Alain Badiou’s Age of the Poets: The Desacralizing of the Poem

Alberto Moreiras (bio)

Abstract

This essay examines Alain Badiou’s claims concerning the historical end of what he calls “the Age of the Poets”: a configuration of thought that keeps philosophy sutured to poetry, which can never be the only condition of philosophy but merely one of them. The Age of the Poets stretches from Friedrich Nietzsche to Paul Celan, and Martin Heidegger becomes its major upholder and representative. For Badiou, undoing the poetico-philosophical suture is a condition of the freedom of philosophy. This essay proposes that Badiou’s liberation of philosophy from poetry is simultaneously a liberation of poetry from philosophy that makes a better encounter possible.

Who today would claim that he is equally at home in the essence of thinking and in the essence of poetry?

—Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?” (206)

Is it true? Badiou states: “Since Nietzsche, all philosophers claim to be poets, they all envy poets, they are all wishful poets or approximate poets, or acknowledged poets, as we see with Heidegger, but also with Derrida or Lacoue-Labarthe” (Manifesto 70). This provocation is the least of it, because Badiou’s main thesis is even more disturbing: “I maintain that the Age of Poets is completed” (71); “the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition” (74). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe responds gently but in a somewhat panicky tone:

Should poetry cease to be of interest to philosophy? Must we—as a necessity or an imperative—sever the tie that for two centuries in Europe has united philosophy (or at least that philosophy that is astonished at its origin and anxious about its own possibility), and poetry (or at least that poetry that acknowledges a vocation toward thought and is also inhabited by an anxiety over its destination)? Must philosophy—by necessity or imperative—cease its longing for poetry, and conversely (for there is indeed reciprocity here), must poetry finally mourn every hope of proffering the true, and must it renounce?

We would not be asking such a question, or we would be asking it differently, if Alain Badiou had not recently situated it at the very center of what is at stake today in philosophizing—in the very possibility of philosophizing.(Heidegger 17)

This discussion took place in the 1990s but is very much alive today, because we are on the verge of a new epoch of radical disorientation that, alas, has not been preempted by Badiou’s conceptualization: “it is no longer required today,” he said in 1989, “that disobjectivation and disorientation be stated in the poetic metaphor. Disorientation can be conceptualized” (Manifesto 74). Let me anticipate that the full philosophical expression of both “disobjectivation” and “disorientation” remains for Badiou the task of a reflection that cannot be passed on without a radical loss of thought’s potentiality to any of the so-called conditions of philosophy—that is, neither to poetry (or art) nor to politics, mathematics (or science), or love. Indeed, the very attempt to solve the problems of the present (of any given present, in exclusive or even overly dominant reference to any of the conditions that produce its truth) results in what Badiou calls a “suture,” whose undoing then becomes imperative for the sake of philosophy’s own freedom. Philosophy does not produce truths, because philosophy is not a truth procedure. It is, rather, a reflection on the truth procedures that define any specific age according to its conditions. Poetry, for instance, can produce its own truth, but poetic truth does not totalize or exhaust the possibility, or the necessity, of philosophy’s task. Undoing the poetico-philosophical suture restitutes philosophy’s freedom to think on the basis of its four conditions. (Of course the same can be said if the suture of philosophy under examination were politics or scientific procedure.)

Badiou’s work on modern poetry is extraordinary both in its rigor and in its capacity to abstract formal procedures from the poetic corpus under study. It is not to be considered literary criticism—it is something else. It is, precisely, the philosophical attempt to extract and explicate a truth procedure from one of philosophy’s conditions. But it has a polemical intent, which is what I study and present in this essay. We could summarize it as an anti-Heideggerian intent, and Badiou radically objects to what he calls the “sacralization” of the poetic word that seals in Martin Heidegger the void of an historical situation. This becomes explicit, for instance, as we will see below, in Heidegger’s essay on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, particularly in its introductory remarks on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (“Why Poets?”). But I would like to proceed slowly and cautiously in my own argumentation and not offer conclusions prematurely, not without having allowed readers to see for themselves. This calls for a certain architecture in my essay, which must rely heavily on Badiou’s own statements. I will first offer a reading of what Badiou says about Fernando Pessoa, for Badiou one of the major poets that defines “the age of the poets.” The presentation of Badiou on Pessoa leads directly to Badiou’s self-identification with a “metaphysics without metaphysics,” to be understood both as a corrective and as a certain acceptance of the Heideggerian problematic vis-à-vis historical metaphysics. I think it is fair to say that the totality of Badiou’s meditation on poetry, and therefore also his “scandalous” announcement of the necessary end of the age of the poets, is made from the position described as metaphysics-without-metaphysics. I will continue this argument through a short engagement with Badiou’s essay on “The Question of Being Today,” where the idea that we must undo the Heideggerian notion of a “saving reversal” in thought concludes with the rejection of Heidegger’s sacralization of the poem, which is also the point where Badiou finds in Heidegger a disavowed metaphysics. The liberation of philosophy from metaphysics is another way of reading the necessary undoing of the poetico-philosophical suture. After those considerations I engage with the series of essays Badiou published on the age of the poets, collected in English in The Age of the Poets. The analysis of what Badiou calls the “fourth relation,” a path that Heidegger could have taken but rejected, is crucial for understanding Badiou’s rupture with Heidegger on poetry. I finish the essay by arguing that there is no end to the age of the poets except as an end concerning the poetico-philosophical suture at the service of a resacralization of existence. This is not a critique of Badiou’s position—I only mean to explicate it, even though my explication may have a bit of a bite, given that I end with the dangerous thought that Badiou may be considered a “left Heideggerian.” In any case, I can only hope that, for those readers not familiar with Badiou’s complex work, it will become clear by the end of my essay that sustained attention to Badiou on poetry reveals not at all a dismissal of the truth dimensions of the poetic word but rather its contemporary rescue—a rescue that I would not hesitate to call “antiphilosophical”—over against the particular mystique of a resacralizing thought that appropriates poetry’s truth and places it at its service.

The annotations that follow take up Badiou’s work after the precise articulation of his historical diagnosis in Manifesto for Philosophy that the age of the poets is complete. They focus on the first four essays included in his Que pense le poème? (2016), which are also, in slightly altered order, the first four essays of his The Age of the Poets (2014), edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Bosteels and Emily Apter. They are essays from which criticism does not seem to have extracted the necessary consequences, and which have been insufficiently read.¹ Beyond achieving as precise as possible an understanding of what Badiou proposes concerning the poetico-philosophical suture and its dissolution, my interest is to determine the way in which Badiou enables a new presentation of the thought of the poem no longer beholden to the suture of philosophy and poetry, going beyond Heidegger and leaving behind what he considers “archi-metaphysical” (and therefore ontotheological, albeit disavowedly so) in Heidegger’s metapoetics.² I do not want to suggest that the four essays I discuss exhaust the reach of Badiou’s thinking on the age of the poets, roughly to be understood as the age after which we must reinvent the possibility of thought’s freedom. Badiou has other things to say on this and related scores, and he says many of them in his major works, starting with Being and Event, which includes sections on Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé, but also in works such as Conditions, The Century, and Handbook of Inaesthetics, and in his seminars.³ The subject has ramifications that extend well into Badiou’s concern with “antiphilosophy” and what he calls sophistics. At some point in The Age of the Poets he says that poetry is to the sophist what mathematics is to the philosopher (47).⁴ But Badiou himself, on the basis of his own articulation of the historical specificity of the age of the poets, knows that such a statement is reductive and unsatisfying. After all, he credits the poetry of the age of the poets with momentous developments in the history of thought. In Manifesto he writes:

If poetry has captured the obscurity of time in the obscure, it is because it has, whatever the diversity or even the irreconcilable dimension of its procedures, dismissed the subject-object “objectifying” frame in which it was philosophically asserted, within the sutures, that the element of time was oriented. Poetic disorientation is first of all, by the law of a truth that makes holes in it, and obliterates all cognition, that an experience, simultaneously subtracted from objectivity and subjectivity, does exist. (73)

And: “Until today, Heidegger’s thinking has owed its persuasive power to having been the only one to pick up what was at stake in the poem, namely the destitution of object fetishism, the opposition of truth and knowledge and lastly the essential disorientation of our epoch” (74). To declare the completion of the age of the poets is to declare that Heidegger’s thought must be left behind in the name of a new conceptualization that solves all the impasses in his thought. That is easier said than done. Badiou’s conceptualization, important as it is, does not have the power to kill what cannot be killed: not Heidegger’s thought, but the problems that his thought attempts to confront.

