Alain Badiou, Logics of WorldsConclusion:

What is it to Live?

0. We are now in a position to propose a response to what has always been the ‘daunting’ question – as one of Julien Gracq’s characters has it – the question that, however great its detour, philosophy must ultimately answer: what is it to live? ‘To live’ obviously not in the sense of democratic materialism (persevering in the free virtualities of the body), but rather in the sense of Aristotle’s enigmatic formula: to live ‘as an Immortal’.

To begin with, we can reformulate the exacting system of conditions for an affirmative response of the type: ‘Yes! The true life is present’.

1. It is not a world, as given in the logic of its appearing (the infinite of its objects and relations), which induces the possibility of living – at least not if life is something other than existence. The induction of such a possibility depends on that which acts in the world as the trace of the fulgurating disposition that has befallen that world. That is, the trace of a vanished event. Within worldly appearing, such a trace is always a maximally intense existence. Through the incorporation of the world’s past to the present opened up by the trace, it is possible to learn that prior to what happened and is no longer, the ontological support of this intense existence was an inexistent of the world. The birth of a multiple to the flash of appearing, to which it previously only belonged in an extinguished form, makes a trace in the world and signals toward life.

For those who ask where the true life is, the first philosophical directive is thus the following: ‘Take care of what is born. Interrogate the flashes, probe into their past without glory. You can only hope in what inappears.’

2. It is not enough to identify a trace. One must incorporate oneself into what the trace authorises in terms of consequences. This point is crucial. Life is the creation of a present but, just like the world vis-à-vis God in Descartes, this creation is a continuous creation. The cohesion of a hitherto impossible body constitutes itself around the trace, around the anonymous flash of a birth to the world of being-there. To accept and declare this body is not enough, if one wishes to be the contemporary of the present of which this body is the material support. It is necessary to enter into its composition, to become an active element of this body. The only real relation to the present is that of an incorporation: the incorporation into this immanent cohesion of the world which springs from the becoming-existent of the evental trace, as a new birth beyond all the facts and markers of time.

3. The unfolding of the consequences linked to the evental trace – consequences that create a present – proceeds through the treatment of the points of the world. It does not take place through the continuous trajectory of a body’s efficacy, but in sequences, point by point. Every present has a kind of fibre. The points of the world in which the infinite appears before the Two of choice are like the fibres of the present, its intimate constitution in its worldly becoming. In order for a living present to open up, it is thus required that the world not be atonic, that it contain points which guarantee the efficacy of a body, thus lending creative time its fibre.

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4. Life is a subjective category. A body is the materiality that life requires, but the becoming of the present depends on the disposition of this body in a subjective formalism, whether it be produced (the formalism is faithful, the body is directly placed ‘under’ the evental trace), erased (the formalism is reactive, the body is held at a double distance by the negation of the trace), or occulted (the body is denied). Neither the reactive deletion of the present, which denies the value of the event, nor, a fortiori, its mortifying occultation, which presupposes a ‘body’ transcendent to the world, sanction the affirmation of life, which is the incorporation, point by point, to the present.

To live is thus an incorporation into the present under the faithful form of a subject. If the incorporation is dominated by the reactive form, one will not speak of life, but of mere conservation. It is a question of protecting oneself from the consequences of a birth, of not relaunching existence beyond itself. If incorporation is dominated by the obscure formalism, one will instead speak of mortification.

Ultimately life is the wager, made on a body that has entered into appearing, that one will faithfully entrust this body with a new temporality, keeping at a distance the conservative drive (the ill-named ‘life’ instinct) as well as the mortifying drive (the death instinct). Life is what gets the better of the drives.

5. Because it prevails over the drives, life engages in the sequential creation of a present, and this creation both constitutes and absorbs and new type of past.

For democratic materialism, the present is never created. Democratic materialism affirms, in an entirely explicit manner, that it is important to maintain the present within the confines of an atonic reality. That is because it regards any other view of things as submitting the body to the despotism of an ideology, instead of letting it roam freely among the diversity of languages. Democratic materialism proposes to call ‘thought’ the pure algebra of appearing. This atonic conception of the present results in the fetishisation of the past as a separable ‘culture’. Democratic materialism has a passion for history; it is truly the only authentic historical materialism.

Contrary to what transpires in the Stalinist version of Marxism – a version that Althusser inherited, though he disrupted it from within – it is crucial to disjoin the materialist dialectic, the philosophy of emancipation through truths, from historical materialism, the philosophy of alienation by language-bodies. To break with the cult of genealogies and narratives means restoring the past as the amplitude of the present.

I already wrote it more than twenty years ago, in my Théorie du sujet: History does not exist. There are only disparate presents whose radiance is measured by their power to unfold a past worthy of them.

