The beginning is the negation of that which begins with it.

F. W. J. Schelling

[…] [T]he ‘contradiction’ is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them […].

Louis Althusser, For Marx

The Italian storyteller Italo Calvino always saw Paris as a symbol of an elsewhere, the foreign city.² In Paris, he wrote, ‘I have my country home, in the sense that as a writer I can conduct part of my activity in solitude, it does not matter where, in a house isolated in the midst of the countryside, or on an island, and this country house of mine is right in the middle of Paris.’³

The characters in Calvino’s novels and short stories often exhibit a singular combination of asceticism and obstinacy, but this is always mysteriously combined with a tenacious curiosity for human beings and their contradictory situations, their peculiarities, their singularities. In The Baron in the Trees, Calvino tells the story of Cosimo, eldest son of the Baron Laverse of Rondeau. Following a quarrel with his parents over his refusal to eat a plate of snails, the twelve-year-old Cosimo decides to climb to the top of the oak tree in their garden – and never to come down again.

Cosimo’s parents are not particularly strict, but in spite of what is, all things considered, a benign family environment, he proves indefatigably stubborn in his insistence on following his own path, his own precise, albeit eccentric, way of being in the world.

The Baron in the Trees transports us to the eighteenth century, to Enlightenment Paris. Cosimo lives in the trees, but keeps up a fervent epistolary correspondence with Rousseau. At one point he even creates a library – also in the trees – which includes the volumes of D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedia. And it is to Diderot that he sends his Project for the Constitution for an Ideal State in the Trees.

Utopia, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the conjunction of philosophy with the ambient milieu:

[U]topia is what links philosophy with its own epoch, with European capitalism, but also already with the Greek city. […] [E]tymologically it stands for absolute deterritorialization but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu.⁴

Also utopian is the paradeigma (model) of Plato’s Πολιτεία (Republic), a book that sets out to discuss what Plato himself defined as φιλοσοφία περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπινα (the philosophy of human affairs), the model of a polis that does not exist anywhere in the world, as described in Book IX at the end of the dialogue:

I understand. You mean […] the politics of the city [πόλει] we were founding and describing, the one that exists in theory, for I don’t think it exists anywhere on earth.

But perhaps, I said, there is a model [παραδειγμα] of it in heaven, for anyone who wants to look at it and to make himself its citizen on the strength of what he sees. It makes no difference whether it is or ever will be somewhere, for he would take part in the practical affairs of that city [πόλει] and no other.⁵

Philosophical engagement is a strange sort of engagement: or rather, according to Alain Badiou, one that creates a strangeness or an estrangement. It is not the same as political engagement or civil engagement precisely because it is marked by this inherent strangeness.

Truth – which, for Badiou, is axiomatic and generic, foundational – posits its own conditions of possibility. They cannot be deduced from any premise, and are not to be confused with the mere coherence, correspondence, or verification found in ordinary logics. For Badiou, the notion of truth surpasses that which can be proved or demonstrated. It cannot be deduced: philosophy must recognize and declare its existence.⁶ Revolution, Badiou writes,

is that which takes another turn around – it is not an absolute beginning, but something that is swept up in the spiral of a new cycle. I believe the present must be represented as a declaration of being swept up, of that which is effectively swept up in the projection. The declaration – to use Mallarmé’s word, perfectly appropriate here – is the coextension of repetition and projection in this being-swept-up.⁷

In a certain sense, Badiou comes back to the notion of the authenticity of decision as detachment, as interruption of the anonymous continuum of Heidegger’s das Man. As described in Being and Time, das Man – ‘the They’ – is everyone in general but no one in particular. Although the very subject of the enunciation may include himself in it, it is never assignable to a concrete circumscribed reality that could possibly be opposed.

For Badiou, it is such an interruption that instigates the tearing [déchirure] involved in the passage from generic animal to subject. If there is no ethics ‘in general’, he writes,

that is because there is no abstract Subject, who would adopt it as his shield. There is only a particular kind of animal, convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject – or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject. That is to say that at a given moment, everything he is, his body, his abilities – is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path. This is when the human animal is convoked [requis] to be the immortal that he was not yet.⁸

In his book on Saint Paul, Badiou evokes a secularized formal conception of grace. Grace, ‘affirmation without preliminary negation’, is not a moment of the Absolute. Paul’s position is radically antidialectical, and ‘death is in no way the obligatory exercise of the negative’s immanent power’. Rather, grace is a pure encounter, and the whole point for Badiou is to know ‘whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time’s cruel routine, encounters the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through subjective division and beyond the human animal’s survival imperatives, an immortal’.⁹

Subjects are ‘points’ of truth, local occurrences of truth processes, particular and incomparable inductions. And, for Badiou, such a subject

goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its sole foundation [support]), [and] needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’. Let us call this supplement an event, and let us distinguish multiple-being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide a new way of being. Such events are well and truly attested: the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Héloïse and Abélard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical music style … . But also: the Cultural Revolution in China (1965–67), a personal amorous passion, the creation of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg … .¹⁰

The event is in a paradoxical position, then: it is situated, but at the same time it is also disconnected from all rules governing the situation.

At the very heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated void’: the event names the void ‘inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation’. As in the famous example that goes by the name of ‘Marx’, who

is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name ‘proletariat’, the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat – being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage – is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital.¹¹

Finally, Badiou concludes, ‘the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event’.¹²

Heidegger’s Abbau, Heidegger’s great ‘deconstruction’, is the disassembling of that which has been built on the beginning: in one and the same gesture, it weakens the edifice of the metaphysical tradition and founds the historical self-positing of this tradition, carrying philosophy to its extreme, to its extremities – to its confines, we might say.

According to Badiou, in ‘situating himself in a coming beyond of philosophy, a ‘thinking thought’ […] that will transcend the philosophical disposition’,¹³ Heidegger places philosophy under a more essential determination than itself: from the Heideggerian perspective, philosophy is destined or sent by a more originary and more essential disposition of thought than philosophy itself. The destiny of philosophy, and its capacities, must always be measured against that condition which is more profound and more decisive than it itself can ever be. The overarching idea of the great Heideggerian deconstruction, according to Badiou, is ‘that metaphysics is historically depleted, but that what lies beyond this depletion is as yet unavailable to us’.¹⁴ Philosophy thus remains imprisoned, ‘caught between the depletion of its historical possibility and the coming without concept of a salvational turnabout [retournement salvateur]. Contemporary philosophy combines a deconstruction of its past with an empty wait for its future.’¹⁵ ‘My basic intention’, as Badiou writes laconically in Conditions, ‘is to break with this diagnostic’.¹⁶

Tout va bien, a French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and which came out in 1972, depicts a factory strike in a post-May-’68 France, complete with a picket and imprisonment of the boss. Alain Badiou sees it as ‘an allegory of gauchisme on the wane’, a narration of the events that unfolded between 1969 and 1972, the political appraisal of an end, or even, as he insists, ‘the end of a beginning’.¹⁷

In a certain sense, Godard’s film asks what conditions must be in place in order for the new to emerge, in order for the world to be changed by the experience of popular struggles. For Badiou, it is the story of a veritable re-education of a petitbourgeois artist and a young woman through revolt and love.

And such ‘is the declaration of Godard’s film [… ] in its strange, timeless beauty’, he writes: ‘Tout va bien’ is ‘the attitude of those who organize themselves freely and are answerable to no one but themselves’.¹⁸

Many thanks to Isabelle Vodoz for her hospitality, and to Armel Hostiou for his images of the Conversation.