of mathematics means simply that their correctness can be perceived without its being necessary that what they express should itself be compared with the facts in order to determine its correctness" (6 . 2 3 2 1 ) . For Wittgenstein , mathematics is a "blind" calcula tion in that it proceeds from equation to equation through the simple artifice of substitutions , without ever having to think anything at all . Statement 6 . 24 recapitulates this linguistic ("[in mathematics] language itself provides the necessary intuition" [6 . 2 3 3 ] ) , operational , and thoughtless view of math ematical progression : The method by which mathematics arrives at its equations is the method of substitution. For equations express the substitutability of two expressions and, starting from a number of equations , we advance to new equations by substi tuting different expressions in accordance with the equations . (6 . 24) 1 40

WITTGEN STEIN ' S ANTI P H l L O S O P H Y

Set theory in particular functions as an objection to this view on the topic, through the astonishing existential statements it demonstrates, especially regarding the infi nite. In the infInite, it is doubtful that one could reduce existence to "what is the case," to what can be "observed" as fact. Consequently, throughout his life, Wittgenstein will pursue the Cantorian theory with vigilant hatred, and this starting with the Tractatus: "The theory of classes is completely superfluous in mathematics" (6 .03 1 ) . I am not concerned with the aplomb of statements such as these. It is time to underscore that the concep tion of mathematics sketched out by Wittgenstein is light and indefensible . First of all , the essence of a mathematical proposi� tion is not the equation . The profound theorems belong to at least four types :

1.

2.

3.

Theorems of existence , particularly at a far remove from all logical reductionism . They raise the prob lem of a "non-worldly," or non-accidental, existence . It is up to ontology to accommodate such theorems , and not up to these theorems to disappear in order to safeguard an ontology. Theorems of power (like the one that , since the Greeks , establishes the existence of an infinity of prime numbers) . They raise the problem of infinite -being, which all philosophy must inte grate , rather than turning against mathematics. Theorems of decomposition (numerous in alge bra) , which establish that a structure can be 141

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thought as the product of simpler structures. They raise the problem of the unraveling of multiple being, of the non-independence of overlapping multiplicities (contrary to the elementary atomis tics of "states of affairs") . Theorems of presentation (like the one that shows that every Boolean algebra lets itself be presented as set algebra) , which raise the problem of the typical singularity, of the type of being that "repre sents" a concept.

Here we are at the heart of the thinking investigation of mathematics : questions about the suture of existents to their being, of infinity, of the composition of multi plicities , of typification . Calculation and equations are very important, of course, but they are only the second ary tracings , the experimental protocols , the expository guarantees for the movement of ideas. IfWittgenstein puts all this aside in favor of an algo rithmic and "empty" vision, it is obviously in order to conjure away the specter of a form ' of thinking that would by itself be trans-worldly, though capable of . exerting itself in the form of the saying. In fact, mathematics , represented as thought concerned with being itself, is a maj or obstacle on the path that leads to the ethical supremacy of the act. Briefly put: if there is thought in mathematics , then there is sense to Platonism . However, if there is one point on which the antiphilosophers Nietzsche and Wittgenstein agree, it is that Plato is abominable. 1 42

W I TT G E N ST E I N ' S A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y

In this sense, mathematics (aside from its purely logical caricature) is more than just an error of thought. It is thought's sin . Besides , this is exactly what Wittgenstein will write in the 1 940s : "There is no reli gious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."2 To identify mathematics with logic means above all to take all necessary precautions so as to set aside the sinful temptation of believing in a thought of being. The fact that mathematics comes out as anemic and unre cognizable is of little importance in comparison to the salvific grandeur of "the mystical element."

2

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 1 ; quoted in Monk, p. 4 1 6 . 1 43

11

Let us now turn to the question of the "juncture" between being (substantial objects) and existence (the contingency of the world) . We argued that logic was involved in this , since it prescribes the "scaffolding" to the world, thus giving the (formal) laws of the world as world, of the possibility of the world . But if we search in the Tractatus for what comes closest to this question, it turns out to be purely and simply the subject. Why? Because Wittgenstein names "subject" that which is not one of the parts of the world, but its limit. And thus because , in a sense which is certainly difficult and oblique but also beyond doubt, the subject is the name if a Blobal "beina" if the existent. The problem then becomes that o f the problematic link between logic and subject. This did not fail to draw the attention of Lacan, whose entire aim is certainly to lay the ground for a (paradoxical) logic of the subject. Lacan 's sympathy for Wittgenstein is first of all that of one antiphilosopher for another. Lacan takes delight in the fact that "this Wittgensteinian operation is nothing but . . . the detection of philosophical 1 45

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crookedness."1 Now that's clear language ! And what does this crookedness consist of? It consists of the supposition that there is a metalanguage. For this is a supposition that philosophy . has not stopped making since Parmenides , and which always means wanting to be the Other of someone, to place oneself there where the figures of someone 's desire will be captivated . If I say "it is day," I announce by the same token that this is true (and according to Lacan, Wittgenstein has excelled in grasping this : the true as enunciative subjec tivization) . There is philosophical crookedness if I suppose that a metalinguistic necessity urges me to examine this assertion of truth in the form "the propo sition 'it is day' is true." Because then at once I obliterate sense, which is that the assertion "it is day," announcing itself as true, comes off as a subjective tactic, invested by my desire to pronounce it. The philosophical meta language, which puts the proposition in quotation marks , pretends as if one could refer the enunciative function of the true to the "objectivity" of what is enun ciated , which thus appears before the tribunal ofTruth. It dissimulates the subject's desiring eclipse in favor of a supposedly self-identical I, an I who is master, a crooked-I . Philosophy lives according to the regime of

[-cracy. Wittgenstein , though, absolutely repudiates all metalanguage . This is all too evident, since what can be shown cannot be said, and what can be said cannot 1

Lacan, The Other Side '?fP9'choanalysis, p. 6 1 (translation modified) .

1 4-6

WITTGEN STEIN ' S ANTI P H I L O S O P H Y

be shown . This irreducibility forbids a saying to claim to be the Other of another (subj ectivized) saying : "What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language" (4 . 1 2 1 ) . Wittgenstein 's thought, in so dOing, opens itself to a theory of the subj ect subtracted from the crooked I-cracy of philosophy. In the Tractatus this theory of the subject goes from 5 . 63 to 5 . 64 1 . Statement 5 . 63 2 indicates clearly that it is a question of that which in existence somehow is its being: "The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world ." This (topological) metaphor tries to show the subject as irreducible both to the world (even though it is its global contour) and to substance (even though, situated outside the world, it is necessary for it to have its "inexistent" being within it) . This is why Wittgenstein does not hesitate to call it a "metaphysical" subject, so as to oppose it to the subject that psychology treats. This metaphysical subject is unique (besides, if it were multiple, it would have to be discernible from the others , and thus situ ated in the world) . This is the solipsist thesis : "What the solipsist means is quite correct" ( 5 . 62 ) . The unicity of the subject is coextensive with that of the world ("I am my world" [5 . 63]) , and it is "existent," articulated , only by the world . One would then expect logic , which is the prescrip tion of the world-form , and subject, which is the name of the unicity of the world, to be tied together. For them to be tied as the "reason" of that which, of being, 1 47

