I at first thought of calling this set of tributes to philosophers who are no longer with us ‘Funeral Orations’.
Now, I hold the view that neither death nor depression should be of interest to us.
Essentially a collection of obituaries for philosophers that the philosopher Alain Badiou has known and liked and/or argued with.
There’s a fair amount of Badiou writing about himself and fingering away at Marxism, Maoism and communism like fetishes. In many ways, it seems he never got past 1968. Badiou seems a peculiar figure: his philosophy adopts mathematics in various ways, but his grasp on maths seems to be primarily poetic and symbolic. He is also very much a part of the academe where philosophy went to die, which makes him a difficult read, even when he’s writing obits.
And thought is nothing more than a burning to a chaotic infinity, to the ‘Chaosmos’.
The section on Althusser is endless and nigh unreadable. I do not think Badiou meant a human reader to come away with the notion that Althusser turned bullshit-artistry into a tenured academic career.
Philosophy has no real object. It is not thinking about an object. The immediate implication of this point is that philosophy has no history, because any history is normed by the objectivity of its process. As it has no relationship with any real object whatsoever, philosophy is such that, strictly speaking, nothing happens within it.
But the other pieces have their fascinations. It shares with the non-fiction books I love the joy of scattering little nuggets of strange joy.
In The Differend, Lyotard repudiates the notion of Human Rights. Neither ‘rights’ nor ‘human’ are appropriate, he quite rightly notes. He also posits, again quite rightly, that ‘rights of the other’ is not much better. And he finally suggests, in a magnificent expression to which I bow, the ‘authority of the infinite’.
There’s only one woman in here, Francoise Proust, of whose thought he writes:
For once it is assumed that being is primarily power, the basic problem is to demonstrate that, far from being univocally on the side of the active force as such, creativity, inventiveness and the new are on the side of the activation of the reactive force.
And there’s a nice little thing here I want to save:
Borreil states: ‘the attention to the aleatory nature of a gaze that does not decide a priori what is worth looking at and what is not’.
Soft eyes. Letting everything in. I like that.
Mostly a very interesting little book, occasionally even charming, and salted with useful ideas derived from many people I haven’t read deeply on or in a few cases hadn’t even heard of. I have learned things.