One of the more interesting aspects of Badiou’s philosophical self-positioning is his acknowledgment that philosophy is endlessly and irreducibly contaminated by the singular experience of existence, which no scientific discursive thinking—that is, no dianoia—can capture. There are as many universalities out there as there are individuals. Poetic truth must be placed and understood in the context of an experience of life that cannot be disposed of by any kind of deductive or apagogic reasoning. And poetry, together with art in general, is better positioned to express the singular than either science or politics. The present essay is just a beginning of work on these issues, as it aims to establish a point from which to proceed, a succinct, but I hope accurate, perspective. My intent is to show that, no matter how powerful Badiou’s critique, the notion of the end of the age of the poets should be circumscribed to the precise end of the poetico-philosophical suture, that is, to the paradoxical pretense that only poetry was a reasonable resource for thought. The age of the poets may have been completed, but Lacoue-Labarthe need not fret so much about the severance of the tie of philosophy and poetry, not even in Badiou’s own thinking. Poetry is not the only reasonable resource for thought, but it is one of them, and it remains an essential one. There has been no end to the poetic drive in philosophical thought, even if the suture itself—the stitching, sewing, tightening up of the borders of philosophy to the borders of poetry—must be given up.

Metaphysics Without Metaphysics

Badiou came to know the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa late in life. The encounter was enlightening and led Badiou to say that “philosophy is not—at least not yet—under the condition of Pessoa. Its thought is not yet worthy of Pessoa” (Handbook 36). He explains his excitement, suggesting that Pessoa’s “thought-poem inaugurates a path that manages to be neither Platonic nor anti-Platonic. Pessoa poetically defines a path for thinking that is truly subtracted from the unanimous slogan of the overturning of Platonism. To this day, philosophy has yet to comprehend the full extent of this gesture” (38). These are rather extraordinary words for a thinker who has long defined himself as Platonic, in addition to being an obvious disclaimer of his position that “the Age of the Poets is completed.” He adds a significant observation that might offer a clue to the simultaneous suspension and affirmation of Platonism in Pessoa’s work, which Badiou endorses: “To be worthy of Pessoa would mean accepting the coextension of the sensible and of the Idea but conceding nothing to the transcendence of the One. To think that there is nothing but multiple singularities but not to draw from that tenet anything that would resemble empiricism” (44). Pessoa’s “diagonal path” (39) becomes for Badiou expressive of a poetic truth that sets a condition for philosophical reflection, which must henceforth “follow the path that sets out … in the interval that the poet has opened up for us, a veritable philosophy of the multiple, of the void, of the infinite. A philosophy that will affirmatively do justice to this world that the gods have forever abandoned” (45). The latter, as we will see, is a disparaging observation concerning Heidegger’s work. Badiou’s intention to catch up with Pessoa’s poetic truth takes place on the way to a radical desacralization of thought.

In the same text, and in a manner consistent with the idea of Pessoa’s double relation to Platonism, Badiou mentions the phrase “metaphysics without metaphysics” (42), which he attributes to Judith Balso.⁵ Badiou uses the phrase several times, frequently but not always in reference to Pessoa, and most recently in L’immanence des vérités. In this book he goes so far as to say that the only difference between Pessoa and himself is that “Caeiro, s’inscrivant … dans ce que j’ai appelé ‘l’âge des poètes,’ écrit sa métaphysique sans métaphysique sour la forme de courts poèmes et non de longs traités” [“Caeiro, inscribing himself into that which I have named ‘the age of the poets,’ writes his metaphysics without metaphysics in the form of short poems and not long treatises”] (L’immanence 191; my trans.).⁶ But “metaphysics without metaphysics” also appears without reference to Pessoa in the final paragraph of a less cited but significant essay, “Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics” (2000).⁷ Badiou writes:

A contemporary metaphysics would deserve the name of metaphysics to the degree that it both rejected archi-metaphysical critique and upheld, in the Hegelian style, the absoluteness of the concept. On the contrary, it would not deserve this name if, elucidating from the beginning the infinity of being as mathematizable multiplicity, it would lack any reason whatsoever to postulate the undetermined.

Doubtless this would no longer properly speaking be a dialectical metaphysics, if it is indeed the case that it would no longer need to have recourse to the theme of a historical auto-determination of the undetermined. Rather, it would affirm, in a Platonic style (and therefore metaphysically) albeit in a style bereft of any hyperbolic transcendence of the Good (and therefore outside of metaphysics) that for everything that is exposed to the thinkable there is an idea, and that to link this idea to thought it suffices to decide upon the appropriate axioms.

This is why one could propose that such an enterprise should present itself under the paradoxical name of a metaphysics without metaphysics. (190)

In these sentences Badiou defines his own thought in a way that is strictly parallel to his observations regarding Pessoa’s work, as he will later do in L’immanence des vérités. Yes, the concept is absolute, as the power of the idea is always able to capture the totality of the real. Thinking is being, axiomatically so.⁸ But being is not the One: it is multiple, infinite—it is an infinite multiplicity—and atheistic. Badiou’s work, and not just Pessoa’s, should be thought of as a “metaphysics without metaphysics.” In what follows I take my own “diagonal path” into Badiou’s work to point out the significance he assigns to poetic truth in the context of his philosophical production, and therefore of his understanding of metaphysics.

Heidegger’s Question of Being and Thought’s Freedom

In “The Question of Being Today” (1988), Badiou attributes to Heidegger a commitment to a “saving reversal” (40). I think Heidegger’s thought can be at least partially used, as Badiou himself uses it, in a different direction. After all, Heidegger is the one who denounces metaphysics as “the commandeering of philosophy by the one” (40), which is Badiou’s starting point in that essay. His critique comes in the form of a question, which he tends to answer negatively:

can one undo this bond between being and the one, break with the one’s metaphysical domination of being, without thereby ensnaring oneself in Heidegger’s destinal apparatus, without handing thinking over to the unfounded promise of a saving reversal? For in Heidegger himself the characterization of metaphysics as history of being is inseparable from a proclamation whose ultimate expression … is that ‘only a God can save us.’ (40)

But this is not entirely fair. The sentence from the posthumously-published interview does not need to be taken literally, and there is in Heidegger no promise, no guarantee, of a saving reversal.⁹ He repeatedly alludes to the possibility that the last epoch of metaphysics, in its very exhaustion, might show on its reverse side a way out. He quotes Hölderlin on “the saving power” that comes with danger, but it is a quotation, even if repeated, and its metaphorics do not strictly belong to Heidegger. To my knowledge, Heidegger never says that there is a way out of the destitute or desolate world at the end of metaphysics (any more than he says that a God would save us), only that perhaps there could be one. He also says that poetic truth could and should show the way, which may not be all that different from what Badiou says.¹⁰ Indeed, the way out is what Badiou is searching for. He thinks he can find it, for philosophy, in at least one of its conditions, namely mathematics in its Cantorian and post-Cantorian form, because mathematics offers the example of a pure “ontology” of the “multiple-without-oneness” (“Question” 41). But he also finds it in art, in politics, and in love, to the extent that these truth procedures are in effect purveyors of truth. The task is then to pursue a philosophy based on the renunciation of the power of the one, on the renunciation of any hermeneutical Versammlung, not necessarily for the sake of “dissemination” in the Derridean sense, but rather for the sake of getting rid of the “historical constraint of ontotheology” (41). And our task is to show how, according to Badiou, poetic truth might help.

