Fatal Repetition – Badiou and the ‘Age of the Poets’ with Appendix: ‘A Psychoanalysis of Alain Badiou’

Badiou, in his Manifesto for Philosophy[1], asserts that the ‘Age of the Poets’- a time-span begun with Hölderlin and completed with Celan – is no more.

This ‘Age’ – ‘period’ – inaugurated by Hölderlin, was first articulated philosophically by Nietzsche – and has been reproduced by all those who still remember and work in the philosophies from Kant to Derrida.

His solution is a pseudo-mathematicisation of philosophy[2] – his target is the trajectory of philosophy from the ‘subjectivist’ turn of Kant to the implosion of subjectivism in post-structuralism (even Wittgenstein falls under his hammer as the new sophistry) – and the philosophers along the way, from the romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger – these ‘philosophers’ give us the words of their texts, poetic memoirs of their own subjective experience, but not the ‘Truth’ –

The paradigm for this turn from language and a problematic subjectivity to ‘truth’ is the definition of philosophy of Badiou’s Plato. The disciplinary strategy is the establishment of a mathematical aristocracy as the gatekeeper of philosophy, as François Laruelle argues, in his Anti-Badiou.[3]  Indeed, in light of the fact that Badiou criticises analytic philosophy, in his ‘Philosophy and Desire’[4] for privileging a scientific and mathematical language that is inaccessible to the majority of the people of the world, why on earth would he privilege ‘set theory’ and the matheme in the way that he does? It seems to be a glaring contradiction.

The purpose of this essay is to place Badiou into question and to resist those who would wish Continental philosophy to acquiesce to the coronation of a rather derivative thinker who is merely an analytical philosopher in drag.

To read the rest, click Fatal Repetition: Badiou and the Age of the Poets

The Way That Is Not: Derrida’s Motif of Différance

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

—Friedrich Schlegel

The other, namely, that It is not,

and that something must needs not be, –

that, I tell thee, is a wholly

Untrustworthy path

For you cannot know what is not –

that is impossible –

nor utter it …

— Parmenides

Derrida introduces the motif of ‘différance’, the purposive misspelling of the word difference, for purposes of ‘strategy’.[1] The playfulness associated with its usage is meant to be disruptive, subversive and adventurous (note Beaufret’s third question to Heidegger in the Letter on Humanism, regarding turning philosophy itself into an adventuress).  Différance, according to Derrida, is neither a concept nor a word, but a motif which intimates a play that, he claims, is prior to Being, and the ontological difference between beings and Being.  This motif that is neither a word nor a concept is instead a trace of that which does not itself have being, or presence.  Derrida informs us moreover that he intends the essay with its nameless name to proceed through the intensification of the play of the sign which, with regard to our customary expectations, is a misspelling – or perhaps a child’s game of no immediately useful significance.

To read the rest of the essay, please visit The Way That is Not: The Motif of Différance.