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Badiou on Deleuze

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+  From: Michael Norman Goddard <m.goddard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+  Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 16:37:42 +1000 (EST)

I am presently reading Badiou's book on Deleuze (le clameur d'etre) which
I find quite fascinating and provoking. I am particularly interested in
the way he contests the idea that Deleuze's thought is some kind of
anything goes, cultural studies, democratic enterprise, reading Deleuze
instead as taking a very rogorous thought of the univocity of being to its
most extreme conclusions. Deleuze is for Badiou a classical philosopher in
this sense, a kind of ascetic of immanence, which Badiou claims is always
linked to the immanence of the one-whole whether it is referred to as the
virtual, the univocity of being, nonsense etc.

what intrigues me about Badiou's book is that I partially agree with this
reading of Deleuze in terms of classicism, rigour etc which if nothing
else is an antidote to tiresome repetitions of platitudes about desire and
revolution or minor literature or any other kind of watered down
libertarianism (I am mainly refering to the Cultural Studies (mis)
appropriation of Deleuze) radical posturing etc. However, in the same way
that Badiou argues that Deleuze turns Plato into a kind of straw target,
and that his anti-platonism is more like a repetition of Platonism (or
neoplatonism, see Alliez on Deleuze and Plotinus), I have a sense that
Badiou is doing the same thing to Deleuze. Certainly I would not contest
that Deleuze affirms consistently the univocity of being, or is influenced
by the (somewhat mystical) monistic tendencies of Spinoza and Bergson, I
am not convinced that reducing Deleuze's thought to the endless repetition
of the relation muliplicity of simulacra to the univocity of being, is
very productive. My intuition is that Deleuze is more interested in the
processes of becoming in their multiple events of actualisation than in
the whole or single event of which they are a part. (for Badiou, the
multiplicity of cases that deleuze refers to are nothing more than a ruse
to demonstrate the univocity of being of the one-whole).
Of course, Badiou is primarily interested in justifying his own
philosophical vision, which also aims to think the multiple/the event, but
without recourse to any virtuality, or any concept of the one. In a way
its a kind of Deleuziansim purged of any possible virtual or spiritual
elements, that aims to be a truer materialism, yet I wonder if it doesn't
thereby sacrifice the richest parts...I also wonder whether it is accurate
to say that the virtual is equal to the one-whole, and is not rather a
particular kind of muliplicity that is neither one nor many and that
Deleuze would cringe to see his thought reduced in this way...

any thoughts...


 
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