How and Why Did Badiou Beat Deleuze with a Stoic Stick?1
Thomas Bénatouïl
Two years after Gilles Deleuze’s death in 1995, Alain Badiou published a small book Deleuze: la clameur de l’être (The Clamor of Being). Although it looked like an introduction to Deleuze’s thought, the book was meant as a substitute for the disputatio book that Badiou wanted to write with Deleuze following a correspondence they had, which Deleuze ended. It seems fair to say that the book caused an uproar among French Deleuzians,2 and rightly so, since they were an explicit target of Badiou, who immediately criticizes a common “image of Deleuze” (1997: 17–18) or the “doxa” which developed around his works (30). Badiou claims that, contrary to this “image” or “doxa,” Deleuze was in fact a classical metaphysician, whose thought is characterized by three positions or orientations, which I will call Badiou’s three ascriptions since they have been much disputed:
1. Deleuze’s philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One.
2. It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism.
3. It is systematic and abstract. (2000a: 17)
While it is very difficult to resist assessing and criticizing this portrayal of Deleuze, I doubt this is the most interesting approach, not only because it has already been tried by many authors3 but also because it is very clear that Badiou is himself engaging in a debate with Deleuze, an assessment of his system and of its inspirations from the point of view of his own doctrine: he is no historian of philosophy, even in this little book entirely devoted to Deleuze. There are, in fact, several other texts by Badiou about Deleuze, a few older and most of them more recent,4 in which he is usually much more critical. In this paper, I will refer only to The Clamor of Being and to Badiou’s Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds, 2006a) and focus on the role played by Stoicism in Badiou’s critical view of Deleuze.
While Stoicism is a major reference in Logique du sens (Deleuze 1969), it is scarcely present in later works, where one can find only brief allusions to aspects of Stoicism already analyzed in The Logic of Sense. 5 By contrast, Stoicism is often mentioned in The Clamor of Being. In the first chapter, Stoicism is put forward when he introduces the second ascription, asceticism:
However paradoxical the attribute may seem, applied to someone who claims to draw his inspiration above all from Nietzsche . . . it is necessary to uphold that the condition of thought, for Deleuze, is ascetic. This is what radically explains the kinship of Deleuze and the Stoics, other than the fact that they also thought of Being directly as totality. (Badiou 2000a: 13)
Badiou clearly casts Deleuze as a neo-Stoic. The first two ascriptions (listed on the previous page) also hold for Stoicism, and this explains Deleuze’s attraction to Stoicism. My claim is that this “explanation” works equally well and perhaps even better the other way around: these analogies between Deleuze and the Stoics throw significant light on Badiou’s views about Deleuze (and his own kinship with Plato). Hence, I will first highlight how Stoicism is crucial to Badiou’s portrayal of Deleuze. I will then try to show how Badiou uses Stoicism to turn Deleuze against himself, as if Deleuze had betrayed his original philosophical inspiration. This will finally lead me to suggest that Badiou’s argument with Deleuze is strictly analogous to the refutation of Stoicism devised by ancient Platonism.
1 The One-All and the Stoic Sticker
Badiou claims to derive his view of Deleuze’s philosophy as a metaphysics of the One from Deleuze’s advocacy of the “univocity of being.” From the fact that Deleuze says that Being is said of all beings with one and the same sense, Badiou concludes that, for Deleuze, beings are only expressive modalities of the One:6 “The multiple acceptations of being must be understood as a multiple that is formal, while the One alone is real” (2000a: 25). As for the Stoic dimension of this metaphysics of the One, it stems from its roots:
The thesis of the univocity of Being guides Deleuze’s entire relation to the history of philosophy. His companions, his references, his preferred cases-of-thought are indeed found in those who have explicitly maintained that being has “a single voice”: Duns Scotus, who is perhaps the most radical . . . the Stoics, who referred their doctrine of the proposition to the contingent coherence of the One-All; Spinoza, obviously . . . Nietzsche . . . Bergson. It is hence possible to “read” historically the thesis of univocity, and this is indeed why Deleuze became the (apparent) historian of certain philosophers: they were cases of the univocity of Being. (2000a: 24)
Yet, there is an odd one out to be spotted in this historical picture: Deleuze never refers to the Stoics as proponents of the univocity of being. He would not have been mistaken if he did, since they claim that all beings are bodies and that incorporeals are not beings, but the Stoics are not mentioned on a par with Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche by Deleuze (1968: 58–60). Badiou’s justification of his mention of the Stoics’s connection with univocity of being is itself puzzling: how is the Stoic logic of propositions related to the coherence of the One-All? Badiou perhaps refers to the fact that, in Difference and Repetition (1968: 58–9), Deleuze uses an analysis of the ontological proposition which is similar to his Stoic analysis of propositions in The Logic of Sense (1990a: 12–22). But the two accounts are quite different: the latter is general and more complex, while the former is focused on the “ontological proposition” and applied to univocity of being as common to many authors. And there is no connection made (by Deleuze) between the ontological proposition or univocity of being and the Stoic cosmos.
