Alain Badiou has arrived at what is perhaps the crowning moment of his
career. His magnum opus of 1988, Being and Event, was finally published in
English this year. His much-anticipated sequel, Logiques des mondes (Logics
of Worlds)—his first major philosophical work in eighteen years—appeared in
France in March. And in February, Century, transcriptions of the seminar
Badiou gave at the Collège International de Philosophie between 1998 and
2001, will be published in English translation. Taking advantage of the
occasion to revisit his ideas and their evolution, we invited Badiou once
again to join in conversation with Lauren Sedofsky, who interviewed him in
these pages more than a decade ago (“Being by Numbers,” Artforum, October
1994). Sedofsky's introduction and a brief excerpt are below; to read the
rest of the text, pick up the November issue of Artforum.

Everything that’s abysmal in the present political situation somehow
conspired to make the recent publication in France of Alain Badiou’s
long-awaited Logiques des mondes seem like an urgent message to pick up our
conversation of twelve years ago exactly where we left off.

Philosophy, Badiou had said, can lead to disaster when it seizes truths in
the form of identity or fusion. Indeed, according to Badiou’s “protocol of
distinction,” it is not at all the vocation of philosophy to posit truth but
only to provide the conceptual framework for grasping the “conditions” in
which truths, truths in the making, manifest themselves—politics, science,
art, and love—the resuscitated Platonic conditions, which are strictly
nonphilosophical. Yet the demonstration in Badiou’s seminal text Being and
Event (L’Être et l’événement, 1988) reposed entirely on science (in its
paradigmatic form, mathematics), while its elaboration, one might contend,
had been inspired by politics. And now here was the second magnum opus, a
sequel to the first, eighteen years in the making, which once again
presented the same ambiguous conjugation of what is intrinsic and what is
extrinsic to philosophy. But how could it not? Fundamental to Badiou’s
project from its inception in Le Concept de modèle (The Concept of Model,
1969) was the recourse to mathematical formalization as the preeminently
contemporary (and ancient) alternative to the concurrent reduction of the
world to écriture but within a speculative account of how formalization
progresses—remarkable, therefore, as a rather ingenious yoking of Platonism
and materialism, mathematics and dialectic, or, to put a further slant on
it, as an intrepid attempt to affix the truths of a particular politics to
the thoroughly demonstrable ones of mathematics. Small wonder then that
Logiques des mondes, basically a work that treats the philosophical problem
of “appearance” by means of an area of mathematics known as category theory,
manages to emit the last wild howl of emancipatory politics and a craving
for the new on a very grand scale. But it is also ironic that Badiou should
have chosen to address democracy directly and declare himself its internal
adversary (as if anyone had ever doubted it) at precisely the moment when
democracy finds itself with other far more efficient internal
adversaries—those of the neoconservative persuasion. How could one resist
offering him the controlled forum of the interview format?

What had been truly startling about Being and Event was not its thesis—that
ontology (the science of being) and mathematics are the same thing, and
therefore being is nothing other than pure multiplicity—no, it was the
thoroughly compelling argumentation, the seemingly incontrovertible evidence
for it, once the axioms of set theory had been elucidated in an entirely
accessible way and paired with meditations on what philosophers had actually
said about being ever since Plato turned his attention to Parmenides (“For
it is the same thing,” the latter had written, “to think and to be”). Even
if it is universally acknowledged that set theory failed to provide a
foundation for mathematics, Badiou proved to have uncovered something else
in it: a veritable anthology of ontology, which permitted him to divorce
philosophy from the age-old problem of being (and put a stop, as he saw it,
to Heidegger’s interminable questioning) by assigning it in toto to the
incontestable intelligibility of mathematics. The protocol of distinction,
in this sense, had been enforced.

For the former Maoist and soixante-huitard under the triple influence of
Sartre, Althusser, and Lacan, though, there was a rub: If “what is” is
merely a secularized infinity, teeming with multiplicities, then how can
anything new happen? To accommodate change, Badiou elaborated a “theory of
the event”—no doubt the aspect of his thinking most congenial to those
involved in the arts and those of a particular political disposition. In the
wake of Heidegger’s Ereignis (the dynamic emergence of meaning), though,
what French philosopher could dispense with having such a theory? But
Badiou’s presented a kind of double drama (after all, he is also a novelist,
playwright, and adept of Mallarmé): How were heretofore undetectable
elements going to emerge, disappear, reemerge, and coalesce to become
truths, the always provisional, procedural, multiple truths of politics,
science, art, and love? And how, at the very same time, was the generic
subset, the set without particularities, somehow going to allow this
intrusion of dialectical thinking into mathematics?

