Demarcation and Demystification : Philosophy and Its Limits (9781789042276) by Moufawad-paul J

Author:Moufawad-paul, J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Natl Book Network
Published: 2019-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

None of this is to say that Marxism lacks ontological elements, that it does not produce judgements about what it means to be, only that this larger and alienated question of being, and quandaries about the structure of reality outside of concrete instances of class struggle, are philosophical dead-ends––a way of thinking that is not materialist, that exists outside of human history, and can only hope to be an idealist abyss.

With this understanding in mind, and despite the fact that I have liberally borrowed some of his language, I do not believe that any militant philosophy with a concrete relationship to revolutionary movements and revolutionary science has much to gain from, for example, Badiou’s return to ontology-qua-ontology. Although I think there are many elements in Badiou’s philosophy that are useful for making philosophical interventions––concepts and language that may aid in forcing meaning and drawing distinctions––and though I cannot help but be impressed by his philosophical corpus, especially its rigour, I would still argue that he is engaged in the kind of philosophy that belongs to the realm of mystification rather than the realm of science.6

The construction of ontological systems is the way in which philosophy has confused itself with theory, and thus chosen to speak in the name of reality rather than understanding its proper relationship to a lived and material reality, by answering its own question––“what does it mean to exist, what does it mean to be?”––with a theory of being that is drawn from the heart of philosophical speculation. Such a practice attempts to construct the basis of reality and, in producing a new theology, deforms reality. It makes no difference whether or not our ontologist disguises their ontology under a veneer that masquerades as a respect for science: after all, if Badiou’s intriguing thesis at the beginning of Being and Event is correct––that “mathematics = ontology”7––then he should have written no further. Instead he provided us with a massive ontological project, pushed further in Logics of Worlds, that attempts to excavate the hidden foundations of reality through philosophical speculation.

What we find in such ontological projects, then, is always an attempt to rename and reclassify the world according to purely speculative categories. Even though we should recognize the potential usefulness of the conceptual language produced by many of these projects, insofar as they may help us force clarity, we should not accept that these conceptual languages are the language of reality’s deepest structures. Here is an interpretation of the world that becomes lost in its own infinitude, incapable of contributing anything by itself to transformation. The result is a conflation of philosophy with theory where, as discussed in the previous chapter, philosophy mistakes itself as a theoretical terrain. Such a conflation was inexplicable in the days before the rise of the “new sciences” where science and philosophy were often intertwined; this was why ontology-qua-ontology was paradigmatic of philosophical practice. Plato, for example, was writing in a time when natural scientists were also ontologists, when all critical approaches to reality and truth were one and the same practice.

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