Pathways of French thought

France has a way of periodically projecting intellectual superstars who then go on to dominate the world stage and become rallying points for various conceptual re-orderings of the landscape of the mind. One has only to think of such names as Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze. Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian by birth), Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Ranciere. We have now a new name that can be added to this academic hit-parade - Alain Badiou.

Badiou is virtually unknown in Sri Lanka; in Anglophone countries in general, it is only now that his importance is being recognized. Clearly, his stock is rising in the Anglophone world. More and more of his works are being translated into English, and critical and exegetical books on his formulations are appearing with an increasing velocity. Therefore, this is an opportune moment for us, in Sri Lanka, to explore his work and see whether there are any perceivable affinities of interests with some of our own distinctive preoccupations.

Alain Badiou is one of the foremost philosophers in France. He is also a social critic, political activist, a venerated professor, a novelist and playwright. He also has had training in mathematics, and draws on mathematical concepts such as Georg Cantor's (Russian-born German mathematician), set theory in some of his more technical works. Like Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant before him, he is deeply inspired by mathematics. Treatises like "Theory of the Subject," "Being and Event," "Infinite Thought," "Logics of Worlds" are technical in nature, and the average reader untrained in philosophy and mathematics will miss out on the full force of his argument.

On the other hand, works such as "Pocket Pantheon," "The Meaning of Sarkozy," "Ethics: A study of Evil," "Metapolitics," could be read by ordinary readers with profit. He was influenced by Sartre, Lacan and Althusser, but went beyond them in his unique quest for a rationale for an emancipatory politics.

His latest work, mockingly titled "Pocket Pantheon", is a relatively short pocket-size book that deals with 14 important French thinkers. These are talks delivered or essays written mourning their death, but he did not want to call them funeral orations. Some of the thinkers that he deals with such as Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, are familiar to Sri Lankan readers, while some like Borreil and Chatelet are clearly not. These essays are highly personal but deal with the central issues of each of the thinkers he has chosen for memoration. Badiou can be personal and passionate as for example when he comments on the fact that after Lacan's death, some of his sworn enemies were asked to write pieces on him.

"When not even death can silence envy, it really is a sign of just how barbaric our societies are all those psychoanalytic dwarves, all those gossip columnists, amplifying the mean cry, he was standing in my way, and now he is dead at last..." For those not familiar with Badiou, this is a good book to start from; some of the essays are very short. Another book that is relatively easy to read is "The Meaning of Sarkozy."

It is a scathing attack on President Sarkozy of France. In the second half of the book, Badiou lays out some of his central concepts which find more complex articulation in his technical explorations.

"Metapolitics" is another accessible book that the general reader can engage with profit. In this book, he makes the argument that the declared aim of contemporary thought is to jettison the idea that politics is only an object for philosophical reflection devoid of any truly radical and emancipatory potentialities. He feels that philosophers should have the courage to take important political decisions. He remarks that, "Metapolitics is the apparatus for attacking this arch complacency." Badiou was an active political thinker; throughout his life, he was deeply impressed by Mao Tse-tung's thinking.

In his earlier phase, he was an ardent supporter of Mao. His writings contain numerous quotations from Mao that he inflects in his own distinctive way. Commenting on Metapolitics, the eminent thinker Slavoj Zizek says that, it is a "book that aims at the very heart of politically correct "radical" intellectuals, undermining the foundations of their very mode of life." "Ethics; An Essay on the Understanding of Evil" is another book that the general reader will find stimulating. This is a meditation on the phenomenon of evil in society in relation to truth and ethics. For him ethics is what enables truth to persist; truth for him is the capacity for being true to something, of holding true to an ideal, principle or person.

His ethical approach serves to undercut some of the privileged concepts of deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists and students of cultural studies. He says, "the really important philosophical questions address the status of the same and not difference; differences are what are prevalent; sameness is what needs to be achieved through a disciplined pursuit of truth."

The concept of evil has been explored from diverse vantage points" theological, metaphysical, sociological and so on. What is interesting about Badiou's approach, to my mind, is his political gloss of the notion of evil. Globalization, capitalist modernity, the seductive face of neo-liberalism and what he terms capitalo-parliamentarism harbour evil that needs to be eliminated.

He has sought to locate good and evil in the very structures of human individuality and freedom.