Still, univocity of being is indeed advocated in The Logic of Sense, specifically in the twenty-fifth series: “Of Univocity” (1990a: 177–80), and this is probably why Badiou includes Stoicism in his historical list. It is indeed from the same series that Badiou draws also his main evidence about Deleuze’s metaphysics of the One, focusing on a passage he quotes several times (2000a: 11, 20, 24–5, 119–20). However, in this text (1969: 210–1, translated in 1990a: 179–80), Deleuze does not refer to a totality of beings, or to the Stoic cosmos as a coherent entity, but to the unification of all events into one event. This is worth explaining in some detail.
Taken out of context and from a strictly Stoic point of view, Deleuze’s definition of Being as “the unique event in which all events communicate” (1990a: 180) is puzzling, because it seems to conflate what exists or beings (bodies) and what subsists (incorporeal events) (1990a: 5). But this conflation is explicitly avoided by Deleuze: “It would be a mistake to confuse the univocity of Being to the extent that it is said with the pseudo-univocity of everything about which it is said” (1990a: 180). Deleuze insists that univocity is not the identity or unity of beings, but a feature of sense, which is what happens to and what is said of these things.7 Univocity translates into oneness or uniqueness only at the level of sense, that is at the “surface” of (corporeal) beings: “a single instance for all that exists” (1990a: 211).8 Moreover, even at this level, Deleuze’s references to “one single Event for all events” (1990a: 180) do not mean that there is one total Event in which the others dissolve themselves, converge, or even cohere. Deleuze explicitly disagrees with the Stoics (and Leibniz) about the “communication” between all events and conceives of them (after Nietzsche) as entering into diverging series forming “a ‘chaosmos’ and no longer a world” (1990a: 176), thus undercutting the Stoic notions of fate as the universal and unifying reason according to which all events happen.9
Badiou nevertheless sees Deleuze as “uphold[ing], in the manner of the Stoics, the virtual Totality or what Deleuze named a ‘chaosmos’” (2000a: 4). Badiou might have a point that, however distinct from a convergence it might be, a communication between all events is a communion of sort and requires the One as an implicit principle,10 but he conflates this One and the All into “the One-All” (2000a: 11).11 Badiou consequently posits a unifying principle at both levels of Deleuze’s ontology, and especially at the level of existing things, under the guise of the infinite power of Life, which expresses itself in every multiplicity. This is certainly the case for the Stoics, who hold the world, which includes all bodies, to be unified by Reason or God, which is the active (corporeal) principle sustaining all and every particular thing in existence and guaranteeing that, at the level of incorporeal sayables, all true propositions are consistent with each other. Hence, in the first quotation made above, Badiou is right to say that the Stoics “conceived of Being directly as a totality.” But this is problematic as far as Deleuze is concerned, not only because, as we have just explained, Being is for Deleuze an incorporeal event in which all events communicate without converging but also, as shown by Villani (1998) or Roffe (2012: 7–10), because Deleuze refuses to see multiplicities as superficial expressions of a unique principle: his notion of multiplicity is directed against the couple one/multiple.12
Badiou’s reading is restated and made more explicit in the section “The Event according to Deleuze” of Logics of Worlds (2009: 381–7), where Deleuze’s concept of event in The Logic of Sense is analyzed into four axioms,13 which are then reversed to define Badiou’s conception of event. The first holds that the event expresses or reveals “the One amid the concatenation of multiplicities,” or that it is “the concentration of the continuity of life, its intensification” (2009: 382). This accounts for the conflation between Being as event and beings (here named multiplicities or becomings) highlighted above. The second states that the event is never present, does not divide time, but is always what just happened or will happen. While the third axiom clearly acknowledges the two levels of Deleuze’s Stoic ontology (“The nature of the event is other than that of the actions and passions of the body”), Badiou restates in his explanation that the event “intensifies” or “affects bodies” and thus disregards the very separation between events and bodies, effects and causes he claims to explain, since he sees events as acting upon bodies. The fourth axiom states that “a life is composed of the same single Event, despite all the variety that happens to it” (2009: 383). Badiou notes that the problem here is not the uniqueness of this event, because it has already been established by the previous axioms. Hence, the unity of all events in one is just the replication of the unification of Life or Becoming by itself, just as the consistency of all true complete (incorporeal) sayables is the expression of the unity of the (corporeal) world through divine reason in Stoicism.
