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

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Lauren Sedofsky

LAUREN SEDOFSKY: The return to systematic philosophy today might seem archaic, if not impossible. How do you explain your conviction not only that the systematic thinking that runs through the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is still possible, but also that this architecture serves some purpose?

ALAIN BADIOU: Philosophy is always systematic. Naturally, if by "system" you mean an architecture necessarily endowed with a keystone or a center, then you can say, to employ Heidegger's vocabulary, that it's a matter of an ontotheological systematicity, and therefore no longer valid. But if by "system" you mean, first, that philosophy is conceived as an argumentative discipline with a requirement of coherence, and second, that philosophy never takes the form of a singular body of knowledge but, to use my own vocabulary, exists conditionally with respect to a complex set of truths, then it is the very essence of philosophy to be systematic.

The distinctive service that philosophy renders thought is the evaluation of time. The issue is whether we can say, and according to what principles, that this time, our time, has value. For that the systematic dimension is necessary. To my mind, it's one and the same question to ask whether philosophy can be systematic and whether philosophy can exist at all.

LS: Your project is strictly philosophical, "a thesis about discourse, not about the world."

AB: Absolutely. Strictly speaking, philosophy doesn't take the form of knowledge about the world. What's more, like Lacan, I'm inclined to think that the idea of the world is itself in the final analysis a phantasy. My project makes claims on the strictly philosophical, within a general logic of delimitation. Philosophy is irreducible to other forms of thought. And it should maintain this criterion of delimitation as one of its most precious possessions. The threat that has loomed throughout its history is a confusion between what philosophy is in itself and what it is not, for example political, or esthetic, or scientific discourse.

It should be understood that philosophy, in itself, has no object. It isn't and mustn't become a body of knowledge. Here I remain faithful to Louis Althusser, who was the first to have pointed this out with perfect clarity. What's astonishing is that the thesis "philosophy is philosophy" seems original today. However tautological, it's a militant thesis, and not at all accepted. We are in a period when philosophy is marked by doubt, or even by a conviction that it is extinct.

LS: The striking equation "ontology = mathematics" has the immense merit of eradicating the mystification that clings to the word "being." You've identified this choice as an exit from romanticism and a program for the death of God.

AB: We're far from having exhausted the consequences of the question of the death of God. The philosophical destiny of atheism, in a radical sense, lies in the interplay between the question of being and the question of infinity. The real romantic heritage--which is still with us today--is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that's both evanescent and sacred, and holds it in the vicinity of a vision of being that's still theological. That's why I think the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity.