Abstract
This paper stages an encounter between the philosophical systems of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze specifically as these relate to the production of subjectivity, or what I call the finite/infinite relation. I attempt to demonstrate that for Badiou a bar of sorts between the finite and the infinite remains determining, whereas for Deleuze – and specifically with his actual/virtual couplet – this bar no longer operates. The paper is at times quite technical in its excavation of the systems in question; however, the introduction and conclusion foreground what is at stake in this confrontation: a certain militant orientation to that which is beyond the world versus an ethical and experimental attitude that is located firmly within the world.
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Notes
The present paper is part of a larger project concerned with what Felix Guattari calls ‘the production of subjectivity’ in which I explore various theorizations of the subject specifically in relation to time. Alongside the present Badiou/Deleuze encounter and a more general Guattarian trajectory, the intended book will examine the writings on aesthetics and ethics of Michel Foucault (technologies of the self) and Jacques Lacan (the ethics of psychoanalysis). It is perhaps worth mentioning here that the urgency of such a project follows from what Antonio Negri, following Marx, names the ‘total subsumption of capital’, or simply capitalism's colonization of all the spaces of being and increasingly of lived-time itself (see Negri, 2003).
My paper, ‘Pragmatics for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for Probe-heads’ (2006) involves a thinking through of one such concept in these terms.
It is to Deleuze's other key precursor, Spinoza, that we can look for just such a programme (precisely the Ethics). This will be the subject of a further essay but it is perhaps worth noting here two important differences to Badiou. First, with Spinoza, the infinite can indeed be prepared for (the conditions of its arising can be put in place albeit the arising itself is fundamentally ‘other’ to any efforts of the subject). This preparation, the Second Kind of Knowledge, being the key material of the Ethics. Second, the infinite can itself be experienced directly – this being Spinoza's Third Kind of Knowledge, an experience of beatitude, of ‘becoming-world’, that takes place outside space-time under the species of eternity. It seems to me that Badiou misses both these points in his reading of Spinoza in Being and Event. We might also look once more to Bergson here, and to his account of mystical experience, for although in Matter and Memory Bergson only posits, as a demonstrative technique, the existence of a someone who ‘experiences’ the pure image and the pure past (that is, a pure virtuality), in The Two Sources of Religion and Magic he describes the mystic as precisely someone who inhabits the gap (in this case in-between the fixed rituals of society) and thus accesses the infinite. This insight might only be temporary but nevertheless it can transform the subject who experiences it and indeed the world in which such a mystic actualizes. The important point here – as it is with Spinoza – is that the subject, as finite being, can experience the infinite directly even if only temporarily. Finally, in relation to the notion of preparation or a programme of ethics, we might also look to the late writings of Michel Foucault on ‘the care of the self’ in which Foucault explicates the ancient Greek understanding of the relationship between truth and subjectivity, namely that the former is only accessible to a subject who has worked on and transformed themselves – which is to say truth must very definitely be prepared for (see Foucault's The Hermeneutic of the Subject). For more on Foucault, Spinoza and Bergson in relation to the production of subjectivity, see my essay, ‘The Production of the New and the Care of the Self’ (2008).
References
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O'Sullivan, S. The strange temporality of the subject: Badiou and Deleuze between the finite and the infinite. Subjectivity 27, 155–171 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.5