Before listing these four axioms, Badiou notes that Deleuze explained his concept of event in The Logic of Sense “in the company of the Stoics. This sets the tone: the ‘event’ must comply with the inflexible discipline of the All, from which Stoicism takes its bearings. Between ‘event’ and ‘fate’ there must be a subjective reciprocation of sorts” (2009: 282).
This quote perfectly spells out how the reference to Stoicism operates in Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze: by contamination. Stoicism is used to make seemingly un- or anti-Deleuzian readings of Deleuze stick. If Deleuze was inspired by some doctrines of the Stoics, then he must have tacitly agreed with other aspects of their doctrine.14 Deleuze’s alleged kinship with the Stoics is used by Badiou to pin some of their positions on Deleuze, as Badiou’s second ascription should make clear.
2 More Stoicism: Asceticism and Monotony
There is at least a whole chapter of The Logic of Sense about Stoic ethics, but Badiou does not mention it when he casts Deleuze as an “ascetic thinker.”15 Still, the reference to Stoicism is essential to this description, as seen in our first quotation. What does Badiou mean by “asceticism”? Mainly it requires going beyond one’s individuality: “Thinking is not the spontaneous effusion of a personal capacity. It is the power, won only with the greatest difficulty, against oneself, of being constrained to the world’s play” (2000a: 12, after quoting Deleuze 1990a: 73).
This has two consequences according to Badiou. First, that “Deleuze’s conception of thought is profoundly aristocratic. Thought only exists in hierarchized space” (2000a: 12), because it is a process accessed only by a few “ascetic” persons. This is an attack on the image of Deleuze as a nomadic or anarchist thinker (2000a: 13 and 69–70, see also 2009: 387). Second and much more paradoxical, Deleuze turns out to be a philosopher of death, because death is the paradigm of all events as dissolution of my identity in the impersonal flow of Life. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou says that death is common to phenomenology and vitalism (he mentions Bergson and Deleuze) as “the attestation of finite existence, which is simply a modality of an infinite over-existence, or of a power of the One which we only experience through its reverse” (2009: 268). Badiou’s second ascription turns out to be dependent upon the first.
While it is true that Deleuze advocates the dismantling of the subject by impersonal vital processes, he never connects death with finite existence: death is not a sign of my being part of something bigger than myself, but a sign of my being composed of impersonal or pre-individual singularities or events. (“It dies like it rains.”) Badiou has a point about death as the Deleuzian paradigm of the contrast between singularity and personal identity (or subjectivity), but Deleuze warned, at least in later texts, about misinterpreting this connection: “But a life should not have to be enclosed in the simple moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects” (2006: 387).16
As textual evidence of his second ascription, Badiou quotes a passage of The Logic of Sense (1990a: 153), which he terms “a veritable hymn to Death [. . .] slipping effortlessly in the footsteps of Blanchot” (Badiou 2000a: 14).17 But he also makes the ascription stick by referring it again to Stoicism: “The result is that this philosophy of life is essentially, just like Stoicism (but not at all like Spinozism, despite the reverence in which Deleuze holds Spinoza) a philosophy of death” (2000a: 13).18
As for the third ascription (systematicity), it drew fewer objections than the previous two from Deleuze’s followers, probably because Deleuze himself claimed to agree with such a classical definition of philosophy.19 Badiou does not mention Stoicism to support this ascription, perhaps because he does not realize that Stoicism was the first philosophy to claim to be a “system.”20 Deleuze appro vingly emphasizes the tight connection between Stoic ethics, logic, and physics (highlighted in Goldschmidt 1953), but it does not mean that he shares this structural conception of a system:
I believe in philosophy as a system. The notion of system which I find unpleasant is one whose coordinates are the Identical, the Similar, and the Analogous. Leibniz was the first, I think, to identify system and philosophy. In the sense he gives the term, I am all in favor of it. Thus, questions that address “the death of philosophy” or “going beyond philosophy” have never inspired me. I consider myself a classic philosopher. For me, the system must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must also be heterogenesis, which as far as I can tell, has never been tried. (Deleuze 2006: 361)
