ALAIN BADIOU: It seems to me that the problem with philosophical commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical. Very often, one equates philosophy and critique. So that philosophical commitment would ultimately amount to saying what is evil, what is suffering, of saying what’s not acceptable, or what is false. The task of philosophy would be primarily negative: to entertain doubt, the critical spirit, and so on and so forth. I think this theme must be absolutely overturned.The essence of philosophical interventionis really affirmation. Why is it affirmation? Because if you intervene with respect to a paradoxical situation,or if you intervene with regard to a relationthat is not a relation, you will have to propose a new framework of thought, and you will have to affirm that it is possible to think this paradoxical situation, on condition, of course, that a certain number of parameters be abandoned, and a certain number of novelties introduced. And when all is said and done, the only proof for this is that you will propose a new way of thinking the paradox. Consequently, the determinant element of philosophical intervention is affirmative – a point on which I agree with Deleuze. When Deleuze says that philosophy is in its essence the construction of concepts, he is right to put forward this creative and affirmative dimension, and to mistrust any critical or negative reduction of philosophy. When you just said that we should understand ‘inhuman’ as something other than a negation, I am obviously entirely in agreement with you. Once again I regret to say that we continue to be indefinitely in agreement, which besides proves that we engage in affirmation and not negation. ‘Inhuman’ must be understood as the affirmative conceptual element from within which one thinks the displacement of the human. And this displacement of the human always presupposes that one has accepted that the initial correlationis the link between the human and the inhuman, and not the perpetuation of the human as such.
Thanks to the Institute
At issue is ‘spontaneity’ or rather, ‘spontaneist eloquence’ and the denunciation of institutions (like the Party or unions). It is the rhetoric of spontaneity that Derrida dislikes most. Rhetoric: the elevation of spontaneity to the status of a value, an operation that conceals the divisions, stratifications, ‘delays’ and mediations at the heart of an immediate relation to self. For spontaneity is another name for the immediate presence to self of a subjectivity in actu, coinciding with itself in the vitality of its upsurge or its insurrection. It is another name for what Husserl called the ‘living Present’ of temporalisation, the ‘absolute beginning’ that – this is from Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness – ‘does not come into existence as that which is generated but through genesis spontanea’. To this spontaneity Derrida opposes the notion of the institution. From his earliest work on Husserl, beginning in the early 1950s, institution’ (or, in the language of Husserl and Heidegger, Stiftung) has signified nothing less than memory, relation, trace in general, the very possibility of history itself. It will be necessary to denounce, critique, deconstruct even this or that given institution in the name, always, of an institution ‘to come’ – not in the name of an absence of mediation or representation, or in the name of ‘direct’ democracy.