Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy by Alain Badiou (review)

The appearance of Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy provides the opportunity to deepen our understanding of Alain Badiou's groundbreaking work on the obsessive Austrian. Both thinkers mix high style with logical rigor and are recognized for having proposed radically different directions for philosophy.

For decades, Wittgenstein has been seen as the great exemplar of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy. Badiou has repeatedly accused Wittgenstein of initiating a century of sophistic language games that have done little for philosophy other than isolate its discourse and drain it of relevance. Arguably, this was Wittgenstein's aim all along. Yet Badiou has recently undertaken a more serious consideration of Wittgenstein's work, most notably, in Logics of Worlds, where he describes the latter as a "precious guide" in understanding the definition and function of the object (358). It is striking, then, to encounter the vehemence of Badiou's renewed attacks in his recent study, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy, where the Austrian philosopher is charged with everything from misogyny to having suffered from psychosis.

In this slim volume, Badiou's writing is more polemic than treatise, and yet he sustains a high quality of argumentation throughout. Long stretches of this book resemble Badiou's Theory of the Subject, which was based on a series of lectures. No surprise, then, that the two essays presented in Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy were drawn from heated discussions that animated Badiou's seminars of the early 1990s that focused attention on the phenomenon of "antiphilosophy." Bruno Bosteels's extended introduction places these essays in context, relating them to Badiou's evolving identities as "philosopher," "antiphilosopher," and "sophist."

The thought of Badiou the philosopher is identifiable here through the enunciation of his belief in the existence of some truths, and in his claim that there is a "regulated access" between being and "the intelligible" (137). Badiou the sophist recognizes, in turn, that philosophy provides this access through discursive propositions that are, at bottom, nonsensical. The sophist aims to deflate the kind of self-serious philosophical discourse that is elaborated through linguistic manipulation, which, he argues, empties the language of philosophy of its value and meaning. In Badiou's mind, this project has shaped a great deal of twentieth-century thought, from Derrida's to Lyotard's to Rorty's, and has led to the elevation of "language games, deconstruction" and the persistent "promotion of the fragment," which, he concludes, reduces all forms of coherent philosophical discourse "to shreds" (16). And yet the sophist fails to identify a clear line of attack; in his discourse, there is nothing independent of philosophy. Trapped inside his own language games, the sophist is condemned to a perpetual elaboration of rules, becoming progressively more removed from concrete reality. The antiphilosopher, however, is a considerably more menacing figure.

Drawing from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Badiou understands the antiphilosopher to reach the same conclusion regarding philosophy as the sophist. Their difference lies in the antiphilosopher's apparent rejection of philosophy as a worthy antagonist. The antiphilosopher positions himself outside of argument and, while condemning philosophy, announces instead the supremacy of the act. Such an act is invariably personal, if not altogether messianic. When Lacan, the self-proclaimed antiphilosopher, declares truth to be a "weakness," Badiou believes he means that psychoanalysis (Lacanian analysis) exposes not only the harmful effects of believing in such a thing as truth, but that it is able to identify the essential contingency of truth as it propels itself into the real (Lacan, 52). In other words, antiphilosophy demonstrates that "most propositions...written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless" (Wittgenstein 39). The question for the antiphilosopher pertains less to matters of "truth" and "falsity" than to the unspeakable real, the realm of subjectivity in which speech is suspended. Badiou shows that what philosophy and its "theoretical pretension" have missed is "nothing less than the real" (94). The task of the antiphilosopher is then to work through philosophy in order to demonstrate that its search for wisdom, truth and knowledge is doomed from the outset, a...