Badiou’s “The Question of Being Today” accepts the effects of ontotheological metaphysics as diagnosed by Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics:¹¹ “the flight of the gods, the destruction of the Earth, the vulgarization of man, the preponderance of the mediocre” (40). Badiou finds in those very effects a “saving” power as well:

Thus the flight of the gods is also the beneficial event of men’s taking-leave of them; the destruction of the Earth is also the conversion that renders it amenable to active thinking; the vulgarization of man is also the egalitarian irruption of the masses onto the stage of history; and the preponderance of the mediocre is also the dense luster of what Mallarmé called “restrained action.”(40)

Philosophy’s task, in order to produce whatever it can produce in the way of “saving” or beneficial effects, is to think through “the immemorial attempt to subtract being from the grip of the one” (40). One could say that this amounts to an announcement of a metaphysics of subtraction over against any metaphysics of presence, and that this is therefore a radically anti-Heideggerian project. But that would be wrong, because mere subtraction does not found a metaphysics but destroys it, and because a final commitment to presence (or to the presentation of presence) is not a conclusion one can comfortably derive from Heideggerian thought.¹² It is possible to accept subtraction as an extremely effective way into the destruction of any metaphysics of presence, always linked to the presenting of the one, and such a procedure of thought does not seem to me incompatible with a certain Heideggerian inheritance, or with a certain way of appropriating that inheritance.

Badiou’s essay goes on to read Plato’s correction to Parmenides on the notion that only being is, that being is the one, and that the one can only be—the one is not, and what about it?—which Badiou discusses in several of his seminars. From there the essay examines the impossibility of any definition of the multiple (“definition is the linguistic way of establishing the predominance of the entity” [43]), as testified by Lucretius and then by axiomatic, mathematical thought. In mathematical ontology (which is not philosophy but only a condition of it), Badiou finds the necessary resource to move away from destinal constraints into a freedom of thought whose exercise is the task of philosophy in the present. Subtractive thought is primarily an-archic thought: “once ontology embraces … a thinking of pure inconsistent multiplicity, it has to abandon every appeal to principles. And conversely … every attempt to establish a principle prevents the multiple from being exhibited exclusively in accordance with the immanence of its multiplicity” (45). An-archic thought has been linked to Heidegger by Reiner Schürmann and others.¹³ Badiou is as committed as Heidegger to an a-principial thought away from hegemonic commonplaces, but he still thinks Heidegger is a thinker of a specifically salvific teleology. He says: “Thought—albeit at the price of the inexplicit or of the impotence of nominations—tears itself from everything that still ties it to the commonplace, to generality, which is the root of its own metaphysical temptation. And it is in this tearing away that I perceive thought’s freedom with regard to its destinal constraint, what could be called its metaphysical tendency” (44–45).

A Mutual Liberation

Mathematics is not philosophy, only one of its conditions; in the same way, poetry is not philosophy, but philosophy must think poetic thought and bring poetry into its form of reflection, not being itself poetry. Some readers today are put off by Badiou’s insistence on an ontology of the multiple-without-oneness derived from post-Cantorian mathematics, partly because they know no mathematics and feel disoriented by his appeal to it. Others are equally put off by what they assume to be Badiou’s abjuration of poetry in his declaration that Paul Celan, confronted by the silence of the philosophical master, brought the age of the poets to its end, as if that meant that poetry is finished as a resource for thought and from now on we can only think politically or mathematically, or preferably mathematico-politically.¹⁴ They fail to understand that what Badiou means regarding the end of the age of the poets is at the same time a liberation of both poetry and philosophy into, respectively, its truth and its conditions. This is subtle, but not excessively subtle: the end of the age of the poets is an end to the “suture” of philosophy and poetry as an exclusive source of meaning, but it is not an end to the philosophical import of poetry or the poetic import of philosophy.

The point for Badiou, speaking as a philosopher and not as a poet, is that the end of the age of the poets liberates poetry from its suture to philosophy as much as it liberates philosophy from its suture to poetry. The suture itself was epochal, that is, historically contingent, and a derivation of a radical malaise in thought: given that philosophy—in the guise of positivism and analytic philosophy on the one hand, and in the guise of Marxism and historical materialism on the other—found itself sutured to science and to politics, a dissenting faction emerged whose most eminent representative would prove to be Friedrich Nietzsche. On the philosophical side, and through procedures that Badiou later names antiphilosophical, Nietzsche initiates a suture of thought to art, initially through his engagement with Richard Wagner’s work and orientation.¹⁵ Heidegger is the second great name of philosophy in the age of the poets, which is why his failure to respond to Celan’s demand concerning the Nazi Holocaust destroys the suture and opens a new path, an imperative both for philosophy to respond to poetry’s demands and for poetry to persist in its own specific register, now liberated from the need to account for a sense of the world and for a sense of sense. Far from establishing a new or renewed destitution of thought, the end of the philosophical age of the poets enables philosophical reflection by cutting the knot that sutured it to poetry and doomed it to think of itself as a producer of poetic truth—in the specific sense of sacred or auratic truth, as we shall see.

Philosophy must now think of poetry as merely one of its conditions. This is probably an even more demanding predicament: the task for philosophy regarding poetry could yet be more arduous today than it was during the age of the poets, and hence even more important. This is also the case for philosophy regarding political or scientific truth, or the truth of love. The stakes have gone up in and after the process of the necessary de-suturing of philosophy from its conditions. Badiou’s work actually says nothing else. The liberation of philosophy from its suture to truth procedures rescues it from its twentieth-century impasses and restores it to its position as the holder of the site of thought’s freedom. The freedom of thought is a not-so-paradoxical consequence of the fact that philosophy is under no obligation to produce political truth, scientific truth, erotic truth, or poetic truth. It only inhabits their paths, and learns from them, and perhaps subverts them.

The Fourth Relation

In the third essay of the series I am concerned with, titled “The Philosophical Status of the Poem After Heidegger,” Badiou detects three historical “regimes” (38) for the link between poetry and philosophy in order to postulate a “fourth relation between philosophy and poetry” (41). Because this fourth relation is the relation that Heidegger fails to establish, in Badiou’s assessment, it is at least plausible to think that this is the relation Badiou favors. If so, it is the relation that will determine the link between philosophy and poetry at the end of the age of the poets, or more precisely, after its end. “What will the poem be after Heidegger—the poem after the age of the poets, the post-romantic poem? … This is something the poets will tell us, for unsuturing philosophy and poetry, taking leave of Heidegger without reverting to aesthetics, also means thinking otherwise the provenance of the poem, thinking it in its operative distance, and not in its myth” (41–42). Badiou then mentions “two indications” (42) that amount, if not to a definition, then at least to a naming of the task of poetry. We must take them to be proleptic indications, to the extent they were provided by poets of the age of the poets and not by poets after Heidegger. One of them comes from Mallarmé and concerns “the moment of the reflection of its pure present in itself or its present purity” (qtd. in Badiou 42). The poem, in the purity of its present, names “what is present only insofar as it no longer disposes of any link with reality to ensure its self-presence” (42). Poetry would then be “the thought of the presence of the present” insofar as the present would have transcended its reality into a form of eternity (42). The second indication comes from Celan. Badiou glosses: “when the situation is saturated by its own norm, when the calculation of itself is inscribed in it without respite, when there is no more void between knowing and foreseeing, then one must poetically be ready to be outside of oneself” (43). The step outside of oneself is an event extracted from the void of sense, from a lack of signification: a leap. Badiou concludes his essay by saying not that those two indications define the poem of the future, but rather that they define what a poem “liberated from philosophical poeticizing” “will always have been”: “the presence of the present in the traversing of realities, and the name of the event in the leap outside of calculable interests” (43). We take this to be the conception of the poem in the fourth relation, according to Badiou. What are the first three, and how is this fourth relation post-Heideggerian?