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lets itself be thought in existence. And consequently one would wish, with a desire that is admittedly philo sophical , for the "sense of the world" to find at least its anchoring in a Jog ic if the limit, which would eluci date subjective solipsism from the angle of logical propositions. But Wittgenstein does not take this path. The reason for this is that the subject, even if it is the "limit of the world," essentially falls outside the world, so that it will find itself entirely on the side of the act and subtracted from the saying: "In an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book [the TractatusJ" (5 . 6 3 1 ) , whereas logic, even if it is also not a saying, nonetheless comes in the form of the proposition . Let us say that, for Wittgenstein, there is no subjective prop osition . Wittgenstein, it is true, has a strong grasp of the fact that the subject, as One-correlate to the world, must have disappearing as its being; that it must present itself as a vanishing point, so that only its articulation remains: the world. Statement 5 . 64 is very dose to Lacan, if one recalls that "reality" is in fact a set of propositions : "The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it." But unlike Lacan, Wittgenstein does not go on to produce a logical algebra of this vanishing, nor a topology of the limit of being/ existence that would be a little less distorted on the sole side of being. In this regard he is content with an image that cannot easily be developed . Nor does he engage with even that minimum of ontology, meant to 1 48

WITT G E N STEIN ' S ANTIPH I L O S O P H Y

support the algebraic and topological operations , to which Lacan ends up consenting despite his sarcasms. "Subject," in Wittgenstein, could have been the name for the paradoxical intersection between empty univer sality (logic) and the point of being that is the basis for existence (ontology) . He renounces this, thus sending logic back to a constitution ("Logic is transcendental" [6 . 1 3]) that, because it is a-subjective, remains entirely obscure . For if, under the name of the subject, there were any ontology of logic , one would have to consent that this "subject" be in part the motif of a thought. But Wittgenstein seeks to reserve this entirely for the silent act, even to make it central in a register-that of affect-essentially different from the theoretical : "Feeling the world as a limited whole-it is this that is mystical ." If one remembers that the subject is precisely a limit of the world , this must be understood as follows : the solitary feeling by which the solipsist subject is shown to me is a silent feeling. It must be that whatever of existence touches upon its being is a matter for the act, and not for thought.

1 49

12

To speak of the antiphilosophical act is obviously contradictory. What is more, one feels a certain (philo sophical) embarrassment for having to adopt a biographical posture to do so, since it is the living subject who personally bears witness to that which exceeds the world toward the unsayable transcendence of its sense . I will limit myself in this regard to a series of punctuations . 1 . The act is that by which a value manifests itself. It is thus what institutes a difference. For, in the world, there is no difference (all true statements have the same value , which means that they have none) . A value, which is also an instance of the sense of the world , ex-sists in the world as a particular element (opposed to the scientific element) which one will qualify as mystical . The act is the showing, without concept, of the mystical element. 2 . A value that is actively shown can be called God . Let us illustrate this point once more with a remark from a notebook of 1 930: "What is good is also divine .

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Queer as it sounds , that sums up my ethics ."2 The act is that by which the word "God" takes on a sense . 3 . The relationship of the act to writing concerns , not what is said, but the effect of what is said, which implies a deposing of the said . This is the sense of state ment 6 . 54, the next to last one of the Tractatus: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me even tually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them-as steps-to climb up beyond them . (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it. ) H e must transcend these propositions , and then he will see the world aright. The act, with regard to writing, is a discarding, a transcending. 4. The resources for producing, in writing, the effect of discarding or of transcending, which induce the possibility of the act, concern the art of writing, and not the saying as such. It is not enough to under stand the sense, since in the element of this understanding one must pass beyond sense, toward the Sense of sense. The act is thus archiaesthetic indeed, as the silent deposing of sense in and by the saying, but beyond the said . In his letter to von Ficker in 1 9 1 9 Wittgenstein writes 2

Quoted in Monk, p. 278 . 1 52


about the Tractatus: "The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it."3 Babbling is philosophy in its metaphysical sense. The opposition to babbling concerns simultaneously: •

•

The matter, which is rigorous , scientific , logi cal , in the service of sense (in the world) . The act, which is archiaesthetic , literary, in the service of Sense (of the world , of life , of the subject) .

In 1 9 1 2 , Russell notes (about the one who is still his friend) : "He has the artist's feeling that he will produce the perfect thing or nothing."4 This is not a feeling but an obligation (just as Nietzsche deemed it a duty to write a form of German of unprecedented beauty) . Because the act is induced, not from what the work says , but from its perfection . S. The effect of the archiaesthetic act must not concern thought or doctrine but the subj ect, which means life (or the world) seized from the side of its limit . This is why the act is in its element in Christianity. In the 1 940s : "I think that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless . That you have to change your life."s 6 . The capacity to change one 's life indicates actively that one is saved, which is anterior to all belief, 3

4 5

Quoted in McGuinness, p. 2 8 8 ; and Monk, p. 1 77 . Quoted in Monk, p. 5 7 . Ibid . , p. 490 . 153

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and thus to all doctrine. Because to be saved is nothing else than the upsurge of the act. In a notebook ( 1 937) : "First you must be redeemed and hold on to your redemption-then you will see that you are holding fast to this belief [Resurrection] . Then everything will be different, and it will be 'no wonder' if you can do things that you cannot do now."6 It is of the essence of the act to be anterior to salvation . 7 . The first sign of salvation is thus a decision that previously was unlikely, incalculable, and even "impossi ble."Thus, in the life ofWittgenstein, the decision to be a simple soldier during World War I; that of renouncing his heritage and of becoming a simple teacher in 1 9 1 9; that of leaving for Soviet Russia to be an ordinary manual worker. None of these decisions really ''holds''; none gives structure to a duration. Wittgenstein always ends up by being a professor in Cambridge, something which makes sense (for thought) and which is absurd, even disgusting, in light of the act. These decisions in fact function as the sign that one is perhaps saved. It is a matter of experienc ing what the subject, purified by the act, is capable of carrying. Not understanding, or knowing, or thinking, but carrying: "When I talked of courage . . . I meant: take a burden & try to carry it . . . . I'm not much good at carrying burdens myself. But still it's all I've got to say" (letter to Rowland Hutt, during World War 11 ) . 7 6 7

Ibid. , pp. 383-4. Ibid. , p. 46 1 . 1 54

WITTGENSTEIN ' S ANTIPHILO S O PHY

Mter the decision, the confession is the second sign of salvation. Like Rousseau, Wittgenstein, toward the end of 1 92 9, envisions writing an autobiography. As is shown in a letter to Moritz Schlick, this initiative is meant to produce a "clarity"; it is in itself a sign of the force of the act: "Something inside me speaks in favour of my writing my biography, and in fact I would like some time to spread out my life clearly, in order to have it clearly in front of me, and for others too. Not so much to put it on trial as to produce, in any case, clarity and truth."8 The biographical confession is not documentary, nor is it on the order of the judiciary "examination" (which would lead back to propositions and to "truth" in the worldly sense) . It is a production of light. By Christmas 1 93 6 , Wittgenstein has gathered several of his friends to hear his confession. The princi pal sin was , it seems , his brutality (very great indeed) toward children when he was a teacher, more than fifteen years earlier. And in fact (this is an instance of the unlikely decision, indicative of salvation) , he has returned to the Austrian village where he had taught so as to present his apologies to the children and their families. As a result he feels good ("First you must be redeemed") : "Last year with God's help I pulled myself together and made a confession . This brought me into more settled waters , into a better relation with people, an d to a greater serIousness.�

8.

.

