Welcome back to the XG Reading Group!
Last year we spent the majority of lockdown reading Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. It was a trip. Now we’re back for 2021 but I’m personally hoping to forestall our diving into some blisteringly difficult and massive text, and I’m instead looking forward to reading a few shorter essays as one-off readings.
For our first session of 2021, we read Ray Brassier’s 2004 essay “Nihil Unbound: Some Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capitalism”. Not to be confused with his 2007 book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, this essay is instead taken from the collection Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter Hallward.
Thanks, as usual, to Wassim for providing this session’s titular pun.
Below, you can find my introduction to the session.
For my sins, I’ve been reading a lot of Badiou recently. In fact, I’ve been reading him for most of the pandemic.
After many years of tactical avoidance, I’ve found myself coming full circle, following a trajectory that I imagine is quite common — first, dismissing him out of hand for his unorthodox and heretical take on Deleuze, only to now appreciate the generative power of his militancy.
In reading Badiou, even (or especially) when you disagree with him, his provocations become sharpening stones for your own positions. This isn’t always the case — sometimes he is just bad — but at his best, and whether he is right or wrong, he moves thought forwards. It’s hard not to respect that.
Last night, I was reading The Adventure of French Philosophy for the first time. It might just be the perfect example of how his thought operates in this way. Here we have his infamous essay on the “potato fascism” of Deleuze and Guattari, among other striking polemics that are unlikely to convince many readers of his value, but Bruno Bosteels’ translator’s introduction frames Badiou’s provocations in the right way. He writes of a series of what he calls “constitutive polemical knots that give Badiou’s philosophy its distinctive orientation, tonality and feel”. For Bosteels,
one of this thinker’s greatest virtues — which to others might seem to be a defect, especially in his writing on other philosophers — lies in giving thought a decisive orientation by leading readers to the point where they must take a stand in one way or another. Each of Badiou’s knots, in this sense, begs to be cut. And the task of his thought — for example, in reviewing someone else’s work — lies in facilitating these cuts and in elucidating the consequences of choosing one knot and one cut — one act — over another.
It feels like a innately post-punk maneuver — a strange way to frame Badiou, I know. It makes me think of Phil Christman’s poignant essay on the Postcapitalist Desire lectures, in which he writes — in quite Badiouan terms, come to think of it — of Fisher’s fidelity to the event of post-punk:
not the loud, colorful, simple, proudly incompetent, and often nihilistic music known then and now as punk rock, but the strange and often foreboding music that came immediately after it, made by artists who occupied the space of possibility that punk had created by saying “No” to manners, taboos, and musical skill. Such artists — Joy Division, the Mekons, the Fall, the Raincoats, Wire — turned punk’s nothing into something, or many somethings.
Badiou’s thought feels very similar. It could be described as a kind of mathematical post-punk — his assertion that being is produced ex nihilo, making the void or zero his foundation — which is not a nihilism but a challenge to turn this the being of nothingness / the nothingness of being into a something. (For Ray Brassier, however, this is precisely what nihilism – a Promethean nihilism, at least – should be.)
Central to this is Badiou’s arguments against Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in his essay “The Fascism of the Potato” from The Adventure of French Philosophy. Here Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the multiple is confused. “Only a moron can confuse the Marxist dialectical principle ‘One divides into two’ with the genealogy of family trees concealed in ‘One becomes two’.” For Badiou, “in the dialectic two times One does not equal Two but once again One – the only Two worthy of the name being the essence in becoming of the One.”
Badiou’s way of thinking about this is via an amoeba. An amoeba divides itself into two. The tension here is between saying, is this division the production of two distinct amoebas or is it the amoeba cloning itself. Badiou thinks the latter — what you have is two of the same, not two that are different. Badiou compares this to how capitalism operates. When capitalism fractures and splits, is it producing difference or the same? For Badiou, again, the answer is that we are seeing sameness rather than difference. We are seeing the duplication of the finite rather than the Deleuze’s recombinant infinity.
The amoeba analogy is fitting, I think. It illustrated why materialism is important (and this importance is Brassier’s starting point). Relying on the deceptive identity politics that can result from multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is to leave yourself open to all sorts of complications, so Badiou insists on a materialism that does away with the apparent omnipotence of the One and instead insists on Zero or the void as his starting point. This is Badiou’s “subtractive ontology”. Being and truth, two central pillars of his philosophy, are names prostituted for all kinds of meanings and ideals. But being and truth, for Badiou, are instead those things left over when all presentation (and representation) is subtracted. It is a materialism that takes the voided matter of being very seriously. And that is why, for him, mathematics is the only way of exploring being and truth without ideological presentation.
This is Badiou’s mathematical Platonism, which asserts that there are mathematical concepts that are wholly independent of human being and language. It’s an assertion that is arguably similar to Nick Land’s fascination with numerology. “Counting always happens on the outside”, Land says in his essay “Mechanomics”, and Badiou would no doubt agree.
This surprising similarity between Land and Badiou is the implicit starting point for Brassier’s critique. Badiou does succeed in subtracting Presence from philosophical debate in order to get the truth, but he also inadvertently reveals the ground within which the seed of capitalism’s takeover was first planted.
From here, Brassier reintroduces Deleuze and Guattari back into the heart of Badiou’s thought. Their project becomes newly relevant to Badiou’s own, to the extent that, if there is a dialectic in the present, it is arguably Deleuzo-Badiouian, rather than Badiouian contra Deleuze. Brassier attempts to demonstrate, rather than Badiou refuting Deleuze and Guattari’s “potato fascism”, all he does is return to the very grounds of its generation, delineating, as he puts it, “the generic infinite’s composition out of the finite, and hence its immanence to finite situations.” This is affirmed, in his opinion, by the work of Gregory Chaitin, who demonstrates how “incompleteness” – arguably more analogous to Deleuzian infinity rather than Badiouian zero –
is far more than a marginal, metamathematical anomaly. It is a central, possibly even ubiquitous mathematical predicament. There are non-deducible, un-provable mathematical truths everywhere, quasi-empirical ‘facts’ that are gratuitously or randomly true and that can only be integrated by being converted into supplementary axioms.
I wonder if it is possible to convert this into cultural terms – perhaps similar to the genre-proliferation that defines postmodernism. The weird genres that have been birthed in recent decades, the “undecidable excess” of our voided cultural landscape, which are arguably supplementary sub-genres to the central cultural movements of the twentieth-century, are precisely the product of what was previously understood to be an anomaly coming quite explicitly to the fore. They are instances of capitalism, as Brassier puts it, converting “random empirical facts into new axioms” – or, rather, converting random experimental pockets into new pillars of cultural production. (A shaky analogy, admittedly.)
The production of these new pillars seems to emerge from nowhere, like radioactive mutants, Things, extremophiles crawling out of an otherwise putrid lifeless swamp, but that swamp is not a void. It is only voided of human influence. What lurks in there is, in fact, capitalism itself.
* * *
This hopefully introduces the stakes of Brassier’s essay, whilst saying very little of its conclusions. My central takeaway, which is broadly driving the research on my accelerationism book, is that, taken together, Deleuze and Badiou produce a matrix through which we might be able to understand the collapse of the distinction between punk’s New and post-punk’s New, albeit through a mathematical rather an cultural framework. I cannot claim to grasp many of those conclusions at present, and I’m also happy to be corrected on this introduction also, because, I must admit, it is hardly a confident elucidation on my part, but I’m hoping that, between us, we might be able to uncover a few of Brassier’s conclusions with more clarity.