In democratic materialism, the life of language-bodies is the conservative succession of the instants of the atonic world. It follows that the past is charged with the task of endowing these instants with a fictive horizon, with a cultural density. This also explains why the fetishism of history is accompanied by an unrelenting discourse on novelty, perpetual change and the imperative of modernisation. The past of cultural depths is matched by a dispersive present, an agitation which is itself devoid of any depth whatsoever. There are monuments to visit and devastated instants to inhabit. Everything changes at every instant, which is why one is left to contemplate the majestic historical horizon of what does not change.

For the materialist dialectic, it is almost the opposite. What strikes one first is the stagnant immobility of the present, its sterile agitation, the violently imposed atonicity of the world. There have been few, very few, crucial changes in the nature of

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the problems of thought since Plato, for instance. But, on the basis of some truth-procedures that unfold subjectivisable bodies, point by point, one reconstitutes a different past, a history of achievements, discoveries, breakthroughs, which is by no means a cultural monumentality but a legible succession of fragments of eternity. That is because a faithful subject creates the present as the being-there of eternity. Accordingly, to incorporate oneself into this present amounts to perceiving the past of eternity itself.

To live is therefore also, always, to experience in the past the eternal amplitude of a present. We concur with Spinoza’s famous formula from the scholium to proposition XXIII of Book V of the Ethics: ‘We feel and know by experience that we are eternal’.

6. Yet it remains important to give a name to this experience [éxperimentation]. It belongs neither to the order of lived experience, nor to that of expression. It is not the finally attained accord between the capacities of a body and the resources of a language. It is the incorporation into the exception of a truth. If we agree to call ‘Idea’ what both manifests itself in the world – what sets forth the being-there of a body – and is an exception to its transcendental logic, we will say, in line with Platonism, that to experience in the present the eternity that authorises the creation of this present is to experience an Idea. We must therefore accept that for the materialist dialectic, ‘to live’ and ‘to live for an Idea’ are one and the same thing.

In what it would instead call an ideological conception of Life, democratic materialism sees nothing but fanaticism and the death instinct. It is true that, if there is nothing but bodies and languages, to live for an Idea necessarily implies the arbitrary absolutisation of a language, which bodies must comply with. Only the material recognition of the ‘except that’ of truths allows us to declare, not that bodies are submitted to the authority of a language, far from it, but that a new body is the organisation in the present of an unprecedented subjective life. I maintain that the real experience of such a life, the comprehension of a theorem or the force of an encounter, the contemplation of a drawing or the momentum of a meeting, is irresistibly universal. This means that, for the form of incorporation that corresponds to it, the advent of the Idea is the very opposite of a submission. Depending on the type of truth that we are dealing with, it is joy, happiness, pleasure, or enthusiasm.

7. Democratic materialism presents as an objective given, as a result of historical experience, what it calls ‘the end of ideologies’. What actually lies behind this is a violent subjective injunction whose real content is: ‘Live without Idea’. But this injunction is incoherent.

That this injunction pushes thought into the arms of sceptical relativism has long been obvious. We are told this is the price to be paid for tolerance and the respect of the Other. But each and every day we see that this tolerance is itself just another fanaticism, because it only tolerates its own vacuity. Genuine scepticism, that of the Greeks, was actually an absolute theory of exception: it placed truths so high that it deemed them inaccessible to the feeble intellect of the human species. It thus concurred with the principal current in ancient philosophy, which argues that attaining the True is the calling of the immortal part of men, of the inhuman excess that lies in man. Contemporary scepticism – the scepticism of cultures, history and self-expression – is not of this calibre. It merely conforms with the rhetoric of instants and the politics of opinions. Accordingly, it begins by dissolving the inhuman into the human, then the human into everyday life, then everyday (or animal) life into the

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atonicity of the world. It is from this dissolution that stems the negative maxim ‘Live without Idea’, which is incoherent because it no longer has any idea of what an Idea could be.

That is the reason why democratic materialism in fact seeks to destroy what is external to it. As we have noted, it is a violent and warmongering ideology. Like every mortifying symptom, this violence results from an essential inconsistency. Democratic materialism regards itself as humanist (human rights, etc.). But it is impossible to possess a concept of what is ‘human’ without dealing with the (eternal, ideal) inhumanity which authorises man to incorporate himself into the present under the sign of the trace of what changes. If one fails to recognise the effects of these traces, in which the inhuman commands humanity to exceed its being-there, it will be necessary, in order to maintain a purely animal pragmatic notion of the human species, to annihilate both these traces and their infinite consequences.

The democratic materialist is a fearsome and intolerant enemy of every human – which is to say inhuman – life worthy of the name.

8. The banal objection says that if to live depends on the event, life is only granted to those who have the luck [chance] of welcoming the event. The democrat sees in this ‘luck’ the mark of an aristocratism, a transcendent arbitrariness – of the kind that has always been linked to the doctrines of Grace. It is true that several times I have used the metaphor of grace, in order to indicate that what is called living always involves agreeing to work through the (generally unprecedented) consequences of what happens.