8 9

Ibid . , p . 2 8 2 . Ibid . , p . 372 . 1 55

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The confession proceeds from the act, and not the other way around : "For ' consciousness of sin' is a real event."IO 9. From the point of view of the collective, the substance of the act is not political in the common sense of the term . The question of the forms of power leaves Wittgenstein indifferent. To a friend who evoked to him the total absence of freedom in Stalinist Russia, including for the workers , Wittgenstein answered with a shrug of his shoulders : "Tyranny doesn't make me feel indignant."H The act only calls for an archiaesthet ics of equality. Inequality is the ugliness of the world . It is solely in this sense that Wittgenstein is able to declare (to Rowland Hutt) : "I am a communist, at heart.m2 To fuse with others in the anonymity of service is what is superior. And the society that makes this possible, or even obligatory, for all, is the best. At bottom it is a question of generalizing the figure of the priest without doctrine. 1 0 . With regard to form, the text to which the Tractatus should be compared is Mallarme 's A Throw if Dice Will Never Abolish Chance. The affirmative and hier archical unfolding of propositions , the metaphorical tension combined with a mathematizing rigor, the latent irony of the figures, the absolute self-sufficiency and yet the reference to an "overcoming" of the Book: all these features bring together the two projects , both 10 11 12

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 2 8 . Quoted in Monk, p. 353. lbid , p 343 .

.

.

1 56


of which, though with opposite aims , attempt to pin down the disjunction between Logic and Chance, between being and existence. 1 1 . As for the content, the intimate alliance of a doctrine of language, a biographical impulse, the ante riority of salvation with regard to beliefs , the mystical element, an ambivalent relation to earthly loves, a trans-worldly theory of the cogito and of subjective purity, an attempt to subjectivize Christianity, and finally an abstract literary audacity, makes Wittgenstein into the long-term brother of Saint Augustine in the

Corgessions. 1 2 . Wittgenstein did not radically transform the

Church, like Saint Augustine ; nor poetry, like Mallarme . Beyond his poor existence-in effect equal to that of anyone else-all that subsists to bear witness to his act is merely its negative preparation . Of this perhaps inexistent act, it is possible, even likely, that nothing remains that is capable of animating a subject. Of that which should overcome thought, only the thought is secured and transmissible . Henceforth Wittgenstein the antiphilosopher is deliv ered over to philosophy. Remarks Throughout this text I have used the translation of the Tractatus Log ico-Philosophicus attempted by E tienne Balibar, in 1 990 , for the students of the University of Paris - I . I thank him very much for passing on a

1.

1 57

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photocopy to me, since this translation is still "unpublished ." 2 . My principal sources of documentation concerning Wittgenstein's life, diaries , notebooks , etc . , were : Brian McGuinness, Wittaenstein: A Life. founa Ludwia, 1 8 8 9-1 92 1 (Berkeley : University of California Press , 1 98 8 ) ; 1 3 and Ray Monk, Ludwia Wittaenstein: The Duty if Genius (New York: Penguin, 1 990) . 14 3 . Lacan's most important statements about Wittgenstein can be found in Book XVII of the Seminar if Jacques Lacan , The Other Side if P�choanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris : Seuil , 1 99 1 ) ; English trans lation by Russell Grigg (New York: W W Norton, 2007) . See especially the seminar of January 2 1 , 1 970 . 4. The number of books written on Wittgenstein is already gigantic , and everything leads one to predict that it will only continue to grow until breaking all records . In a certain sense, it is Wittgenstein who led the way, if one considers that all his "sayings ," piously recollected and edited after his death, are only-this is my opinion-glosses that are ultimately murderous on a single and powerful ecrit : the Tractatus. So the real measure to be taken , and this is illuminating for the antiphilosopher in general , is that of the relationship between the galactic mass of glosses and the thinness of the text. In order to inscribe myself into this .

1 3 Badiou uses the French translation byYvonne Tenenbaum, 1 99 1 . 1 4 . French translation by Abel Gerschenfeld, 1 99 3 . 1 58

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relationship, it would certainly be in bad taste on my part if I were not to declare, in conformity with a maxim l owe to Jean- Claude Milner (concerning, in his case, the pile of Lacanian glosses) : "All books on Wittgenstein are excellent."

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I

2 The Languages ofWittgenstein

I cannot describe Wittgenstein's languages in their materiality. This would require measuring whatever the English language inflicts upon the German, and think ing the gap between the Austrian singularity and its overdetermination by exile. It would require above all a detailed evaluation of the relationship, proper to every antiphilosopher but exacerbated in the case that concerns us, between oral transmission and written text. For Wittgenstein, there exists a didactic paradigm, a Socratic figure of urgency and authority, of which his wish to be a teacher-and, for some time, the very brutal realization of this wish-is the moral fantasy. The written language, beginning in the Cambridge years , is in its most intimate scansion marked by this paradigm . It is made up of notes, or annotations. Everything exists in the form of the notebook: Wittgenstein the instruc tor as his own schoolboy. I will therefore restrict myself to a more limited point. Let us say : Wittgenstein's rhetorics , or, the 161

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internal variation of a philosophical, or antiphilosophi cal , stylistics . That is , on the basis of this discourse 's arrangements , an examination of what is meant by the classical opposition between the two periods of his thinking (very crassly : one, the Tractatus, and two, the

Investigations) . This examination is already highly complicated by three factual observations whose banality must not obscure the extent to which they also consti tute the most essential point of entry into our question : •

•

There exists only one book overseen by Wittgenstein and published during his life time, which is the Tractatus. This book contains furthermore the clause about closure that is the famous statement of its preface : "On the other hand, the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive . I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points , the fmal solution of the problems ." Let us say that the only "book" by Wittgenstein explicitly states the uselessness of any other. It is , in conform ity with a dream that could well be called Mallarmean , the Book. The second text, the Investigations, cannot be considered complete or satisfactory, either in its own right or, even less so, in the eyes of its author. 1 62


•

All the rest belongs to the order of the docu ment. These are preparatory drafts for lectures , or notes taken during courses or talks . Or else anecdotes , interviews and morality tales , all very much in keeping with the style of ancient biographies .

Of course , even if this constitutes a limit of sorts (a single validated text, which is extremely brief and centered on j ust a few sentences ; all the rest, a construction site bordering upon orality) , we are also touching upon an eternal singularity : the always diagonal and uncertain status of philosophical writ ing. Jacques D errida has said some extremely important things about this , though marked by a polemical spirit against the pre - eminence of voice (which is where I take my distance) . It is indisputa ble that the philosophical strategy, as a strategy of mastery, has always privileged the oral face-to-face confrontation with those that it calls upon to become disciples (which means : to become , within thought, disciplined) . The discussion , the seminar, the school or the lecture course : these are the natural vectors for this task of rational persuasion . From Aristotle to Lacan , via a good portion of the Hegelian mas s , w e never know for sure who has written what we read under the most solemn proper names of our speculative library. We see only too clearly that what gives itself free rein , page after page , is the darken ing devotion of the fanatical disciple . And even when 1 63

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the philosopher proceeds intimately by way of the written , we observe the phenomenon of an infinite labor, a blackening of pages without any destination other than the interior advancement of the analysis , pages made illegible by endless rehashing or obscure rootedness in the maze of subj ectivity, as witnessed by the impotence we face in attempting to appre hend anything remotely resembling the complete works of Leibniz or Husser! ' The philosopher, most often , either leaves it to others to write down the words with which he has subjugated his audience , or sticks to the endless workbooks of a thought with out satisfaction . Let's say that philosophy's mother tongue is the lesson, or even the exercise, at best the manual (which is to the taste of Descartes) . The book, in the sense of the oeuvre, always comes second . The consequences of this secondariness of the book concern above all the syntax . The philosophical discourse-whether we are dealing with Aristotle, Descartes or Heidegger makes no difference whatso ever in this regard-is assembled with an eye on obtaining assent, which must be extorted even by antic ipating, as much as possible, the eventual objections. Whence a syntax that is always solid, in the sense of endlessly hitting the same nail or, to be more precise, of ensuring that, no matter how one holds the hammer, it is always the same nail that gets knocked in. In this regard, the more a philosophy declares itself "open," deconstructive, or even skeptical, the more rigorous 1 64

