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April 02, 2006
Beyond Polarity
Let's hope we do get to see à gauche's paper online sometime soon.
Obviously, I'm working long-term on much the same issues, perhaps more with an eye to defending Deleuze, through a reinterpretation of his work, from Badiou. But there is also need of a defense against some 'deleuzian' defenses which themselves don't really help Deleuze's case.
The assumption that Deleuze uses mathematics simply as a vindicating example for a pre-decided ontology, and the fact that the examples he chooses are, as he admits 'mathematically obsolete', is seen to necessitate an appeal to notions such as that of a ‘minor science’, proposing to revaluate such episodes in the history of science as moments in a dynamic process of imperial conquest by the mathematical bad-guys.
This account tends to transform implicitly Deleuze's continual engagement with the mutual intertwining of mathematics, natural science and transcendental philosophy into a vague, reiterated appeal for political resistance against a repressive ‘majority’ position, which in turn becomes a synechdoche for a general ‘enemy’ of ‘nomadic thought’. Thus in the final analysis, and despite the foray into mathematical territory, supposedly repressive intra-philosophical structures such as ‘the dominant history of Western Metaphysics’ remain the only perspective within which these mathematical problems are seen as significant. i.e. they lose their specificity.
Of course, it is this characteristically postmodern, and ultimately romantic, image of ‘nomadic thought’ indiscriminately using special cases from foreign disciplines to plead recognition for its ‘minorities’ for which Badiou castigates both Deleuze and Deleuzians, arguing that this conception blinds them to actual developments in mathematics which have profound ontological implications.
So, merely reiterating all the cognate dualisms of virtual/actual, nomad/state, minor/major, doesn't make a very strong case; more detailed work needs to be done on the specificity and origin of Deleuze's mathematical thought and the historical provenance of the examples he chooses (calculus, manifold). Then a defence can be made that puts D and B on an equal footing, as two heirs to the same philosophical heritage (20th century french philosophy of science, with its debt to the scientific-epistemological problems of kant and neokantianism, and thereby to Leibniz/Newton).
Any reading that conceives philosophy, as Badiou does 20th C. French Philosophy in that astonishingly simplistic piece in the New Left Review, as a series of polarised advocates of 'animal' and 'number', life versus concept, already concedes his point. What's interesting about Deleuze and Badiou, and the only thing that can possibly make for a fruitful engagement between them as opposed to an interminable polemic ("Bolshevik!"; "Fascist!"), is what they have in common: Badiou's strategic effort to polarise them is precisely an effort to suggest that there is, has always been, only one way to develop the historical intrication of philosophy and mathematics, and that any apparent difference in Deleuze's position is but a diametric resistance. Certain defensive moves end up tacitly vindicating this to some degree by assuming the polar position carved out for them. It may even be that we need to jettison certain comfortable slogans he provided us with, and be a little cruel to Deleuze (which surely wouldn't be a problem for him) in order to go beyond this stalemate.
There is a matrix (i.e., more than one-dimensional) of philosophical problems from which they both draw their inspiration - a broad 'continental' philosophical tradition for which the matheme's importance for philosophy was always a given, a core problematic (yes, even for Bergson...) and whose diverse efforts to articulate historicity and scientific truths, being and event, are so many obliquely-related vectors, constituting a rich field of possibility. With due attention to this, maybe it will be possible to rise to the valid challenges Badiou sets us, whilst simultaneously making an effort to clarify the illegitimate means by which he deploys them against Deleuze; and thereby open up this field again, beyond the tragicomic confrontation between a vitalist-affirmative donkey and a cold, stern mathematics master. "Yea! Yea!"; "ø! ø!".
Posted by robin at April 2, 2006 04:33 PM