Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels

Description

Stunning reassessment of Wittgenstein from France's most famous contemporary philosopher
Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the "linguistic turn" in modern philosophy and anatomizes the "antiphilosophy" of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein's thinking, Badiou refines his own definitions of the universal truths that govern his work. Bruno Bosteels's introduction argues that a continuing dialogue with Wittgenstein is inescapable for contemporary philosophy.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie politique
• Individual Philosophers
• Political
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of language
• Criticism
• Politics
• Jacques Lacan
• Friedrich Nietzsche

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788734639
• Langue: English

Extrait

WITTGENSTEIN’S ANTIPHILOSOPHY
ALAIN BADIOU
WITTGENSTEIN’S ANTIPHILOSOPHY
Translated and with an Introduction by Bruno Bosteels
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
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This paperback edition first published by Verso 2019
First published in English by Verso 2011
Translation and Introduction © Bruno Bosteels 2011, 2019
Published first in French as L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein
© Editions Nous, Caen, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-224-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-463-9 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-464-6 (US EBK)
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Typeset in Perpetua by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
CONTENTS
Translator’s Introduction
Preface
1 Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy
2 The Languages of Wittgenstein
Notes
Index
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 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy 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 abjection that lies in wait for psychoanalysis when it is no longer anything else than a pious hermeneutic. 1
At first sight, this would appear to be a story with a fairly straightforward moral lesson, one that furthermore could easily be transferred just as it is onto philosophy—certainly as far as the European philosophical scene is concerned. Indeed, many so-called continental philosophers 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 abject: “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 decided to plead guilty .” 3 Thus, just as psychoanalysis risks being reduced to a bland acknowledgement of the universal reign of the symptom in which each individual can be seen as passionately attached to his or her own trauma, so too philosophy—in the name of the 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—phlegmatic 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 psychoanalyst and the philosopher alike signals a remarkable intellectual forfeiture.
Upon closer inspection, however, the implications 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 clinical 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 or refuse ( déchet ), as Lacan was fond of repeating, most notably in his 1967–68 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 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 psychoanalysis, which is supposed to be a radical practice and potentially an even more radical theory of the intervening subject, is indeed reduced to the level of a pious hermeneutic.
Today, of course, there is no shortage of thinkers—Slavoj Žižek 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 precursor 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 dislocation, 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 complete rupture with Descartes. Lacan signals that he “does not misrecognize” that the conscious certitude of existence, at the centre of the cogito , 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 anecdote 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 recognize 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: “ I rise up in revolt , so to speak, against philosophy. What is sure is that it is something finite and done with. Even if I expect some rejects to grow out of it. Such regrowths are common enough with finite things.” 6 This antiphilosophical 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 considers philosophy a form of psychosis. More specifically, 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 [ manque à être ] of truth. We coul