WITT G E N ST E I N ' S ANTIP H I L O S O P H Y

are the artifices of its brooding. There is nothing syntac tically more monotonous than the exhortations to liberate oneself from destiny or to undo metaphysics. Philosophy (no matter its otherwise trumpeted declara tions about the freedom of mind) organizes its discourse in such a way as to leave no opening through which heterogeneity might pass , nor any clearing through which deception could filter itself. But the semantic consequences are equally signifi cant . Words , no matter how ordinary they sometimes are (and , after all , God, or eternity, or the soul , or ideas , are utterly ordinary words) , always turn out to be displaced by their persuasive destination , assigned to torsions and unknown neighborhoods , since they must serve as standards for the universal rallying of minds . In philosophy, words take on an imperious and troubling sens e . They are both axiomatized by systematic effort and poeticized by rhetorical energy. And it is true that if they resist too much , new ones will be fabricated . Who does not experience , merely upon hearing the words "transcendental ," "actuality," "noumenon" or "objet petit a ," the paradoxical feeling of a promise of abso lute rigor combined with that delightfully contradictory one of an unfathomable profundity? The didactic destination of philosophy joins a syntax that is always tempted by mathematics to a semantics that is always tempted by hermetic poetry. It aspires in one and the same movement to crystalline univocity and to absolute equivocation . 1 65

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In the case ofWittgenstein, the syntactical effect of solidity is put to the test all at once by the Tractatus. It is a matter of producing an oeuvre without exterior (except that which, not being able to be said, cannot take the form of the oeuvre) . The syntax of the Tractatus, as infinite solidity, derives from two principles: •

•

A principle of integral affirmation . There is practically not a single interrogative sentence in the entire text . It is the opposite of the Platonic rhetoric of astonishment , of doubt, of the aporetic dialogue , of the inter rogating suspens e . It is a stylistics of the aphorism , which owes its consistency only to itself. In this we can decipher a subj ective trait which , even while being taken up into writing in a completely different way, will . subsist and even amplify itself in Wittgenstein's subsequent thinking : it is what , if one is kind , might be called his aplomb ; and what , if one has the nerve of the psychoanalyst like Lacan , will be called his psychosis . That is , the certitude of being the organ of the True , often rendered impure by the conscience of being morally unworthy of such a function . A principle of montage, codified by the numbering. This is not a principle of argu mentative concatenation (there is nothing 1 66

WITTGENSTEIN ' S ANTIPHILO S O PHY

that resembles a problem to be solved in stages , the style cuts to the chase by deciding everything in an instant) ; nor is it a principle of subordination , since for the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, all true statements are equi valent to one another. This is certainly a formal property of the calculation of statements , but more profoundly it means that in the realm of the sayable there exists no norm for measur ing the importance of what is said . In fact, the montage and its numerical ornaments desig nate a flexible rapport or assemblage of planes between what has a global value and what is merely a local illustration . This disposition of aphoristic planes spreads out between the world as a place of the sayable and the sense of the world as a place of the unsayable , or of the mystical element. The semantics of the Tractatus does not escape the rule of equivocal variation . Its paradigm is the meaning of the word "sense" (Sinn) , which circulates equivocally between the sense of the proposition (which is the eternal foundation of its possible truth) and the sense of the world, or its value , which can only be shown in the unsayable ordeal of an archiaesthetic (or, which is the same, archiethical) act. Finally, the syntactical principle of the montage, with its external paraphernalia such as the typical numbering and its appearance of internal rigor 1 67

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borrowed from the newly mathematized logic , is destined, as always in philosophy, to frame what supports the seduction and the rallying, which is the ineluctable semantic variation . In Wittgenstein's only book, every nomination is suspended by the montage between its side of truth (which is empirical or worldly) and its side of value (which is trans-worldly and rescinds the act of nomination itself) . This is why Wittgenstein's language is subjected from within to a terrible torsion. Let us observe first of all that the syntactical solidity, the idea of a definitive presentation of planes arranged between the sayable and the unsayable, the motive of what one might call an aphoristic completeness: all this is fmally conditioned by its inessential character, even in the eyes of Wittgenstein himself. Let us say that the presentative syntax is all the more complex and peremptory the more what is presented has no decisive importance for the author's meditation . Sure, all the problems are solved, but in order to show "how little is achieved when these problems are solved" (Preface) . What is essential is translinguistic , it is on the order of the act. For the act alone is that by which a value mani fests itself. In the 1 940s , when, as often, he is asked by a poten tial disciple to define a stable doctrinal orientation, Wittgenstein declares his belief that "sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your lye ." ! 1

Quoted in Monk, p. 490 . 1 68

WITTGENSTEIN ' S ANTIPHILOSO PHY

We could venture that this unilateral importance of "changing one 's life" is the side of Rimbaud in Wittgenstein , whereas the care given to the montage , the disposition of the page , the inessential solidity of the syntax , is his Mallarmean side . The Tractatus is a bit like A Season in Hell written in the form of A Throw if Dice. This shows the enormous pressure exerted on the text, as is immediately sensible to the reader, inas much as we never know whether we are really in the process of reading this text-what it means to read in the present circumstance-and whether what is on the page really belongs to the order of the "readable ." The properly unbearable side of this masterpiece , the proof of its uniqueness , of the absurdity of continuinB in this vein , or in this form , sheds some light , I think , on the ulterior renouncing of the solid syntax , the aphoristic completeness , and its replace ment by its exact opposite : the uninterrupted question without an answer, the question destined to provoke irritation , and not an assertion . This is what one might call the style of the bee : torment and sting. As always , Wittgenstein explains his inten tions : "Such a contradiction is of interest only because it has tormented people , and because this shews both how tormenting problems can grow out of language , and what kind of things can torment US . " 2 To put in place torment , so as to make clear 2

Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations if Mathematics, p. 1 20 . 1 69

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that the only inner peace , no matter how unlikely, is in any case guaranteed to stem from the act , and not from discourse . Wittgenstein's rhetoric thus passes from an impres sive but inessential solidity to an irritating, deceptive but essential harassment. The aplomb (or the psycho sis) that remains takes refuge in the much-flaunted relevance of the most evasive exercises. They will almost always begin with "We might say, for example . . ." or "We can imagine . . ." Let us give a typical example of this second rhetoric , of this swirling language : "How does one count in the decimal system?" "We write 2 after 1 , 3 after 2 , . . . 1 4 after 1 3 . . . 1 24 after 1 2 3 and so on ."-That is an explanation for someone who, while there is indeed something he doesn 't know, does under stand "and so on ." And understanding it means not understanding it as an abbreviation : it does not mean that he now sees a much longer series in his mind than that of my examples . That he understands it comes out in his now making certain applications , in his saying this and acting so in particular cases . "How do we count in the decimal system?" . . . . . . . . . -Now is that not an answer?-But it isn't for someone who did not understand the "and so on ."-But may our explanation not have made it intelligible to him? May he not, through it, have got hold of the idea of the rule?-Ask yourself 1 70

