Badiou/Heidegger

A couple of Badiouians wrote in today, claiming that (a) Badiou does engage with Heidegger sufficiently. But oddly, under pressure, one of them changed the subject and retreated to the contradictory follow-up positions that (b) maybe Badiou doesn’t really engage with Heidegger much after all, but Heidegger isn’t worth the trouble anyway, since Badiou blows him away in just a few pages, and (c) anyway, Badiou engages with Sartre, and since Sartre engages with Heidegger, that’s good enough.

This is simply Freud’s “kettle logic” at work. You want me to return the kettle I borrowed from you? But I never borrowed it from you. And anyway, it had a hole in it. And furthermore, I already returned it.

Translated into the present terms… You want Badiou to discuss Heidegger at length? Well, he already does. And anyway, even though he doesn’t, Heidegger isn’t worth it. And besides, he does talk about Heidegger indirectly by talking about Sartre. This is obviously very weak reasoning, and simply the work of a Badiou devotee who doesn’t want any questions raised about his hero, no matter how harmless.

I’m not sure the point of my earlier posts on this topic was clear enough, so let me try again. Consider the following series of statements.

True Statement 1: “Badiou acknowledges that Heidegger is a great philosopher.”

True statement 2: “Žižek acknowledges that Heidegger is a great philosopher.”

True statement 3: “Meillassoux acknowledges that Heidegger is a great philosopher.”

(I didn’t mention Meillassoux in my previous posts in this connection, but it’s worth doing so. He shares much in common intellectually with Badiou and Žižek, and certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath in terms of importance, as they have both recognized.)

True statement 4: “Badiou, Žižek, and Meillassoux all make rather strikingly insightful remarks about Heidegger at times.”

All right, are we all clear about that? You can find some powerful remarks about Heidegger in all three of these authors. They are smart, philosophically gifted people who are all widely read in 20th century philosophy.

Here’s True statement 5: “In the works of Levinas, Sartre, and Derrida, we find lengthy and explicit acknowledgment of the deep debts their own positions owe to that of Heidegger.”

Now, it’s time to generate a false statement. Here’s one…

False statement: “In the works of Badiou, Žižek, and Meillassoux, we find lengthy and explicit acknowledgment of the deep debts their own positions owe to that of Heidegger.”

It’s a false statement for the simple reason that this never happens in any of these authors. Let’s settle that point before becoming needlessly defensive about Badiou, as today’s correspondents did. I’m simply making a factual statement here.

Moreover, it’s neither a trivial factual statement nor a boring one. Three important contemporary philosophical authors spend relatively limited amounts of time discussing Heidegger despite openly recognizing his formidable stature. This leads me to one fact and one opinion.

Fact: Badiou, Žižek, and Meillassoux do acknowledge Heidegger’s importance. But deep down, they’re all a lot more excited about Hegel than about Heidegger. I’m not sure how this point can plausibly be challenged.

Opinion (my own opinion): As a consequence, none of these authors do sufficient justice to the way in which Heidegger makes things difficult for Hegel’s position.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Heidegger a full-blown and univocal realist, but the atmosphere of his philosophy is immeasurably more suited to realism than the atmosphere of Hegel’s philosophy is.

The consequences are as follows: Badiou’s position is very much an idealist position. Žižek turns out to be a full-blown idealist. Meillassoux is technically speculative realist, but as I argued in my book about him, his in-itself is not nearly in-itself enough, since it is fully convertible into absolute knowledge that might be had of it. As I have often argued, you cannot have a genuine realism if you also believe that absolute knowledge is possible, because you have no good way to account for why absolute knowledge of a tree does not turn into a tree. I won’t reargue the point here, but refer any interested readers to my book on Meillassoux (who is a tremendously good philosopher despite my objection on this point).

Presumably there will also be a chance to debate this a bit with Žižek this summer in Bonn. I’m not sure if I’ll have had a chance to read his mammoth Hegel book in full by that point, but I’ll certainly try to fit it in.