[D-G] Celebrity Deathmatch: D&G vs Badiou

[Glen Fuller]

Hi James,

I think you may have something there. Two sides of the same 
enunciation. Badiou's militant is D&G's legislator-subject? Though I 
dunno if it is absolute deteritorialisation in either account, can you 
say more about this please. And what do you mean by negative and 
positive?

Something that bugs me about Badiou's approach is the question of 
scale. Why should an event necessary be on such a normatively 
miraculous scale? That is one difference between badiou's event and 
D&G's point of subjectification. I still don't understand how Badiou 
escapes from the problem of his militant's constant (micro-fascist) 
becoming-majoritarian or maybe it isn't a problem for him?

"The subject of enunciation recoils into the subject of the statement, 
to the point that the subject of the statement resupplies subject of 
enunciation for another proceeding." (ATP, 129)

This cyclical movement, resonating around a point (of subjectification) 
captures the active-passive swing (moving and being moved, ala 'tool' 
and 'weapon' of nomadology) between denotating a state of affairs to 
becoming expression. The self becomes its own 'state' (a simulacra 
of 'itself') that resonates with the State (or whatever vertical 
hierarchy in question). In this case the 'State' would be a closer 
approximation to Badiou's event. What I don't understand is how 
this 'State'/event is necessarily a good thing. Why can it not be lived 
by reactionary right-wing nutters as much as being immanent to the 
experience of exploited 'third-world' workers? Both experience a 
perceived injustice, the experience of injustice is collective, both 
can be mobilised into action, and so on...

If 9/11 could be considered an event, which fidelity to this event -- 
militant material practice -- axiomatises the truth of a universal? The 
neo-con response -- neo-colonial business as usual -- does not attempt 
to do this at all, but they deploy the conservative refrain running 
through popular culture synthesising heterogeneous affective elements 
into hegemonic stratifications. Is fear not part of the event? Which 
leads to the question, paraphrasing Deleuze from LoS, are the people of 
New York and the US not worthy of what happen to them?

Ciao,
Glen. 

PS Chris, I am still thinking about Massumi paper!


> Has the Badiou-Deleuze comparison died out?  In any case, I wanted to
> ask: has anyone noticed that Badiou's event seems similar to Deleuze
> and Guattari's "point of subjectification" mentioned, for instance, on
> page 127 of ATP?  It leads to the negative deterritorialization of a
> postsignifying semiotic.  Could one say that both Badiou and D&G are
> formulating the revolutionary potential of absolute
> deterritorialization, Badiou=negative D&G=positive?  Or is that
> pushing it too far?
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:09:18 -0500, Chapman <chapman0603 at rogers.com> 
wrote:
> > Glen, I've just read your post. It's given me much to chew on, 
Merci. I'm
> > going to take the wekend to find LoS and do some reading.
> > 
> > In the meanwhile I have to ask you if you've read 
Massumi's 'Involutionary
> > Afterward'? There he unpacks a bit of the virtual / actual 
relationship. To
> > be gross abt it, I think the distinction has to do with the 
difference
> > between two acts of interpretation: sorting out 'actual' 
differences through
> > forming royal analogies by noticing similarities that differ and 
empirical
> > veridity or the virtual differences held together by common 
analogies,
> > things that sample a common, measurable property.
> > 
> > I see you discuss traffic between the actual and the virtual in 
your last
> > post, intuit that they are in some manner connected and informing, 
but I
> > think that this passage / connection is still indebted to Lacan, a 
way of
> > entering into language as the subject making surplus? My gut tells 
me that
> > the 'passive syntheses of conjugation' necessary for the 'schizo' 
(good) is
> > in dismantling this connection between the actual and the virtual, 
allowing
> > them to run parallel and in themselves. I probably owe that thought 
to
> > Massumi.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Chris.
> > 

-- 
PhD Candidate 
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney

Read my rants: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/