WITT GEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHI L O S O P H Y

what are the criteria for his having got hold of the idea now. What is it that compels me?-the expression of the rule?-Yes, once I have been educated in this way. But can I say it compels me to follow it? Yes : if here one thinks of the rule, not as a line that I trace , but rather as a spell that holds us in thrall . 3 Taken from one of Wittgenstein's most inexistent "books" (the Remarks on the Foundations if Mathematics, a posthumous mass of notes going back to the period 1 93 7-40) , this passage is not for this reason any less characteristic of the swirling, aggressive and retractile style of the "second period ." Between the questions that nobody would dream of raising, the paradoxical and promptly contradicted answers , the transforma tion of each answer into a question and vice-versa, the "concrete" examples that are especially abstract, the rhetoric of agitated uncertainty : in short, the hystericization of the whole discourse, pushing every supposed reader to the point of vertigo, which is also a trying accusation-the text in the end imposes less a position than a deposition, we could even say a capitu lation, which is the subjective essence of the essential hassle or harassment. For the aim is ultimately to estab lish that there are only rules , whose efficacy stems from anthropological particularities. This is why we 3

Ibid . , pp. 3 94--5 . 171

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can compare the logic of the sequence of numbers to "a spell that holds us in thrall ." The inessential solidity, which relies on a syntax of affirmation, was a hidden aphoristic assemblage whose ultimate guarantee was an ontology, namely, that of obj ects. The essential harassment is an anthropological disassembling of solid evidences , in favor of the contin gent plurality of rules and the eradication of all ontology. The languages themselves-without entering into too much detail-are also different. Wittgenstein 's first language is at bottom that of Nietzsche, a language of the great Noon of affirmation, whose signifying unity is the aphorism and whose paradigm is the quiv ering impassivity of the poem . It is a form of German that is both tortured and imperial . The second , highly marked by the didactic element and the perpetual inquiry, of which English is the underlying model , is a deliberately minor language, which holds any affirma tion that is overly solidified into the phrase to be a metaphysical impoliteness . This being said, are there invariants? Yes, there are . Are we always dealing with Wittgenstein, and in what sense? Yes , it is always a question of Wittgenstein the antiphilosopher. That is to say, in the final analysis , an adversary of mathematical pretension : an enemy of Plato. First, negatively : if one holds that no discipline can pretend to escape the anthropological dissemination, the ruled contingency of every constraint, then it will 1 72

WITT GEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHIL O S O PHY

be necessary to demonstrate with the greatest urgency that this indeed applies to that language which is most evidently inclined to imagine itself able to represent the universal necessities : the language of calculus and of proof. The core of the question consists in the dives titure of mathematics. This aim is present in the Tractatus and, ultimately, for the same reasons : mathematics , imagining itself capable of proposing to thought some thing like a pure language, is the rat's nest ofmetaphysical (read : Platonic) confusions . Consider for example the following: "There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics.'14 The conviction of the philosophically sinful nature of mathematics traverses all ofWittgenstein's styles. Then , positively : whether within the imperial aphorism or the didactic harassment, the fundamen tal value remains on the order of the act, and thus is subtracted from the play of judgments . This , too, is a constant, which designates the totality of what is said or written as being inessential . What is indicated in the anthropological dissemination of language games is the radicality of the ethical choice , which is without concept and for which, from one end ofWittgenstein 's endeavor to the other, only indeterminate words are appropriate : the mystical element, God , the divine . . . As a notebook entry from 1 930 declares : "What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds , that sums up 4

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 1 ; quoted in Monk, p. 4 1 6 . 1 73

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my ethics."5 The essence of life remains unsayable, for its stakes, its gravity, consist in "taking a burden and trying to carry it."6 Hence , what takes the place of the aphorism and its numerical spacing is of the order of the meta phor, or even of approximation pure and simple , since the ultimate value o f language oscillates between its ethical nullity and its anthropological relativity. Let us say that, syntactically, there can exist no rule of rules , and , thus , no univocal style ; and , semantically, since the absolute stems from the act , all significations are both rule -bound and free-floating. In a highly consistent fashion, the imperial stylistics of univocity is followed , but at bottom for the same reasons , by a writing style that accepts , or vindicates , that there i s n o rule for the use of words. The hassling is then something like an injunction without a law. Or: every ethical style is linguistically solipsistic , which means that language can be measured therein only by its immediate effects. I maintained that, in the Tractatus, the element of equivocation is always severely framed by the syntax . The second Wittgenstein suppresses the framing and installs himself within a free -floating methodology. The semantic drift is a maj or procedure of the style of harassment, which seeks to impose the 5 6

Quoted in Monk, p. 278. Ibid . , p. 46 1 . 1 74


anthropological dissemination of rules . This drift is finally supported by the equivalence of sensible constraints , the complete destabilization of words , and the abolition of the principle of non- contradic tion . The following is a typical example , still from the Remarks on the Foundations ifMathematics, in which we find an amusing reminiscence of the deceiving God of Descarte s : Could it perhaps b e imagined that where I see blue, this means that the object that I see is not blue-that the colour that appears to me always counts as the one that is excluded? I might for example believe that God always shews me a colour in order to say: not this. Or does this work: the colour that I see merely tells me that this colour plays a part in the descrip tion of the obj ect. It corresponds , not to a proposition, but merely to the word ''blue .'' And the description of the object can then equally run : . no t blue ." Then one says : the "·t · blue," and "·t I IS I IS eye only shows me blue , but not the role of this blue .-We compare seeing the colour with hearing the word ''blue'' when we have heard the rest of the sentences. I should like to shew that we could be led to want to describe something's being blue, both by saying it was blue , and by saying it was not blue . 7 7

Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations if Mathematics, pp. 207-8 . 1 75

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In the end, what Wittgenstein "should like" i s that the will to describe meet with no censorship. The breadth of the verbal effectiveness of an object description must be able to establish the equivalence of ''blue'' and "not-blue," inasmuch as it is never anything but a tran siently regulated correlation between what the eye shows and what the ear hears. But this nominal correlation between a will and a use is one of Wittgenstein's oldest convictions. For all that does not belong to the register of the unsayable act, one must keep within the limits of a descriptive pragmatics. To conclude, we will say that Wittgenstein's languages are arranged on the basis of three axioms. The first axiom , which governs the stylistic traj ec tory of every consistent antiphilosophy (Pascal or Rousseau as much as Nietzsche or Wittgenstein) , states : "Philosophy is not a theory, but an act" (4 . 1 1 2 , translation modified) . And , certainly, this act or activ ity is a speech act. For the silent ethical act has nothing to do with philosophy. It is the mystical overcoming of all philosophy. What Wittgenstein wants to tell us is that philosophy (that is to say, antiphilosophy, or antimetaphysics , it is the same thing) is a non-theoretical speech act. What is an active speech that does not get caught in the trap of theory, that repudiates the Platonic theorein? It is precisely that which is imposed by the linguistic variability, the rhetorics now of the framed aphorism and now of the metaphorical or comparative harassment. 1 76

WITT GEN STEIN ' S ANTIPHI L O S O P H Y

However, two other axioms regulate the application of this variability. Axiom 2 : "[Philosophy] will signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said" (4. 1 1 5 ) . Discursive solidity is the said presentation of the sayable . The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus sees its clarity in the adjustment of an ontology of obj ects and a logic of elementary propositions. The resulting language is an aphoristic logicism . But can we then truly signify the unsayable ? Or do we obtain merely the closed montage of onto-logy? This question leads Wittgenstein to replace the onto-logical disposition with an experimental anthropological pluralism , to replace the rhetoric of affirmation with that of the approximative hassling. But do we then not completely lose sight of the question of the One? Do we still know where to situate the place of empty words , God , the mystical , the divine-words whose refer ent, inasmuch as it is on the order of the act, is the only available value ? I t i s n o doubt at this point that axiom 3 comes into play : "I think 1 summed up my attitude to philosophy when 1 said : Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic comp osition " (a comment made by Wittgenstein in the 1 940s) . 8 A poetic composition is an assemblage that makes language say what it does not say, or that shows materially the unsaid of the saying. The place of the act is thus summoned at the edges of linguistic 8