In Parmenides’s poem there is a tension between the sacredness of the mytheme, which is the structure of authority under which the poem declares its truth, and the truth the poem itself purports to convey, which we could sum up in the notion that only being is.¹⁶ The latter, Badiou says, is necessarily desacralizing. The desacralization of apagogic reasoning, which medieval philosophy called reductio ad absurdum, has no need to rely on anything but its own force of argumentation. “The matheme, here, is that which, making the speaker disappear, emptying its place of any and all mysterious validation, exposes the argumentation to the test of its autonomy, and thus to the critical or dialogical examination of its pertinence” (37). This is the regime of what Badiou calls fusion, where the power of the argument is subordinate to the sacral authority of the enunciation itself. In Plato, however, rather than fusion, a relation of distance obtains. Plato wants to expel the poets from the Republic, as he has understood that “[p]hilosophy cannot establish itself except in the contrast between poem and matheme, which are its primordial conditions (the poem, of which it must interrupt the authority, and the matheme, of which it must promote the dignity” (38–9). The Aristotelian moment, which is the moment of the third relation, is a moment of inclusion in which the poem comes under the jurisdiction of philosophical knowledge, which it classifies as a regional discipline that will later be called aesthetics. The poem has now become an object and is to be treated as such. “In the first case, philosophy envies the poem; in the second it excludes it; and in the third it classifies it” (39).

Badiou, who wants to take his own distance from Heidegger, wishes now to know what Heidegger’s thinking is. He says: “Heidegger has subtracted the poem from philosophical knowledge, in order to render it into truth” (39). Heidegger thoroughly ruins the aesthetic approach without however compromising with Platonic distance. As a philosopher of the age of the poets, Heidegger privileges the “operations by which the poem takes note of a truth of its time,” which, for the Heideggerian period, becomes the destitution of the category of objectivity in ontological presentation, which is a radically anti-Platonic gesture (40). This means—”unfortunately” (40), says Badiou—that what is left is either a return to the sacralization of the saying or the thinking out of a “fourth relation” (41). Heidegger opts for the former: “Heidegger prophesies in the void a reactivation of the sacred within the undecipherable coupling of the saying of the poets and the thinking of the thinkers” (41).

The fourth relation, which opens up at the end of the age of the poets and is a condition of the renewal of a desutured link between philosophy and poetry, is therefore what needs to be thought out or understood beyond the “two indications” given above, which refer both to pure presentiality and to a leap in the void beyond all calculation. If we understand Badiou correctly, this means that pure presentiality and the need for a leap in the void beyond calculation become not philosophical truths but conditions of philosophy. Let me now move to the essay published as the second chapter in Que pense le poème?, that is, “The Age of the Poets.” The English publication places it as first chapter. Badiou is very clear: the “age of the poets” is neither a historicist nor an aesthetic category. It does not mean to put all poetry of the time under a periodizing category; it does not pass judgment on what poets, by belonging to the age, are therefore the greatest poets. It is rather a philosophical category: “the moment proper to the history of philosophy in which the latter is sutured” to poetry (4). This applies to certain poets, or to certain poems within the epoch’s poetic production. They would be poets that accept the suture, and its injunction, and respond to it. Among them Badiou mentions Arthur Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Georg Trakl, Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, and Celan. In their work “the poetic saying not only constitutes a form of thought and instructs a truth, but also finds itself constrained to think this thought” (5). Thinking the thought of poetry, which poetry in the age of the poets does, is already a move towards the poetico-philosophical suture. It enables it without constituting it.

Take the poems of Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms. “For Caeiro, the essence of thought is to abolish thought” (7). In Caeiro’s poetry, “being does not give itself in the thought of being, for all thinking of being is in reality only the thinking of a thought” (8). Caeiro abolishes the cogito in order to liberate being to its radical exteriority: “I try to say what I feel / Without thinking about things I feel” (qtd. in Badiou 8). For Badiou, conscious reflection is an obstacle to the purity of presence, and it must be abolished so that being may come into its own. Caeiro’s operation is an example. Other operations configure the truths of the poem in the age of the poetico-philosophical suture. Badiou names three, and I propose that they be added to the “two indications” in the fourth relation of poetry and philosophy. The first is “counterromanticism,” which subtracts the poem from the image and the dream in favor of the presentation of a counter-image in the form of a “tacit concept” (13). In the age of the poets, there is a prohibition of the image in place in the thought of the poem. The second is “detotalization” (13). There is a “separate, irreconcilable multiplicity” that is also inconsistent (14). And the third one is “the diagonal” (13), which is the attempt or the wager “that a nomination may come and interrupt signification” (15). Take for example Trakl’s verse: “It is a light, which the wind has blown out” (15). But if the wind has blown out the light, then the light does not appear—or appears only poetically. “The poetic diagonal declares that a faithful thought, thus capable of truth, makes a hole in whatever knowledge is concentrated in significations. It cuts the threads, for another circulation of the current of thought” (16). This involves an endeavor of deobjectification, insofar as the object is “what disposes the multiple of being in relation to meaning or signification” (16). And it also involves a “disorientation in thought” (18), because the sum of those operations “put[s] under erasure the presumption of a sense that gives meaning and orientation to History” (18).

We have, then, as preliminary conditions of the fourth relation, pure presentiality and a leap into the incalculable, the thinking of the abolition of thinking within the poem, the prohibition of the image, the affirmation of an irreconcilable and inconsistent multiplicity, the active production of holes in signification, and the abjuration of a sense of history. Through its operations, the poetry of the age of the poets dismantles the pretensions of both the scientific and the political sutures of philosophy. And it “bequeaths to us, in order to liberate philosophy, the imperative of a clarification without totality, a thinking of what is at once dispersed and unseparated, an inhospitable and cold reason, for want of either object or orientation” (20). Badiou’s question is whether philosophy can be faithful to that legacy, and his claim is that Heidegger fails to be so, instead engaging in a faux resacralization that betrays the philosophical mission that the Greek first beginning had already determined to be the task of philosophy proper. In the final analysis, it amounts to positing that not just poetry in general but the very poetry of the age of the poets must be subjected to a desacralizing operation in order to liberate both poetry to itself and philosophy to its multiple conditions. Poetry is not the end goal of philosophical reflection—no more than politics or love or indeed scientific knowledge. A liberation of philosophy onto itself is therefore to be understood as the interruption of any one suture of philosophy to any one of its conditions—in our case, the interruption of the resacralizing suture of philosophy to poetry. To the extent that the poetry of the age of the poets had already renounced the work of sacralization, the announcement of the end of the age of the poets is really the revealing of Heidegger’s operation of faux resacralization, conditioned by a disavowed ontology of the one. It is also the liberation of poetry from what we have to consider a Heideggerian sequestering of it.

Plato’s Restitution

Before going on to the other two essays in the series, I want to dwell for a moment on a difficulty that the reader may already have sensed: the poetic truth that Badiou’s extraordinary analysis unveils is established by the constellation of poets that configure the age of the poets. Badiou’s claim is that poetic truth conditions philosophical reflection, which must be commensurate to the rigor of poetic discovery. Even if poetry is only one of its conditions, philosophy cannot be oblivious to it, but must let itself be determined by poetic saying. In other words, the fourth relation constrains philosophy, which must find its freedom not in a refusal to meet the truths of its conditions (poetic or otherwise, once they are analytically determined), but rather in what can only be understood as a consistency with them. The fourth relation establishes a rule of consistency for philosophical reflection. This is nothing less than a paradox, because at the core of the poetic analysis we find “an irreconcilable and inconsistent multiplicity” (Badiou, “Question” 45). The paradox is compounded, to my mind, by the proposition that the poetic truth of the age of the poets issues a rule of consistency to philosophy in the fourth relation, which can only be thought of as the relation that obtains at the end or after the end of the age of the poets, when the suture of philosophy to poetry has been arguably dissolved. I will come back to this. Let me now annotate the second essay in the English-language compilation, which is the first in the French volume, titled “What Does the Poem Think?”