What is positively astonishing about Logiques des mondes is not the
unsurprising parallel thesis—that appearance and logic are the same thing,
and therefore appearance is nothing other than a particular branch of
mathematics—no, it is the curiously discreet passage of category theory in
and around a massive application of the excursus. Through pages upon pages,
Badiou summons up or projects disparate worlds, each exemplary of various
traits of his logic: Spartacus and the slave uprising; Rousseau’s La
Nouvelle Héloïse; Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília; Mao and the Chinese peasants;
Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin”; the Quebec separatists and the Mohawks;
Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas; Sartre’s Le Diable et le Bon Dieu; Berlioz’s Les
Troyens; Kierkegaard’s Either/Or; Schönberg’s oeuvre; the Paris Commune; and
Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, among others. Nor does the overwhelming
didactic component end there: Studded with scholia, the work comprises, in
addition to the seven books of formal and conceptual exposition, a highly
revealing section of notes, “Information, Commentaries, and Digressions”; a
synopsis in the form of “66 Statements”; dictionaries of concepts and
symbols; an unusually personal bibliography; and, most pointedly, a
concluding chapter titled “What Is It to Live?”—a set of repeated
exhortations to “be incorporated” into a truth process or, in an explicit
retort to the book’s epigraph from Malraux lamenting the generalized
inability to believe in anything, to live for an idea.

The idiosyncratic flavor should not, however, obscure either the real
philosophical work or the polemics embedded in Logiques des mondes. What
Badiou is advancing is an objective transcendental, an a priori
configuration of categories—wrested from Kant’s subject, from his finitude,
his relativism, his rectitude (everything that Badiou abhors)—with
sufficient descriptive power to account for the “appearance” of a
multiplicity of worlds and their respective constituents. The consequent
reformulation of Badiou’s “doctrine of truths” and his “theory of the event”
does raise an issue deleted from the interview but worth mentioning here:
For all of the philosopher’s exhortations to “be incorporated,” it is
abundantly clear to anyone thinking through his thought, as it appears in
Logiques des mondes, that we are in a “world” of pure thought and the
“Immortality” or the “Inhumanity” that he proffers belongs only to the few
engaged in the unraveling of “Eternal Truths.” To my question as to whether
this was not, in the final analysis, an aristocratic idealism, Badiou
replied, “We must always think our world not only as the present situation
but as the general availability of all the orders of eternal truths, what we
can resuscitate, reactualize, and remake in this world from the heritage of
these truths and their unending consequences. Nothing is ever lost.” —LS

Lauren Sedofsky: The Platonic aspect of eternal truths is probably most
apparent in your comparison of the depiction of horses found in the Chauvet
Grotto with Picasso’s, though the invariant here somewhat eludes me.

Alain Badiou: We’re in an intermediate region between Plato and Hegel. If an
eternal truth can be appropriated by any world, including a world totally
different from the one in which it was instituted, you have necessarily to
think simultaneously something that is invariant and something that
constitutes a break. We know next to nothing about the Chauvet Grotto. But
it is often the case that we construct worlds from eternal truths. Many
worlds are known only because we continue to understand them. And what we
continue to understand of them is what they were able to create that has
eternal value. Picasso is an artist at the beginning of the twentieth
century engaged in a break: His horses are neither the figurative horses of
pompier military art, nor exactly pure abstractions, either. Nonetheless,
something in them communicates, visibly resuscitates the Chauvet Grotto
horses, belonging to a world thirty thousand years ago that has vanished.
Picasso’s horses belong to the eternal truths of the twentieth century, but
within the creative process something can be resuscitated, reappropriated,
reintroduced that, although not the same at all, remains recognizable as
having been created in a different world. When Rosa Luxemburg and her
friends take the name Spartacist Group, in order for them to refer to
themselves as Spartacist, they must fully understand that Spartacus and his
movement had nothing to do with what they are doing. The same and not the
same.

LS: This particular transtemporal conception summons up Aby Warburg’s
project but also the thorny issue of what Panofsky referred to as
pseudomorphisms, thereby raising the question of your view of historicism.

AB: Yes, Warburg might be interpreted this way. But be careful: I’m not
saying that there is a set matrix. For me, what subsists of historicism is
the manner of its approach: The configuration of a truth is made only with
the materials of a world. Thus, the body of truth is entirely internal to
that world. If you want worlds to be sequences of history, this body is
internal to a sequence of history, and not only in the temporal sense. The
body is made only with elements of a world; therefore, the materiality of a
truth is a worldly materiality, historical as soon as we call it “world.” My
antihistoricism pertains uniquely to the impossibility of integrating things
into an overall history, declaring that sequences of worlds, the disparate
of worlds, can be reconciled with or organized in a general dynamic.

LS: The genealogy you offer for the event of Galois’s algebra, for example,
which passes through Lagrange and Cauchy, would then constitute this kind of
internal worldly history.

AB: The world that saw the birth of algebra is an internal world. Geneses
exist absolutely because the body of truth itself is a genetic composition
that occurs in the world. Its genesis can certainly be thought.

LS: How does the eternal-truth model of art cohere with the other model that
you propose: the tension between the sensible and the clarity of form or, as
you state it more generally, the tension between formlessness and form?

AB: In both cases, it is a matter of introducing into form something that
wasn’t there. Artistic eventality in the order of drawing or painting
invariably occurs at the edge between formlessness and form; something that
wasn’t there will be presented as internal to the painting, that is, as
pictorial form. A century earlier, Picasso’s re-marking of a horse’s head
wouldn’t even have been recognizable as a horse.

Translated from French by Lauren Sedofsky.