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 2 5 . 1 77

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equivocation, as the unsaid resource of the latter's whole powerfulness . In order to clarify this "poetic" conviction, it is not excessive to compare Wittgenstein and Heidegger. For one as for the other, the poetic proposition installs language at the edge of the world and the sense of the world . And, above all, it functions for itself as its own linguistic activity, its own proof of power. Ultimately, there is no philosophical language . There is an oscillation between the clear presentation, of which formal logic is the paradigm (but logical propo sitions say nothing) , and the poetic composition, which signifies what cannot be said (but the poem , over powerful as far as the tension toward the unsayable is concerned, does not have the power to delimit what can be said from within itself, to say the frontier of languages as the frontier of the world) . To the onto logical articulation, Wittgenstein like Heidegger opposes the prophetic schiz of poetical-thinking. The Tractatus, according to a first style that is adequate for the clarity of the showing, finds support in the propositions and their montage. The second style, the bee style-torment and relaunch-follows diagonal lines of flight without logic or proof, suspending the rhetoric from the evasive form of the question and the question of the question. All this amounts to pronouncing that there is only one path, which indeed leads to nowhere. 9 The unconscious 9

An allusion to Martin Heidegger's collection of essays titled Holzwege 1 78

WITTGENSTEIN ' S ANTIPHIL O S OPHY

effect of this metaphysical pronouncement will be that at the point of nowhere there will resound the uncon taminated power of the emptiest word , which is God, or salvation . Caught in the ordeal of the excessive aphorism or the endless question, every antiphilosophy ends up in moral (or, which is the same, aesthetic) theology : only the saving act interrupts the critical chatter. As Wagner says at the end of Parsifal: "Redemption to the Redeemer."tO Heidegger in the words of his last will : "Only a God can save US." I I Wittgenstein , in 1 93 7 : "First you must be redeemed . . . Then everythinB will be different, and it will be ' no wonder' if you can do things that you cannot do now."1 2 At bottom , there are three linked theses about language common to both Wittgenstein and Heidegger:

1.

Logic says nothing, and mathematics is not a thought. Philosophy, therefore, as far as its

(Frankfurt am Main : Vittorio Klostermann, 1 950), in French: Chemins qUi ne menent nulle part, trans. Frans:ois Fedier (Paris : Gallimard, 1 96 2 ) . Literally, "paths that lead to nowhere." 10 See Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Waener (London : Verso, 20 1 0) , p. 1 4 1 : "There must be a redemption of the Redeemer himself, meaning the infinite reopening-by means of the arc of an invariant purity--<>f that which has closed up on itself. The story thus truly inscribes the i rifi nite and purity in the epic of Parsifal as constitutive of the character of Parsifal himself." 1 1 Martin Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us," in The Heideeeer Controver�, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1 99 3 ) , pp. 9 1 - 1 1 6 . 1 2 Quoted in Monk, pp. 38 3-4 . 1 79

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founding distinction is concerned, which is that of sense and of truth, cannot in any way have confi dence in the matherne-that language which is not a language . The poem signifies being, and registers the imma nence of the act. But it is only the guardian of this immanence, its composition in retreat. Philosophy as such, which is also the critique of the pure worldhood of the world, cannot identify itself absolutely with poetic speech . Salvation, which is of the order of an interior event within its own thought, must be attached to the semantic constellation organized by the word God, which is the word of the absence of words .

These three certitudes (all three of them anti- Platonic) clarify, I believe, the languages of Wittgenstein and what we can surely call their latent despair.

1 80

Index

the act

Conditions, 1 4 , 1 6 , 24, 3 5 Five Lessons on Waaner, 1 79n 1 0

and antiphilosophers, 28nl , 3 8--40 , 75-8 2 , 87-9 1 versus discourse, 1 5 1 - 1 5 7 , 1 70

"Lacan et Platon: Ie matheme est-il une idee?", 2 3 n 1 4

versus event, 5 8-62 , 5 8n2

LOOics cfWorlds, 1 9n9, 3 2n5

speech act, 1 76

"Logologie contre ontologie," 3 3n6 ManifestoJor Philosoph'y, 3n3 , 1 4n 3 ,

Alain Badiou: Philosoph'y and Its Conditions (ed. G. Riera), 37n l l

1 6n5 , 2 2 " O f a n Obscure Disaster," 1 8n8

Aleman, Jorge, 7n6 Althusser, Louis, 1 6n5 , 80-8 1

Anti-Christ, The (Nietzsche) , 74

Pocket Pantheon: Fiaures if Postwar Philosophy, 1 6n5

antiphilosophy I antiphilosophers and Christianity, 8 3-90

"The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself," 1 6n5 , 29n2 "Silence, solipsisme , saintete ," 35n8 Theoretical Writinas, 5 8n l

defmed , 1 6n5 , 2 7 , 62-64, 67-69, 74--8 2 Lacan and, 6-7, 7n6 versus philosophy, 1 1 6- 1 1 8 . See also

Theory if the Subject, 20-2 1 "Who Is Nietzsche?", 36n l 0

propositions

Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformatioru Oohnston), 5 8n2 BadiouJuera de sus limites (ed. C.

and psychoanalysts, 9- 1 1 self as subject, 5 3-54 stylistics, 1 76- 1 80

See also contemporaneity; sophistics "Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan"

Gomez and A . Uzin), 7n6

"Badiou without Zizek" (Bosteels) , 5 8n2 Balibar, E tienne, 65 Beine and Event (Badiou) , 5 , 1 3 , 2 1 , 2 2 , 1 05 n l Bosteels , Bruno, 1 3n l , 37nl 1 , 5 8n2 term translation note, 65-66

(Badiou) , 2 3 n I 4 archiaesthetic act, 3 8-39, 5 9 , 8 0 , 8 2 , 8 9 , 1 5 2- 1 5 3 , 1 67 Aristotle, 30-3 2 Badiou, Alain: works of "Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan," 2 3n 1 4 Beine and Event, 5 , 1 3 , 2 1 , 2 2 , 1 05 n l

"Can Change Be Thought?" (Bosteels) , 37n l l Cartesian cogito, 5-6

Casser en deux l'histoire du monde

Casser en deux 1'histoire du monde,

(Badiou) , 76n2

76n2

181

INDEX

Ecce Homo (Nietzsche) , 87 E cole Normale Superieure, 1 3 , 76n2

Cassin, Barbara on antiphilosophy, 1 4n3 , 2 3 n 1 4 , 63-64, 64n6

fcrits (Lacan) , 48n8

and linguistics /philosophy seminar, 70

"EI adversario y el doble en la filosofia de Badiou" (Gomez) , 7n6

on sophists, 1 4n 3 , 1 5n4, 2 3 n 1 4 , 30-3 3

"Ethics, Imagination, and the Tractatus" (Diamond) , 5 3n I 7 event versus act, 5 8-62 , 5 8n2

Cavell, Stanley, 42 , 5 9-60 Christianity and antiphilosophers, 8 3- 90, 1 1 4-- 1 1 5

Five Lessons on Wagner (Badiou) ,

Wittgenstein on, 74, 8 3-8 6 ,

Fonteneau, Franyoise, 48n9

1 79n l 0 Foucault, Michel, 1 6n5

8 8-9 1 , 1 5 3-1 54, 1 57 Cohen, Paul, 1 7n7-1 8 College International de Philosophie,