Faithful to the poetic truth of Alberto Caeiro’s work, and in fact to the other truths he has delimited in the constellation of the age of the poets, Badiou insists that the poem is a form of thought and not of knowledge:

Not only does the poem have no object, but a large part of its operation aims precisely to deny the object, to ensure that thought no longer stands in a relation to the object. The poem aims for thought to declare what there is by deposing every supposed object. Such is the core of the poetic experience as an experience of thought: to give access to an affirmation of being that is not arranged as the apprehension of an object. (“What” 28–9)

Through “subtraction” and “dissemination” (29) the poem “disconcerts” traditional philosophy because “at the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know” (31). This is why the poem—or rather, the poem that is consistent with the inconsistent multiplicity of an affirmation of being that radically subtracts from knowledge—is “haunted by a central silence” (24), and from the point of that void in the situation, it prepares its leap into the incalculable:

A pure silence, devoid of anything sacred, it interrupts the general racket. It lodges silence in the central framework of language and, from there, skews it towards an unprecedented affirmation. This silence is an operation. And the poem, in this sense, says the opposite of Wittgenstein. It says: I create silence in order to say that which is impossible to say in the shared language of consensus, to separate it from the world so that it may be said, and always re-said for the first time. (24–5)

It is a silence with a bite: it ruins discursivity. It is radically antiphilosophical. It ignores dianoia (discursive thinking) and every kind of philosophical argumentation. It is “incalculable thought” (33). If dianoia is philosophical procedure, and if it is to be understood as “the thought that passes through, the thought that is the traversing of the thinkable” (33), the poem targets the insufficiency of dianoia, which is also philosophy’s insufficiency. At the end of dianoia, epekeina tes ousias (beyond substance), beyond every possible knowledge of the entity, Badiou says, “the poem is a thought in its very act, which therefore has no need to be also the thought of thought” (34). This is what makes the ancient dispute that Plato evoked between philosophy and poetry necessary: “palaia tis diaphora philosophia te kai poiètikè (‘ancient is the discord between philosophy and poetry’)” (qtd. in Badiou 32). This is the ancient discord that the suture of philosophy and poetry dreams of suspending or reconciling. We can perhaps now better understand the implications of Badiou’s definition of the poetry of the age of the poets in the first essay I examined: “the poems of the age of the poets are those in which the poetic saying not only constitutes a form of thought and instructs a truth, but also finds itself constrained to think this thought” (“Age” 5). The intrusion into poetry of the thought of thought echoes the intrusion into philosophy of the strange and inconspicuous and de-objectified “light, which the wind has blown out”: the ancient dark light of withdrawing being. We have come back to the unheard-of meditation of Alberto Caeiro, according to which “[b]eing does not give itself in the thought of being, for all thinking of being is in reality only the thinking of a thought” (“Age” 8).¹⁷

It is now possible to understand that the posited rupture of the poetico-philosophical suture is far from an abjuration of poetry, and that there was no need for Lacoue-Labarthe to worry. Poetic truth persists at the end of dianoia without being claimed by it. And yet dianoia must not ban it. But Plato did. The core of the fourth essay I wish to examine concerns the insufficiency of the Platonic gesture of violence against the poets in The Republic for the configuration of philosophy in our present. The fourth relation determines thought’s freedom not through the abjuration of poetic truth but rather through the opening of thought to the determinations of poetic truth in the age of the poets. The consistency of philosophy must thus be understood as an acceptance of the radical inconsistency of objectless being. Heidegger is said to have recoiled in the face of it, towards the sacred of the first regime of the link between poetry and philosophy. Badiou persists in philosophical desacralization while remaining faithful to poetic operations. This is, I believe, the extent of the difference Badiou claims from Heidegger, which still retains Badiou in the Heideggerian wake and enables us to understand why the end of the age of the poets is a limited or restrained end, itself a philosophical operation through which philosophy opens itself again to its political and scientific and erotic conditions. The fourth essay in the series, “Philosophy and Poetry from the Vantage Point of the Unnameable,” points out the stakes for the futures of philosophy after the Heideggerian suture.

The Incalculable Wager

Let me recapitulate Badiou’s list of poetic truths in the age of the poets, a list that forms a nontotalizing but epochal account of poetic destiny after the twentieth century: pure objectless presentiality and a leap into the incalculable; the thought of the abolition of thinking within the poem for the sake of a liberation of exteriority; the prohibition of the image, which always hides more than it reveals; the affirmation of an irreconcilable and inconsistent multiplicity as unnameable being; the active production of holes in signification, which amounts to a liberation of language from the constraints of inscription; and the surrender of a sense of oriented history. If reflection on what is imperative about those truths determines philosophy, the ensuing philosophical reflection will be opposed to any kind of archeo-teleo-onto-theology. It will be an an-archic philosophy without principles; it will suspend any positing of ends; it will understand being as the very void of ground; and it will not submit to any paternal sacredness or indeed to sacredness of any kind. Beyond that, it will only affirm thought’s freedom to proceed to an order of singular, contingent, existential nomination. Is that Badiou’s philosophy? I believe it is, in spite of everything.

Poetry bothers and disconcerts philosophy not simply because philosophy, as a dianoetic process that believes in the transparency of the matheme and wants to get as close to it as possible, abhors “the metaphorical obscurity of the poem” (“Philosophy and Poetry” 48). In particular, the poetry of the time of the poetico-philosophical suture, as Badiou now repeats, “identifies itself as thought. It is not only the effectiveness of a form of thinking proffered in the flesh of words; it is also the set of operations by which this thinking thinks itself” (49). The poetry of the age of the poets has therefore usurped some of the functions of philosophy, because philosophy “has no other stakes but to think thinking, to identify thought as the thinking of thinking” (48). Double jeopardy: if poetry is also the thought of thought, then philosophy must include poetry in its purview, because philosophy is the thinking of thinking, therefore also the thinking of the thinking of thinking. Poetry is lodged deeply into philosophy in ways that are now more pervasive than they presumably were in Platonic times, and even in Heideggerian times. Philosophy has no choice but to deal with it, short of merely disavowing it as a condition of itself, thus betraying itself. Philosophy cannot not think poetry as a truth procedure.