The advocates of the divine, rather than of God, have long strived to rectify the apparent injustice of this gift, of this incalculable supplement from which stems the sublation of an inexistent. In order to fulfil this task, the most recent, talented and neglected among these advocates, Quentin Meillassoux, is developing an entirely new theory of the ‘not yet’ of divine existence, accompanied by a rational promise concerning the resurrection of bodies. This goes to show that new bodies and their birth are inevitably at stake in this affair.

9. I believe in eternal truths and in their fragmented creation in the present of worlds. My position on this point is entirely isomorphic with that of Descartes: truths are eternal because they have been created, and not because they have been there forever. For Descartes, ‘eternal truths’ – which, as we recalled in the preface, he posed in exception of bodies and ideas – cannot be transcendent to divine will. Even the most formal of these, the truths of mathematics or logic, like the principle of non-contradiction, depend on a free act of God:

God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore he could have done the opposite.

Of course, the process of creation of a truth, whose present is constituted by the consequences of a subjectivated body, is very different from the creative act of a God. But, at bottom, the idea is the same. That it belongs to the essence of a truth to be eternal does not dispense it in the least from having to appear in a world and to be inexistent prior to this appearance. Descartes proposes a truly remarkable formula with regard to this point:

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Even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily.

Eternal necessity pertains to a truth in itself: the infinity of prime numbers, the pictorial beauty of the horses in the Chauvet cave, the principles of popular war or the amorous affirmation of Heloise and Abelard. But its process of creation does not, since it depends on the contingency of worlds, the aleatory character of a site, the efficacy of the organs of a body, the constancy of a subject.

Descartes is indignant that one could consider truths as separate from other creatures, turning them, so to speak, into the fate of God:

The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures. Indeed to say that these truths are independent of God is to talk of him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject him to the Styx and the Fates.

I too affirm that all truths without exception are ‘established’ through a subject, the form of a body whose efficacy creates point by point. But, like Descartes, I argue that their creation is but the appearing of their eternity.

10. I am indignant then, like Descartes, when the True is demoted to the rank of the Styx and the Fates. Truth be told, I am indignant twice over. And life’s worth also stems from this double quarrel. First of all against those, the culturalists, relativists, people preoccupied with immediate bodies and available languages, for whom the historicity of all things excludes eternal truths. They fail to see that a genuine creation, a historicity of exception, has no other criterion than to establish, between disparate worlds, the evidence of an eternity. And that what appears only shines forth in its appearance to the extent that it subtracts itself from the local laws of appearing. A creation is trans-logical, since its being upsets its appearing. Second, against those for whom the universality of the true takes the form of a transcendent Law, before which we must bend our knee, to which we must conform our bodies and our words. They do not see that every eternity and every universality must appear in a world and, ‘patiently or impatiently’, be created within it. Since a truth is an appearance of being, a creation is logical.

11. But I need neither God nor the divine. I believe that it is here and now that we rouse or resurrect ourselves as Immortals.

Man is this animal to whom it belongs to participate in numerous worlds, to appear in innumerable places. This kind of objectal ubiquity, which makes him shift almost constantly from one world to another, on the background of the infinity of these worlds and their transcendental organisation, is in its own right, without any need for a miracle, a grace: the purely logical grace of innumerable appearing. Every human animal can tell himself that it is ruled out that he or she will encounter always and everywhere atonicity, the inefficiency of the body or the dearth of organs capable of treating its points. Incessantly, in some accessible world, something happens. Several times in its brief existence, every human animal is granted the chance to incorporate itself into the subjective present of a truth. The grace of living for an Idea, that is of living as such, is accorded to everyone, and for several types of procedure.

The infinite of worlds is what saves us from every finite dis-grace. Finitude, the constant harping on of our mortal being, in brief, the fear of death as the only passion – these are the bitter ingredients of democratic materialism. We overcome all

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this when we seize hold of the discontinuous variety of worlds and the interlacing of objects under the constantly variable regimes of their appearances.

12. We are open to the infinity of worlds. To live is possible. Therefore, to (re)commence to live is the only thing that matters.

13. I am sometimes told that I see in philosophy only a means to re-establish, against the contemporary apologia of the futile and the everyday, the rights of heroism. Why not? Having said that, ancient heroism claimed to justify life through sacrifice. My wish is to make heroism exist through the affirmative joy which is universally generated by following consequences through. We could say that the epic heroism of the one who gives his life is supplanted by the mathematical heroism of the one who creates life, point by point.

15. In Man’s Fate, Malraux makes the following remark about one of his characters: ‘The heroic sense was given to him as a discipline, not as a justification of life’. In effect, I place heroism on the side of discipline, the only weapon both of the True and of peoples, against power and wealth, against the insignificance and dissipation of the mind. But this discipline demands to be invented, as the coherence of a subjectivisable body. Then it can no longer be distinguished from our own desire to live.

16. We will only be consigned to the form of the disenchanted animal for whom the commodity is the only reference-point if we consent to it. But we are shielded from this consent by the Idea, the secret of the pure present.

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