Freud, Sigmund, 5-9 , 9n9 , 2 1 -2 2 , 2 2n 1 3

2 3 , 70 Gomez, Carlos, 7n6

Comment ecrivent Ies philosophes? (Soulez) , 54n 1 8

Gorgias, 1 4n 3 , 1 5 , 1 8 , 2 3n 1 2 , 3 2 Guattari, Felix, 34n7

Complete Works (Plato, ed. J . Cooper) , 34n7

Conditions (Badiou) , 1 4 , 1 6 , 24, 35 Confessions (Rousseau) , 68n2 , 87 Confessions (Saint Augustine) , 1 5 7 Consequences '!! Pragmatism (Rorty) , 2 , 4 1 , 43nl , 5 8nl , 6 1 n4 contemporaneity, 2 5 , 27-2 8 , 36-3 7 , 5 8 , 67-69 Crary, Alice, 43nl "crookedness," 48-5 2 , 6 2 , 1 46 Culture and Value (Wittgenstein) , 82n3

Hegel, Georg W E , 5 8 , 5 8 n l

Heidegger, Art and Politics (Lacoue Labarthe) , 2n2 , 3n3 Heidegger, Martin, 2n2 , 3 1 -3 2 , 1 78 1 79 , 1 78n9, 1 79n l l Heraclitus, 69, 75

Holzwege (Heidegger) , 1 78n9, 1 79n l l "hontology" (Lacan) , 35 Hutt, Rowland, 1 54 , 1 5 6 II n'y a pas de rapport sexuel (Cassin) ,

"Deep Disquietudes" (Sass) , 1 3n l Deleuze, Gilles , 3 3 , 34, 34n7 Democritus, 30, 3 2 Derrida, Jacques, 1 6 , 1 6n5 , 1 63 Descartes, Rene , 5-6 , 7n7 mentioned, 42 , 69, 75 , 1 1 7 , 1 64 , 1 75 Dewey, John , 42--43 Diamond, Cora, 4 3n 1 , 5 3n 1 7

D!fferend: Phrases i n Dispute, The (Lyotard) , 1 4n3 Diogenes , 69 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 39, 84, 86

1 5n4, 2 3 n I 4 , 30-3 1 , 63-64 Johnston, Adrian, 7n6 , 5 8n2

Just Gaming (Lyotard and Thebaud) , 1 4n3 Kant, Immanuel, 7 , 42 , 43 , 96, 1 1 1 "Keeping Philosophy Pure" (Rorty) , 4 1 , 43nl Kierkegaard, Soren, 5 3m , 69, 7 1 , 8 3 , 87, 94, 95

1 82

I ND E X

EEthique du silence (Fonteneau) , 48n9 "L' E tourdit" (Lacan) , 30

Lacan, Jacques on 'the act,' 59 and analyst role, 3-5 , 2 3n l 4, 5 2 and antiphilosophy, 6-9 , 7n6 , 6 8 ,

Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore (ed . G . H . von Wright) , 86n4 logic. See propositions

74, 8 3 , 87

Loaics cifWorlds (Badiou) , 1 9n9, 3 2n5

Badiou on, 5-6 , 20--2 5 , 3 5 , 3 8-3 9 , 5 5 , 1 48-1 49

"Logologie contre ontologie" (Badiou) , 3 3n6

Cassin on, 2 3 n l 4 , 30 and Christianity, 8 3

Lucretian atomism, 98-99

"crookedness," 48-5 2 , 1 46

Ludwio Wittoenstein (Monk) , 84n l , 1 5 8

on Freud, 7-9

Lyotard, Jean-Frans;ois, 1 4n 3 , 1 6n5

"hontology," 3 5 , 35n8 'linguistery,' 20

Maddy, Penelope, 1 3n l

mentioned, I , 1 3 , 1 6n5 , 5 3 , 66, 67, 69, 7 1 , 1 36

Mallarme , Stephane, 5 3-54, 5 8-5 9 ,

on metalanguage, 49-5 0, 1 46

ManifestoJor Philosophy (Badiou) , 3n3 ,

157

on philosophers , 6--9 , 3 5

1 4n3 , 1 6n5 , 2 2

o n psychosis, 7-9 , 48 , 50--5 2 , 1 66 quote in waiting room , 8 8

Marx , Karl, 1 6n5 , 2 1 , 2 2 , 2 2n 1 3 Masseau, Didier, 7n6 mathematics

seminars, 4 , 8 , 9n9, 2 3 , 2 4 , 4 1 , 4 8 , 53, 158 on Wittgenstein, 8 , 4 1 --4 2 , 47-5 2 ,

propositions, 1 0 1 , 1 03- 1 06 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 3-1 3 2 , 1 34

54, 1 45-146 , 1 66

remainder in, 1 1 0-- 1 1 1 theorems, 1 4 1 - 1 42

"Lacan en antiphilosophe" (Soler) , 7n6 "Lacan et Platon" (Badiou) , 2 3 n 1 4

Wittgenstein on, 7 1 , I I I , 1 3 3- 1 34, 1 37- 1 40, 1 4 3 ,

Lacan with the Philosophers (conference) , 2 3-24

1 72- 1 73 , 1 79- 1 80

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 2n2 , 3n3

McGuinness, Brian, 65

language axioms (Wittgenstein's) , 1 76-- 1 78

"Memorial" (Pascal) , 68nI , 8 7

of mathematics /proof, 1 73 role of, 30. See also sophists/ sophistics "L' antiphilosophie" (Milner) , 7n6 "L' antiphilosophie selon Lacan" (Regnault) , 7n6 "Law against Christianity" (Nietzsche), 35n8 EIffet sophistique ( Cassin) , 1 4n3 , 2 3n 14 Leibniz, Gottfried, 97, 9 8 , 1 05 Lenin, Vladimir, 2 1 Les Ennemis des philosophes (Masseau) , 7n6

Miller, Jacques-Alain, I , 8n8 , 5 7 , 1 5 8 Milner, Jean- Claude, 7n6 , 1 5 9 misogyny, 95-96 Monk, Ray, 65 , 84n l , 1 5 8 "Monsieur A" (Lacan) , 7n6 mystical element and the act, 1 5 1 - 1 5 2 versus logic, 1 2 1 , 1 4 3 versus thought, 1 07- 1 09 and the unsayable, 5 5 , 90--9 1 , 1 00, 1 2 1 , 1 4 3 , 1 67 Wittgenstein and , I I , 5 1 , 80--8 2 , 9 3 , 1 7 3-1 74

183

INDEX

Perloff, Marjorie, 54n 1 8

New Wittgenstein, The (ed. A. Crary and

Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard) ,

R . Read), 43nl , 5 3 n l 7

60, 69n3

Nietzsche, Friedrich as antiphilosopher, 3 8-39, 6 8 ,

Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein)

68n l , 75-76 , 76n2

Cavell on, 60--6 1

archipolitical act, 3 8 , 39, 5 9 , 76,

idea o f the rule, 1 8

76n2 , 89-90 and Christianity, 8 3 , 8 5 , 89-90

Rorty on, 4 1 --42 , 45--47 , 47n7

Great Noon of, 24, 79

versus Tractatus, 1 9 , 4 1 --4 2 , 46, 70,

on philosphers, 34, 3 5 , 35n8, 3 6 , 74 on Plato, 1 43

1 62

Philosophy
and "remainder," 94 on the unevaluatable, 90, 90n9

Plato, 3 1 m , 3 3-34, 1 1 8

as Wittgenstein's predecessor,

Pocket Pantheon (Badiou) , 1 6n5

8 1 -8 2 on writing, 1 5 3 nomination, 1 07-1 09 "nonsense," 77-78, 1 1 2 , 1 1 5-1 1 6 ,

poetry, 8 2 , 1 08- 1 09 , 1 77- 1 78 , 1 80 propositions elementary and complex, 1 0 1 , 1 03- 1 06 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 3-1 3 2 of logic, 1 30- 1 3 1 , 1 3 3-1 36, 1 78