But there is another problem: mathematics, the model science, the paradigm of philosophy’s dianoetic method, has evolved into an erratic situation, has been traversed, after Cantor, Gödel, and Cohen, by a principle of errancy “on which it cannot put a measure” (50). Mathematics and poetry have begun to move towards each other, very much against the Platonic injunction of radical distance. “At the same time that the poem arrives at the poetic thought of the thinking that it is,” Badiou writes, “the matheme organizes itself around a point of flight in which the real appears as the impasse of all formalization” (50). Both poetry and mathematics, as conditions of philosophy, find their contemporary abyssal ground, are de-grounded, by a point of unnameability that is at the same time their power and their powerlessness: “any truth stumbles upon the rock of its own singularity, and only there can it be announced, as powerlessness, that there is a truth” (54). This stumbling block is to be named as “the unnameable” (54), because truth can cannot force its nomination in either poetry or mathematics. The mathematical unnameable is consistency, just as the poetic unnameable is power. Both are simultaneously done and undone in unnameability as nomination. And this is Badiou’s move: “philosophy will place itself under the double condition of the poem and the matheme, both from the side of their power of veridiction and from the side of their powerlessness, or their unnameable” (57). Finally, against Plato and as the very condition of his exit from the age of the poets, Badiou must choose to “welcome the poem in our midst, because it keeps us from supposing that the singularity of a thought can be replaced by the thought of this thought” (58). If so, then the task of poetry from the perspective of philosophy is far from completed. This final appeal to the singularity, contingency, and inconsistency of thought, from which alone a word, in the form of a wager, can be issued towards the incalculable—for me, it means that philosophy has now become open to thought’s freedom, which is the rare freedom of existence.¹⁸

How to Live

The essay entitled “The Age of the Poets,” we read, “was first published in French as part of the seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie organized and subsequently edited by Jacques Rancière under the title La politique des poètes: Pourquoi des poètes en temps de dètresse? (Badiou, Age 206). The question in Rancière’s title quotes Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” elegy, and references a great and controversial lecture given on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s death in 1946. Heidegger’s “Why Poets?” opens in immediate reference to Hölderlin’s elegy and quotes the missing words in the title’s question: “in a desolate time” (“Why Poets?” 200). Most of Heidegger’s lecture focuses on Rilke’s later poetry, from the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus to even later texts, and on some of his letters. But in order to move toward my conclusion, I concentrate on the first few paragraphs of the lecture that have to do not just with Hölderlin but also with the Heideggerian determination of the historical time between Hölderlin and himself as an age of poetry or an age of the poets.

Our “desolate” time is presented by Heidegger as the time of the death of God and of divinity:

In the default of God notice is given of something even worse. Not only have the gods and God fled, but the radiance of divinity is extinguished in world-history. The time of the world’s night is the desolate time because the desolation grows continually greater. The time has already become so desolate that it is no longer able to see the default of God as a default. (200)

The age of the world’s night is the age of the poets because “the abyss of the world must be experienced and must be endured. However, for this it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss” (201). When poets reach into the abyss they find “the tracks of the fugitive gods” (202). This has consequences: the “aether,” as it shelters the tracks of the fugitive gods, is “the sacred” (202). “Yet who is capable of tracing such tracks? Tracks are often inconspicuous, and they are always the legacy of instruction scarcely divined. This is why the poet, at the time of the world’s night, utters the sacred. This is the reason that the world’s night, in Hölderlin’s language, is the sacred night” (202). The world’s night is the time of desolation. At such a time “the condition and vocation of the poet have first become poetic questions for them. That is why ‘poets in a desolate time’ must specifically speak the essence of poetry in their poems” (203). The essence of poetry is to dwell in the sacred but empty night of the death of God. The death of God is the final accomplishment of the metaphysical destiny of Western humanity which, in Hölderlin, Heidegger tells us, manifests itself “more intimately than [in] any other poet of his time” (203). That means that Hölderlin’s poetry, which dwells in an essential “manifestness of being within the fulfillment of metaphysics” and at the same time dwells in and experiences “the extreme oblivion of being” (204), forces philosophy into a particular necessity: “by thinking soberly in what is said in his poetry, to experience what is unsaid. … If we enter upon this course, it brings thinking and poetry together in a dialogue engaged with the history of being” (204).

The last sentence perhaps organizes for twentieth-century thought the (contested) age of the poets as the age of the poetico-philosophical suture: from that determination poetry thinks the task of thought. If philosophy takes poetry’s word for it, without critique, through a submission to a principle of poetic authority, the poetico-philosophical suture is consummated. This is essentially what Badiou means to undo. In Heidegger, philosophy does it not directly in the name of the sacred but of an active search for the traces of the sacred, which at the time of the consummation of metaphysics tracks the flight of the gods but also awaits “the advent of the fugitive gods,” that is, their possible return (202). In the context of such powerful imagery, it might seem superfluous to point out that the rest of the essay, which no longer glosses Hölderlin, is concerned with an analysis of Rilke’s poetry as still under the sway of metaphysics, concretely under the sway of a Nietzschean interpretation of being as will-to-power. But his conclusion reintroduces the theme of the return of the sacred. The translation in what follows is confusing, because “the whole” translates das Heile and “the unwhole” is heil-los, but here it is: “Because they experience unwholeness as such, poets of this kind who risk more are underway on the track of the holy. … The unwhole, as the unwhole, traces for us what is whole. What is whole beckons and calls to the holy [das Heilige]. The holy binds the divine. The divine brings God closer” (240). The poets “of what is whole” are “poets in a desolate time” of whom “Hölderlin is the forerunner” (240). The game is served. The poets of the age of the poets, who organize and even direct the dialogue between poetry and philosophy with the history of being, are poets of the holy, poets of the sacred, poets concerned with the flight and the return of the gods.

This is something that Badiou cannot bear, and it is the very motor of his position. It is no doubt why “The Philosophical Status of the Poem After Heidegger” is explicit in his denial. “Now philosophy cannot begin,” he writes, “except by a desacralization: it installs a discursive regime that is its own, purely earthly legitimation. Philosophy demands that the mysterious and sacred authority of proffered profundity be interrupted by the secularism of argumentation” (36). There is to be no dialogue between poetry and philosophy in the name or under the yoke of the sacred. Only a fusion regime, such as the Parmenidean one, would tolerate the contrary state of affairs. The development of a fourth relation in the link between poetry and philosophy, which establishes poetry as truth procedure as a condition of philosophy, at the same time subjects poetry to a philosophical and philosophically desacralizing critique. Let us remember the minimal definition of the fourth relation: poetry is “the presence of the present in the traversing of realities, and the name of the event in the leap outside of calculable interests.” The sacred appears as a “calculable interest.” This is the real rupture away from the age of the poets, which is not the end of the philosophical efficacy of poetry; it is simply a reorientation of purpose.

In the “Art and Poetry” chapter of Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Peter Hallward follows the latter’s Handbook of Inaesthetics, saying:

Whereas mathematics composes the truth of ‘the pure multiple as the primordial inconsistency of being as being,’ being evacuated of all material presence or sensual intensity, ‘poetry makes truth of the multiple as presence come to the limits of language. It is the song of language insofar as it presents the pure notion of there is in the very erasure of its empirical objectivity.’ (196–97)

This is consistent with the first part of the minimal definition of the fourth relation that organizes the post-sutural link of poetry and philosophy. Yet Hallward is resolute in declaring that

[d]uring the true age of poetry (roughly, from Rimbaud to Celan), poetry rightly took on some of the functions abandoned by a philosophy temporarily preoccupied with the sterile hypotheses of scientific positivism and historical materialism. This age, however, has now passed. The poem is simply incapable of a genuinely philosophical self-awareness. The poem declares the Idea, but not the truth of the Idea. The poem can aspire to condition philosophy, not to replace it. (200)

It is one thing to give up on the understanding of the relationship between poetry and philosophy as a relationship bound to the silence of the divine, but a poetry that no longer dwells “in the sacred night of the death of God” may still maintain, in Badiou’s concrete determination, “a genuinely philosophical self-awareness.” Hallward is wrong. Badiou has shown, and we have seen, that poetry cannot be reduced to its Heideggerian definition for the age of the poets. This is why Badiou’s declaration of the end of age of the poets is a liberation of poetry from philosophy as much as it is a liberation of philosophy from poetry. But it is the kind of liberation that makes a better encounter possible.

