The End: A Conversation by Alain Badiou and Giovanbattista Tusa's (review)

How does one access a major French thinker, the author of scores of influential books, many of which only recently are appearing in English? One route is through the time-honored genre of brief interviews. This short work gives casual English readers entry to Badiou's thinking through informal conversation with a thoughtful interlocutor. It also gives those familiar with his work a commentary on where that thinking is now, a cumulative retrospective as the French polymath (in his early 80's when this work came to print) nears the end of a stunning intellectual career that sought to carve out space over and against the post-modernists of his day.

The title of this work initially suggests one more end-of-philosophy discourse, something to which readers have no doubt become accustomed. After all, such discourses have been in play since Hegel, and have found steady employment, from Anglo-American thought saying that a criterion for meaningfulness had been found, which rendered ethics and metaphysics meaningless, to philosophy's having taken a linguistic turn to where all previous thought had been brought to an end or at least demonstrably based on mistakes that could finally be corrected. Philosophical fin-de-siècle narratives can be seen in everything from Wittgenstein's craving for the non-philosophical life to Derrida's views on the apocalypse. Philosophy seems to perennially stand before itself in the way Heidegger once claimed that Dasein stands before itself toward its end, in its own possibilities for being or not-being.¹ The 'end' is thus the name of an impossible simultaneity. If we have in fact reached the end, then we are no longer 'there'—but if we are still awaiting the rendezvous, then it obviously has not yet happened. Talk of the 'end' always triggers a radical sense of untimeliness, of ever happening 'now.' This paradoxically renders it of recurring value to our time, to now-time. For Badiou, after philosophy comes more philosophy, but a thinking nonetheless altered by the 'after.'² What does this philosophy so altered look like? It calls for the unthinkable within the order of the present, a questioning that puts any current order to the test.

In his first Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou had argued that philosophy had certain extra-philosophical conditions which are required for it to take place. The task was to assert the existence of philosophy against the attempts to declare its death by 'suturing' it to science (in the name of analytic philosophy and positivism); politics (Marxism); art (Nietzscheans and Heideggerians); or love (Levinasians, Lacan). By affirming the dependence of philosophy on these extra-philosophical conditions, the specificity of philosophy collapses, but a role for it nonetheless was to exist, namely to propose a unified conceptual space, opened from within these external conditions. Such conditions clarify and orient the task of philosophy proper, even in the concepts that philosophy internally employs, including those of being, truth, the subject, and the history of philosophy itself.³ Philosophy was ultimately then to think the 'compossibility' of its enabling conditions, so as to not be sutured with any particular one of them.⁴

Twenty years later Badiou published a second manifesto.⁵ Here he came to think that philosophy is not at an end, but that it is everywhere, fallaciously ubiquitous in its assimilation to capitalism.⁶ Philosophy must go beyond thinking the systematic compossibility of its conditions by engaging in a de-moralising, a de-stabilizing of dominant opinion.⁷ Such de-stablizations come in the form of truth-events, severe interruptions in various domains, discontinuous novelties irreducible to any immediate cause. Against the postmodern tides decrying truth-discourses, Badiou described such 'evental' moments in terms of the truths they manifest, and extrapolated to other sorts of happenings, which follow from their own immanent conditions. This was to hold open the possibility for something entirely new coming into the world, which would nevertheless invite the universal affirmation of that...