1 20

nonsensical, 5 3 , 5 3 n 1 7 , 1 1 8- 1 1 9

Notas ant!filos6ifias (Aleman) , 7n6

See also mathematics objet petit a, 4

Protagoras, 1 4n3 , I S , 3 2

Occam's razor, 5 2 , 6 3 " O f a n Obscure Disaster" (Badiou) ,

Prototractatus (ed . McGuinness,

1 8n8 "Only a God Can Save Us" (Heidegger) , 1 79n l l

Nyberg, von Wright) , 9 1 n l 0 psychoanalysts / psychoanalysis, I - I I , 20--2 4, 37, 42 , 50-5 5 , 1 66

Psychoanalytical Act, The (Lacan seminar) , 4

oral versus written text, l S I - I S 3 , 1 6 1 - 1 65

Other Side
psychosis, 47--48 , 50-5 2 . See also Lacan

8 , 35n8 , 4 1 , 47, 48n9 , 1 46 , 1 5 8 Parmenides , 3 2 , 75 Parsifal (Wagner) , 1 79 , 1 79n l 0 Pascal, Blaise and antiphilosophy, 6, 2 8 , 28n2 5 , 34, 69, 1 1 7 and Christianity, 8 3-84, 8 5 and mathematics, 7 1 mentions, 6 0 , 75 , 8 6 , 94, 1 76 and misogyny, 95 self as subject, 68n I , 87

"Radical Antiphilosophy" (Bosteels), 1 3n l Read , Rupert, 43nl Regnault, Frans;ois, 7n6 "remainder," 24, 94--96 , 98

Remarks on the Foundations
1 84

INDEX

TarryinB with the NeBative ( lizek) ,

Rimbaud, Arthur, 1 69 Rorty, Richard

7n7

on Cavell, 6 1 n4 on contemporaety, 5 8

TiitiBkeit (act) , 62n5 tautologies , 1 2 8- 1 29 , 1 30- 1 3 2

on Dewey, 42

terms, translator's note on, 65-66 Thebaud, Jean-Loup, 1 4n3

on Wittgenstein, 4 1 --47, 5 5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques , 6 8 , 68n2 , 8 3 , 94

TheoreticalWritinBs (Badiou) , 5 8 n l Theory cf the Subject (Badiou) , 20-2 1 , 22

Rue Descartes (journal) , 70 Russell, Bertrand, 8 6 , 86n4, 1 5 3

"This Philosophy Which Is N o t One"

Saint Augustine, 1 5 7

A Throw cf Dice Will Never Abolish Chance

Oohnston) , 7n6 (�allarme) , 54n 1 8 , 1 5 6

Saint Paul, 1 3 , 69 Sass, Louis, 1 3n 1

Tolstoy, Leo, 84

Schllck, �oritz, 1 5 5

Tractatus LOBico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)

Selected Letters cf Friedrich Nietzsche

and antiphilosophy, 1 6- 1 7 , 47-5 5 , 5 3 n 1 7 , 62 , 1 2 1

(ed . l trans. C. �iddleton) , 68nl , 76n2

Seminar cfJacques Lacan (ed. J -A

compared to �allarme , 1 5 6

Miller) , 8n8 , 1 5 8 "sense of the world," 1 1 2- 1 1 5 , 1 20

versus lnvestiBations, 1 9 , 46 , 70,

set theory, 1 3 9 , 1 4 1

propositions in, 1 2 1 , 1 39

"Silence, solipsisme, saintete"

"subject" in, 1 46-1 49

(Badiou) , 35n8 Soler, Colette, 7n6

"substance" in , 97- 1 00

1 62- 1 6 3

syntax of, 1 3 8 , 1 66- 1 69 , 1 77- 1 78

Sophist, The (Plato) , 34n7 , 1 1 8

translator's note on terms, 65-66 TwiliBht cfthe Idols (Nietzsche) , 9On9

sophists / sophistics and antiphilosophy, 2 2-2 5 , 34, 3 6 , 40, 4 1 , 48 , 75 Deleuze on, 34n7 modern sophistics, 1 3-20, 1 5n4, 1 8n8 , 44--45 and Plato, 1 3- 1 4 , 3 3-34 role of, 27-3 3 , 1 1 8 andWittgenstein, 1 8n8 , 1 3 8-1 39 Soulez, Antonia, 54n 1 8 speech act, 1 76 state of affairs , 98- 1 0 1 , 1 03-1 06 , 1 20- 1 2 1 , 1 2 3- 1 2 5 . See also propositions "subject," in Tractatus, 1 46- 1 49 "substance," in Tractatus, 97- 1 00

UnBlauben (Freud) , 9, 9n9 unsayable / sayable and Christianity, 84--8 6 "half-said" (Lacan) , 24 and mystical element, 1 9 , 5 5 , 80-82 Nietzsche versus Wittgenstein on, 89-92 and sense/nonsense, 1 1 5- 1 1 7 and writing, 1 5 1-1 5 2 , 1 66- 1 68 , 1 74-- 1 78 See also mystical element; poetry Uzin, Angelina, 7n6

1 85

INDEX

von Ficker, Ludwig, 9 1 , 1 5 2-1 5 3

on metaphysics, 1 4 3 , 1 46-- 1 47

von Wright, G . H . , 8 2n3 , 8 6n4,

in military, 73-74

9 1 n l O , 1 39n l

and Nietzsche, 74, 8 1 -8 2 , 8 3-92 , 1 43

Wagner, Richard, 1 79

and philosophy's legacy, 34-39

Welcome to the Desert if'the Real!

and Plato, 1 4 3 , 1 72

( Zizek) , 5 8n2

and science, 1 27 , 1 34- 1 3 5 and sophistics, 1 8n8, 1 3 8-1 3 9

What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) , 34n7

o n suicide, 86--87 writing style, 45-47 , 5 3 , 1 3 8 , 1 66-- 1 69 , 1 74- 1 80

"Who Is Nietzsche?" (Badiou) , 3 6n l O "Why I am a Destiny" (Nietzsche) , 8 7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Wittaenstein : A Life (McGuinness) , 158

and the act, 5 8-5 9, 1 5 1 - 1 5 7

"Wittgensteinian Anti-Philosophy"

o n Christianity, 74, 8 3-86, 8 8-9 1 ,

(Maddy), 1 3n l

1 5 3-1 54, 1 57

"The Wittgensteinian Event" (Cavell) ,

confession, 86--87, 1 5 5-1 5 6

59-60

and Heidegger, 1 78- 1 80

Wittaenstein 's Ladder (Perlo£!) , 54n 1 8 written versus oral discourse, 1 5 1 - 1 5 3 ,

Lacan on, 8 , 4 1 -42 , 47-5 2 , 54, 1 45 - 1 46 , 1 66

1 6 1 -1 65

language axioms, 1 76--1 80 on logic, 1 34-1 3 5 , 1 40 on mathematics, 7 1 , 1 1 1 , 1 3 3-1 34,

Zizek, Slavoj , 5, 7n7, 58, 5 8n2

1 37-1 40, 143, 1 72-1 73, 1 79-1 80

1 86

Badiou - Wittgenstein's Anti Philosophy (2011)

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