We may now come back to Badiou’s “Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics,” and to his definition of philosophy. Badiou says:

Not only, and contrary to what Hamlet declares, is there nothing in the world which exceeds our philosophical capacity, but there is nothing in our philosophical capacity which could not come to be in the reality of the world. It is this coextensivity in actu of conceptual invention and of a reality-effect that is called the absolute, and it is this that is the sole stake of philosophy. (189)

Philosophy thinks the absolute because it thinks and is able to think not only poetic truth in the guise of the invention of presence (reality-effect) at the limit of language, but also because it is prepared to offer to name the event in the leap outside of calculable interests, which is the only possible name of conceptual invention. At the end of Logics of Worlds, in the conclusion titled “What Is It to Live?” Badiou says:

I am sometimes told that I see in philosophy only a means to reestablish, 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. (514)

But then there is also a poetic heroism that takes poetic truth beyond the minimal conditions of the fourth relation and expands them to include a liberation of exteriority, the active production of holes in signification, which amounts to a liberation of language from the constraints of inscription and the surrender of a sense of oriented history. Does this not lead to a certain derangement of old metaphysical presuppositions while still holding well back from any archimetaphysical projection (which is Badiou’s objection to Heidegger)? Insisting on it, on the derangement as such, would be the inconsistent consistency of the poet.

There is no end to the age of the poets except as an end concerning the poeticophilosophical suture at the service of a resacralization of existence. Only the poets may continue to instruct in what is still essential: that the end of the metaphysical epoch in its ontotheological configuration imposes a displacement from the meaningfulness that was the privilege of metaphysical humanity; that the breakdown of expectations in the wake of the ontological event of the end of metaphysics brings about the destruction of hermeneutics to such an extent that the entry into any sort of fidelity to that event must be thought of as an appropriation into truth (in its full play of concealment and revelation) and not into meaning. In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger says that a certain “restraint” (Verhältnis) is the appropriate mood and style for existing at the end of metaphysical humanity.¹⁹ I could rephrase this by saying that restraint, perhaps in the wake of the Mallarméan notion of “restricted action,” is the faithful and guarded relation to the errant truth of our times, which becomes eternal truth in our “subjective fidelity.” And memory, the poetic memory of our future implied in any commitment to the philosophical Idea, can only be a memory of disruption, the memory of a fundamental unknowability to be paired with Badiou’s conceptual invention of the absolute. The immemorial is the breakdown of signification and the radical point of non-measure that organizes the mutual need, the mutual use, of being and thinking—of thinking by being and of being by thinking. This is learning how to live poetically, and this is how I read Badiou on how to live poetically, which philosophy only thinks about. It might be too Heideggerian for Badiou; he may not like it. But I think he might like it even less if I were to call him, at the end of the day, the prince of the left Heideggerians.²⁰

Alberto Moreiras is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Latinx and Mexican American Studies at Texas A&M. He has taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and the University of Aberdeen, and has held visiting positions at numerous institutions (Emory, Johns Hopkins, Minas Gerais, Chile, Buffalo). He is the author of Interpretación y diferencia (1991), Tercer espacio: literatura y duelo en América Latina (1999), The Exhaustion of difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2002), Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político (2008), Marranismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada (2016), Infrapolítica. La diferencia absoluta de la que ningún experto puede hablar (2019), Sosiego siniestro (2020) and Infrapolítica: Instrucciones de uso (2020). He is a coeditor of Política común, and of the “Border Hispanisms” Series at University of Texas Press.

Footnotes

1. See for instance Tom Eyers or Christian Doumet; both have written failed essays in my opinion, informative as they are in their own ways, to the extent that they get lost in inessential considerations and neglect to focus on what is determinant for the philosophy/poetry relation in Badiou. Justin Clemens’s “Eternity is Coming” also fails to focus on the most relevant philosophical contribution of the book it reviews. Apters and Bosteels’s introduction to The Age of the Poets suffers from the same problem even though their knowledge of Badiou is not in question. There is a tendency in some of these critics, particularly in Eyers and Apter and Bosteels, to concentrate their remarks on the second half of the book, which really concerns early attempts by Badiou to come to terms with Althusserian Marxism’s notions of the relative autonomy of art, bypassing what is for me new and crucial in Badiou’s theses on the end of the age of the poets and the legacies of the latter for contemporary thought. Let me however take this opportunity to praise Tom Betteridge’s enlightening essay. This essay does not mention The Age of the Poets; it takes most of what he wants to comment on from Badiou’s The Century. But it is an excellent introduction to the different ways in which Heidegger and Badiou relate to the notion of “homecoming” in reference to Hölderlin and Celan respectively. Celan is of course one of the major references in Badiou’s “age of the poets.”

2. Badiou’s critique of the critique of metaphysics is not limited to Heidegger’s hermeneutics, but extends to Kant’s critical philosophy and to Comtian positivism. All three of them would revert, in Badiou’s determination, to a disavowed metaphysics in the form of an “archi-metaphysics.” He says:

critique, positivism, and hermeneutics, even if we were to grant them that they diagnose metaphysics correctly, merely replace it with what we shall call an archi-metaphysics, that is, with the suspension of sense to an undetermined that is purely and simply left to the historical determination of its coming. Archi-metaphysics is the replacement of a necessary undetermined with a contingent one, or: the established power of an unknown master is opposed by the poetics and the prophetics of the to-come. This is the case with the mystical element in Wittgenstein, as with the metaphorical God in Heidegger or the positivist church in Comte. (“Metaphysics” 181)

3. See Badiou’s Being and Event, The Century, Conditions, and Handbook of Inaesthetics.

4. The question of antiphilosophy is a ticklish issue in Heidegger, for instance; it would be concerned with Heidegger’s thought on “the other beginning” and the cryptic writings he developed starting with Contributions to Philosophy and through the mid-1940s, and which he never wanted to publish while he was alive. Those volumes are still coming out in the Gesamtausgabe and most are as yet untranslated, in addition to Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness, History of Being, Metaphysik und Nihilismus and Die Stege des Anfangs (the latter still unpublished). Badiou never discusses them explicitly, but the thought of a possible antiphilosophy in Heidegger is in the background of his Heidegger seminar, and later in the antiphilosophy project in contemporary thought, that is, after Friedrich Nietzsche. See Badiou’s Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy; Nietzsche; and Lacan.

5. See Judith Balso, especially pp. 54–61.

6. See 191–96 on the poems of Alberto Caeiro.

7. See Badiou’s “Metaphysics.” The essay is also significant in terms of establishing Badiou’s antipathy for any kind of hermeneutical approach to truth, including but not limited to the Heideggerian one. It is hard to find fault with Badiou’s critique as far as it goes, although I would like to say that it is or would have been quite possible, perhaps also desirable, to take a more generous approach to Heidegger’s notion of a destruction of metaphysics without necessarily reducing him to the condition of an “archimetaphysical” thinker.

8. Badiou posits, following Hegel and for reasons that have to do with his endorsement of dialectics, that the identification of thinking and being is an axiomatic point of departure for philosophy: a “preliminary thesis,” he calls it. It is axiomatic obviously because it is also highly debatable—and the axiom takes care of the debate, preempting it. This is the key passage:

Dogmatic metaphysics defends the rights of indeterminacy only within the bounds of a preliminary thesis which affirms that thought and the thinkable are homogeneous to each other. As Hegel writes in the introduction to the Science of Logic: “Ancient metaphysics had in this respect a higher conception of thinking than is common today … This metaphysics believed that thinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature … and that thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things form one and the same content.”(“Metaphysics” 182)

9. See Heidegger, “‘Only a God.'” The interview was done by Der Spiegel on September 23, 1966, but Heidegger requested that it be published only after his death. Der Spiegel published it on May 31, 1976. These are the more relevant passages:

Spiegel:
Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

Heidegger:
If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

Spiegel:
Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Heidegger:
We cannot bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].”

(“Only a God” 57).

