Being by numbers - interview with artists and philosopher Alain Badiou - Interview

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Lauren Sedofsky

LS: Marxist from the outset, Maoist for a long time, would you accept the accusation of having yielded to a philosophical idealism?

AB: Not at all. To be an idealist you have to distinguish between thought and matter, transcendence and immanence, the high and the low, pure thought and empirical thought. None of these distinctions function in the system I propose. Actually, I would submit that my system is the most rigorously materialist in ambition that we've seen since Lucretius.

LS: Concerning the condition of love, is the event situated in the encounter of love or in Lacan's renovation of Freud?

AB: In the truth procedure that is love, the immanent event is the encounter of love. If I mention Lacan as a theoretical event, it's because Lacan represents psychoanalysis' contemporary time, when the question of love, in a modern form, has returned to the scene of thought as a real theoretical issue. Lacan tried to grant a quasi-ontological significance to the encounter of love. He inscribed love in its real terrain, the formula of sexuation. And he also tried to disentangle the extraordinarily complex web that ties and unties love and desire. For all these reasons, he made invaluable contributions to restoring love to its function as a truth procedure, a point that had been partially forgotten since Plato.

LS: You've found a generic set and truth inside the analytic situation.

AB: Until now, my interest in Lacan and psychoanalysis has been confined to showing that what I was saying in philosophy was compatible with Lacanian thought. In doing this, I was led to say a number of things about the situation of the analytic cure. But I've never resolved the issue of whether the analytic cure represents an independent, autonomous truth procedure. The difficulty is that there's something in the analytic situation that's analogous to the love situation. Transference, after all, is an encounter that is supposed to take the form of knowledge. Lacan himself was unable to clarify transference except by referring to the great philosophical works on love. The determination of the analytic situation's exact point of autonomy requires research on my part that is not yet complete.

LS: Sexuation enters your system as a radical disjunction between the fundamental Two. Expelling all pathos, you equate feminine jouissance with the structure of an axiom, and a woman with the generic function.

AB: Given my relationship to the axiom, it's hardly an insult to say that feminine jouissance is axiomatic. What interests me in feminine sexuality is its singular link to infinity. It's a quasi-ontological process, a test of infinity, that seems subtracted from the finite regime prescribed by phallic logic. I don't see how the irreducibility of this jouissance could be a source of any pathos whatever. That's the price of a deromanticization of infinity.

LS: How do you identify the unity of an pertinent for philosophy, what you call a "configuration"?

AB: In music there is a sequence that starts with Arnold Schonberg and renders the truth of the tonal system retroactively by proposing an essentially different figure of musical composition. This sequence has all the attributes of a truth procedure. The protocol of the break is grouped around certain works by Schonberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, the uncertain progressive protocol of nomination, dodecaphonic, then later serial music, and the labor of fidelity to that event. I would call this set a "configuration." It's not the work of an artist, or even of several artists, but a sequential constellation of works, inaugurated by an event and tracing a singular trajectory. In the investigation of art, we should completely abandon the notion of the auteur. Because of the encyclopedia, however, the auteur continues to paralyze our thinking.