A book of Badiou that I find particularly fascinating from the point of view of our interests in religion and literature and philosophy in Sri Lanka is "Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism." In this book, he focuses on the monumental efforts of Saint Paul to interpret the resurrection and give it a depth and plenitude of meaning that continues to reverberate throughout the centuries. Alain Badiou is a declared atheist.

However he focuses on the work of Saint Paul as a way of enforcing his central concepts of event- subject - truth process- fidelity. What is interesting from our perspective is the way in which Badiou selects religious narratives and imagery in order to advance his social vision of revolutionary social change and emancipatory politics. He sees Saint Paul as a theorist of cultural revolution.

This seventy-three-year-old philosopher continues to generate passionate agreements and disagreements among leading writers and thinkers. For example, the eminent British literary critic Terry Eagleton says that, "scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear-sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda." Badiou has launched a transformative new intervention, which deserves to provoke a persisting response.' Badiou's declared objective is to force thinking to pave the way for a better world and emancipatory politics. This idea of seizing is important for him. He talks about philosophy as the seizure of thought and politics as the revolutionary seizure of power. Philosophy and politics are intertwined and philosophy is the interventionist and effectual thought.

Why is the work of Alain Badiou relevant for us in Sri Lanka? Here, I wish to focus on a number of intersecting points. He presents a judicious critique of postmodernism. Many of the Sinhala writers are somewhat wary of postmodernism as an approach to arts and literature. Many of those who are quick to criticize postmodernism appear to be outsiders to the movement. But in Badiou we find a critic who is from the inside; after all, he says that his master is Jacques Lacan who is a leading figure in the post modernist movement. Hence, his critique is more credible and persuasive. Badiou makes a number of assertions that we should examine very carefully.

First, he challenges the linguistic determinism of the post-structuralists and post-modernists. While recognizing the supreme importance of language as a determinative force, he also appreciated the fact that language does not exhaust all possibilities. There are issues of human agency and politics that lie beyond the grasp of language.

This is an important and controversial line of thinking that I find very stimulating. Second, he places great emphasis on the idea of truth. Truth is a concept that has become suspect in the age of cultural relativism and social constructivism. What Alain Badiou is suggesting is that there is a set of universal truths, a set of principles that are applicable to all citizens. What is distinctive about his approach is that he sees truths as inescapably local and fundamentally subjective productions; however, through a set of procedures that he elaborates very studiedly, he points out how they acquire for themselves a universal applicability.

His desire to singularize his universal's merits closer study. Third, Badiou focuses on the idea of universality which is vitally connected to the idea of truth that I referred to earlier. Once gain, universalism is a concept that has been under fire from the postmodernist thinkers, and as a consequence has become a concept that harks back to an earlier faded period. The kind of radical universalism that Badiou advocates is different from the one espoused by Enlightenment thinkers; his is one closely linked to emanciapirory politics. Fourth, Badiou's privileging of Sameness over Difference invites deeper study. The idea of Difference has become a master concept in deconstruction, post colonial theory and cultural studies. However, Badiou challenges this concept. According to him, difference is what is ubiquitously available; what we should strive for sameness . As he observes, "for the real question" and it is an extraordinarily difficult one" is much more that of recognizing the same."

Fifth, the idea of event is important; it is something unique, one that disrupts the existing structures of thinking and behaviour. It invites universalizability and is linked to a political imaginary that can precipitate revolutionary change. He connects this idea of event with his other pivotal concepts such as truth "universality" fidelity and subjectivity. For him the Resurrection, the Cultural Revolution, May 68 uprising are such events. They form the basis for his political explorations. This concept of event, it seems, to me has great possibilities for literary criticism. I have not seen Badiou being invoked as much as he should be in literary analysis. Sixth, for those of us interested in literature, his writings on Mallarme, Rimbaud, Celan, Pessoa, Holderlin and Beckett can prove to be of immense value.

Badiou, to be sure, has his critics. Some say he is too Platonic; others say that he tends to argue in circles; There are those who accuse him of glorifying violence and betraying an excessive romanticism towards Maoism. He has also been accused of anti-Semitism. These charges need to be taken seriously. All in all, Badiou is a writer that we in Sri Lanka should engage with very seriously, although we may not agree with everything that he says.