It is obvious that Heidegger’s emphasis has to do with his assumption that no human action by itself can determine a change in historical conditions, and thought can only prepare a possible change of epoch. An emphasis on the arrival of the future and salvific god is perhaps legible in these words, but I tend to read them in quite the opposite way: if there is any possibility of retrieval of a non-destitute future for humanity, it will have to come from elsewhere. We are impotent concerning it. One can definitely think this is a bad or even untenable political position but I do not see it as a particularly religious one. The “waiting” regarding an absence that may or may not find a solution is to be thought of as a posture of thought that preempts nihilistic fatalism rather than a manner of prayer.

10. Heidegger refers to the verses in Hölderlin’s “Patmos” elegy in connection with the destiny of the world in the 1946 lecture “Why Poets?” As this connects with the previous note and with Badiou’s insistence on Heidegger as a thinker of religious salvation, let me quote the extended paragraph:

The essence of technology is dawning only slowly. This day is the world’s night made over as the purely technological day. It raises the threat of a single endless winter. Man now forgoes not only defense, but the unbroken entirety of beings remains in darkness. What is whole withdraws. The world is being emptied of what is whole and heals. As a result, not only does the holy remain hidden as the track to the godhead, but even what is whole, the track to the holy, appears to be extinguished. Unless there are still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as unwhole and unhealing. They would have to discern which is the danger that assails man. The danger consists in the menace that bears on the essence of man in his relationship to being itself, but not in accidental perils. The danger is the danger. It conceals itself in the abyss in its relation to all beings. In order to see and to expose the danger, there must be such who first reach into the abyss.

But where the danger lies, there also grows

that which saves. (Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. IV, p. 190) (“Why Poets?” 221–22)

What saves is therefore not the godhead but poetic truth. Those who are able to discern the danger are, as the essay will make clear, “the poets in a desolate time” (240). The 1955 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” presents Hölderlin’s verses along similar lines, talking about Ancient Greece:

What, then, was art—perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and therefore belonged within poiesis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name. The same poet from whom we heard the words “But where danger is, grows the saving power also’ says to us: ‘poetically dwells man upon this earth.” (34)

The saving power is the art of poetic revealing, or poetic truth. It does not seem to me Heidegger says anything else, particularly not anything “theological.”

11. In his 1985–1986 seminar on Heidegger, Badiou actually links them to the conclusions Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reach in The Communist Manifesto. The November 18, 1986 session refers to the same passages from Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), and immediately associates them with the famous passages on the melting away of everything solid at the hands of the bourgeoisie in The Communist Manifesto. Badiou then says:

La vigueur de ce texte est absolument intacte, ce qu’il décrit continue à se derouler sous nos yeux, et, dans sa substance, c’est bien ce que Heidegger décrit sous le nom de nihilism. Comment penser cette difference entre la predication nihiliste et ce qui est décrit ici comme les effets inéluctables de la generalization du capital? Tout est dans l’accent, l’orientation de la pensée, et non dans les termes.

[The vigor of this text is absolutely intact, that which it describes continues to deploy itself under our eyes, and it is what Heidegger names nihilism. How to think this difference between nihilist predication and what is described here as the ineluctable effects of the generalization of capital? Everything hinges on the accent, the orientation of the thought, not on the terms.] (Heidegger 60; my trans.)

Badiou finds here what I believe is the kernel of his disagreement with Heidegger, which I would propose we understand as the generative site of everything Badiou says against Heidegger. Yes, it is a question of the orientation of thought within the general disorientation produced both by nihilism and the bourgeois revolution. This is the time of the age of the poets, as we will see. It is clear that Badiou prefers the Marxist position, according to which we are convoked to a “beginning that will not recommence anything, because there is nothing to recommence” (61). The general dissolution of the old social links are for Marx “the condition of a production of truth” (61) while for Heidegger they would be the site of “a nostalgia for a return of categories whose loss of sense is deplorable. He aspires to the re-sacralization of existence, to the reappropriation of the site” (60). For Marx, instead, the real question is different: “There where Heidegger convokes us to the return of the sacred, Marx says to us: Is it possible to continue the dissolution of the images through a means other than Capital” (61), can we move to a new production of truth not based on a return of the old? Ultimately, Heidegger’s “other beginning” probably has nothing to do with any return of the ancient sacred; it is also a new production of truth. But we must agree with Badiou that there are rhetorical configurations in Heidegger’s text that project a reactionary politicity Badiou finds abhorrent and thoroughly counterproductive.

12. See on this Jacques Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme,” in particular 63–67. Talking about Heidegger’s “The Anaximander Fragment,” Derrida says that, on the one hand, Heidegger thinks or attempts to think of modalities of presence; on the other hand, he seeks to call all modalities of presence in general “the Greco-Western-philosophical closure” (65). Derrida states that all the arduous fundamental meditations by Heidegger on presence, including the text on Anaximander, are intra-metaphysical meditations, but he also says that Heidegger is aware of it and that in such an awareness he prepares another gesture, “the more difficult, more unheard-of, more questioning gesture, the one for which we are least prepared” (65). This would be a gesture that “only permits itself to be sketched, announcing itself in certain calculated fissures of the metaphysical text” (65).

13. See Schürmann. See also Alberto Moreiras, ed., “On Reiner Schürmann.”

14. See James K. Lyon for a careful and fairly complete account of the relationship between the poet and the philosopher. See also Charles Bambach. For Badiou’s considerations on the (mis)encounter see Badiou’s Manifesto 85–89.

15. Badiou makes much of the importance of Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner to shape Nietzsche’s process of philosophical production and existential reflection. In fact, for Badiou the impossibility of saving the Wagner relation made Nietzsche’s antiphilosophical trip rather desperate and led to a particular kind of impasse. See Badiou, Nietzsche, particularly 233–311.

16. On the “mytheme” see Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, in particular “Prologue: Heidegger’s Onto-Mythology,” 11, and “Poetry, Philosophy, Politics,” where Lacoue-Labarthe engages Badiou’s notion of the poetico-philosophical suture (18–37). Badiou also engages with the Parmenidean poem and with Plato’s Parmenides in a number of seminars, but let me refer in particular to the 1986–1987 seminar on Heidegger, Heidegger, where Badiou also discusses at length Heidegger’s relationship to poetry and rehearses his own notion of the poetico-philosophical suture. See in particular on Parmenidean issues and the exit from Parmenides’s apagogic reasoning, pp. 179–216. See also of course the 1985–1986 seminar on Parmenides, Parménide, now available in English as “Heidegger’s Parmenides.”

17. See on this the literary hoax or semi-hoax perpetrated by Yoandy Cabrera, Rodolfo Ortiz and myself, which nevertheless includes earnest reflection on Alberto Caeiro’s poetry and profile: Caeiro, Alberto and Timoteo Moreira. Infracendencia. Inéditos del entorno (¿póstumo?) de Fernando Pessoa, transcription and notes by Alberto Moreiras, with an Introduction by Rodolfo Ortiz, with a Postface and notes by Yoandy Cabrera. See for Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa.

18. I have tried to reflect on these issues in my book Infrapolítica. Instrucciones de uso.

19. “Restraint is the style of inceptual thinking only because it must become the style of future humanity grounded in Da-Sein, i.e., only because it bears this grounding and is its pervasive disposition. Restraint, as style: the self-certainty of the grounding measure and of the sustained wrath of Da-sein. It determines and disposes the style, because it is the basic disposition” (Heidegger, Contributions 28).

20. The 2015 foreword to Badiou’s 1992–1993 seminar on Nietzsche concludes with the following words: “On verra comment, gouverné par cette profonde sympathie, le commentant en detail et l’admirant sans avoir pour autant à lui concéder quoi que ce soit, j’ai pu décerner à Nietzsche, en mon seul nom, le titre suivant: prince pauvre et définitif de l’antiphilosophie” [We shall see how, governed by this profound sympathy, commenting on him in detail and admiring him without however having to concede anything, I have been able to discern in Nietzsche, in my name only, the following title: poor and decisive prince of antiphilosophy] (Nietzsche 11; my trans.).

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