Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy by Alain Badiou

Author:Alain Badiou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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It is no doubt time for us to synthesize how this construction has worked in the service of antiphilosophy while at the same time, animated by the spirit of philosophical resistance, marking our differences, or at least the risks to which Wittgenstein exposes us.

Everything that is at play, of course, depends on the line of demarcation traced between thought and non-thought, since it is Wittgenstein’s strategic goal to subtract the real (what is higher, the mystical element) from thought, so as to entrust its care to the act which alone determines whether our life is saintly and beautiful.

In order to achieve his goals, Wittgenstein must give a particularly narrow definition of thought. This is striking from the very start. Thought, indeed, is the proposition endowed with sense, and the proposition with sense is the picture, or the description, of a state of affairs. The result is a considerable extension of non-thought, which is unacceptable to the philosopher.

In non-thought there is first of all the primordial operation of the naming of simple objects. Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophical orientation on this point is very clear: if the names of objects were to envelop a thought, we would have a relation on the order of both language and thought to the intimate composition of substance, which accordingly would weaken the need for the silent act.

Wittgenstein does not clarify this question of names, which has been the topic of strong debates in philosophy since at least the Cratylus. I can certainly understand that in the proposition names represent objects combined in the state of affairs, described by the proposition in which these names appear. But what I do not understand is how the unthinkable difference of objects comes to be represented by the difference attested to by the names. Here, a fissure slips into the specular construction that brings face-to-face the multiple of objects (on the side of substance) and the multiple of names (on the side of the proposition, or of the picture). If objects violate the Leibnizian principle of indiscernibles, how is it that names, which are there only as signs of objects, obey this principle? Because it is certain, no matter what the extent of homonymy might be, that two indiscernible names ultimately are the same. Names, as opposed to objects, are not identified by their external relations. They have a dense intrinsic identity.

As a result, one begins to doubt whether nomination as such might be a non-thought. And in fact, we can and must maintain that there is a practice of language that is entirely dedicated to naming as thought, that is, poetry. The poetic act indeed is neither descriptive (even if it practices description) nor “monstrative” in the sense of the mystical element (even if it practices suggestion). It aims rather to organize a verbal totality (a poem by itself composes a proposition) in such a way that a presence-of-being be named by this totality, whereas nothing in ordinary language named this. Poetry is the creation of a name-of-being that was previously unknown.

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