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  • Badiou’s Deleuze by Jon Roffe
  • Joshua Comyn
Badiou’s Deleuze. By Jon Roffe. Durham: Acumen, 2012. x + 196 pp.

Jon Roffe’s book is a thorough inquiry into Alain Badiou’s engagement with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The investigation is ‘prosecuted in the vein of an adversarial trial’ (p. 160), with Roffe attempting a concept-by-concept refutation of Badiou’s thesis on Deleuze as a philosopher of the One. The text with which he primarily engages is Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 (translated by Louise Hill)). Badiou’s contentions regarding Deleuze are, Roffe argues, not conclusions ‘drawn on the basis of a careful study of the latter’s texts’, but an ‘initial axiom [. . .] through which the material under consideration is examined’ (p. 5). Repeatedly, Roffe’s criticism of Badiou concerns the latter’s textual infidelity to Deleuze’s writings. Badiou, however, to take one example, is not unaware of the multiple/multiplicities distinction, maintaining nonetheless that it is ‘the occurrence of the One [. . .] that forms the supreme destination for thought’ in Deleuze (Badiou, Deleuze, p. 11). This question of textual fidelity is important. For one thing, it is not strictly speaking philosophical, a problem that Roffe himself addresses admirably, in so far as it concerns his own work (p. 160), stating that, while ‘we must judge Badiou’s Deleuze on the grounds of fidelity to the text, we must also reassert that there is a greater fidelity in question [. . .] the fidelity to philosophy itself ’ (p. 162). To what extent then, do (must) these two part ways? In Chapter 3 Roffe proposes that either Badiou has misunderstood the nature of Deleuze’s method, or that Deleuze does not have a fundamental method. Roffe then presents a third option — ‘that Badiou has recognized in Deleuze’s philosophy a method that the latter did not or could not admit was at work there’ (p. 38) — but immediately resolves this into a dilemma for Badiou: the incoherence that this final option implies for Deleuze’s work compromises Badiou’s own reading. But might not the coherence that Badiou finds in Deleuze be due in part to a philosophical fidelity that necessarily passes over inconsistencies in the text that may otherwise undo the work? If this were indeed the case, it would not be without (great) precedent. Roffe, for his part, is generally consistent in his aims to judge only Badiou’s fidelity to Deleuze’s text, and not to consider ‘the correctness of Deleuze’s philosophy, nor indeed that of Badiou [sic]’ (p. 160). One regrettable lapse is Roffe’s suggestion that the formal monotony of Badiou’s concept of event undermines its status as radical novelty (p. 126). But this ignores the framework of Badiou’s ontology in which the event introduces an inconsistency that contradicts the axiom of foundation. Besides, this objection to formalization is easily thrown back on Deleuze, for whom the eternal return is the ‘empty form of time’. And we ought, finally, not begrudge Badiou his wager of an actual formalization. These reservations aside, Roffe’s book is a deep and wide-ranging engagement with Badiou’s Deleuze, and a counter to the tendency towards the vulgarization of both these important thinkers. As such, it is a work that deserves to be read. [End Page 275]

Joshua Comyn
University of Melbourne
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