Badiou’s third ascription goes, in turn, beyond systematicity in a structural sense but also against Deleuze’s notion of a system of heterogeneity. Badiou holds the often-celebrated thematic diversity of Deleuze’s books to be superficial. While Deleuze always starts with concrete “cases” (as Badiou terms them), such as the works of a philosopher, a painter, a writer, or movie-directors, they are not objects of thought to Deleuze, and he does not analyze them for their own sake (according to Badiou): they are occasions to constrain thought into thinking, ascetic exercises, so to speak. Badiou sees proof of that in the “monotony” of Deleuze’s œuvre: all his books are supposed to operate with a very limited stock of concepts repeating themselves under various names. Accordingly, there is only one system re-engendering itself in all of Deleuze’s works. This allows Badiou to use Deleuze’s two volumes about cinema and his books about Leibniz and Foucault on a par with The Logic of Sense or Difference and Repetition in order to reconstruct Deleuze’s ontology. It is as if Badiou took Deleuze’s approach to other thinkers or artists to be similar to Stoic allegory, which was mocked by its adversaries as a method allowing the Stoics to rediscover their own physics in Hesiod, Homer and all the various myths.21
I will not discuss this approach to Deleuze’s method and philosophy, but note only that in The Clamor of Being and later texts, Badiou consciously ignores the works written with Félix Guattari (2000b: 210), as if Deleuze’s thought had not evolved after The Logic of Sense through this collaboration.22 Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus develop theories which are surely different from the structuralist approach offered in The Logic of Sense, especially concerning the signifier23 and psychoanalysis, and this had consequences as far as ontology is concerned, as Deleuze himself acknowledged (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 16–18, Deleuze 2006: 65–6)—calling A Thousand Plateaus “the book dedicated to multiplicities in themselves” (2006: 362). Even if one conceded to Badiou that Deleuze started as a neo-Stoic, one would still need to prove that he remained one. The repeated reference to Stoicism in Badiou’s interpretation is also a way of turning The Logic of Sense into a canonic presentation of Deleuze’s metaphysics. It is in this book that Badiou finds his main evidence in favor of his first two ascriptions.24 While many important doctrines of Deleuze, like the overturning of Platonism, univocity of being, eternal recurrence or the notions of singularity and problem, are already present in The Logic of Sense, others are not. As for the references used in The Logic of Sense, many are not, so to speak, canonical from the point of view of Deleuze’s history of philosophy: Kant, Spinoza, and Bergson are absent and, instead, we have the Stoics, Husserl, or Sartre.25
In Dialogues, when Deleuze explains how he started doing the history of philosophy by focusing on authors he liked for their marginal status, he lists Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 15). The Stoics are not named, although they are later discussed, after Hume and Spinoza, in the same book (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 62–6). For Deleuze, the Stoics are probably like Leibniz: they had wonderful concepts, they ar e fascinating antiplatonists, hence they are not enemies, like Plato, Descartes, or Hegel, but they clearly do not belong to the group of Deleuze’s philosophical heroes. From its introduction (2000a: 4 quoted above) to the last pages of his short book, Badiou nevertheless keeps making Deleuze the heir of as many Stoic legacies as possible: “The Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, as well as Deleuze himself will construct the fold of the unfolding, will refold, will virtualize” (2000a: 101).
3 Spinoza as the Foot-in-the-Monist-Door
One might however object that Badiou could have made many of his ascriptions stick by using Deleuze’s official pantheon. In fact, he does just that in his book; Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche are mentioned at least as often as the Stoics by Badiou. For example, it is not difficult to make a case that an admirer of Spinoza such as Deleuze cannot be a pure advocate of multiplicity or singularity, since Spinoza’s philosophy posits one single Substance.26 And the same could be said for asceticism, which, as far as Badiou’s understanding of this notion is concerned, could easily be connected to the third type of knowledge in Spinoza. Badiou does indeed sometimes uses Spinoza in this way, for example in Logics of Worlds:
Deleuze’s idea of the event [as having an “eternal truth”] should have persuaded him to follow Spinoza—who he elects as the “Christ of philosophy”—right to the end, and to name the unique Event in which becomings are diffracted as “God.” God the sole Event where all becomings diffract themselves. (2009: 386).
The reference to Spinoza helps to pin a religious attitude on Deleuze, but note that this is done explicitly (“Deleuze should have. . .”) and that this chapter opens with an analogous use of Stoicism, which was quoted and analyzed above. One could find other similar remarks in The Clamor of Being, for example when Bergson and the God of Spinoza (Nature) are mentioned to introduce Bernanos’s phrase “All is grace,” which is supposed to summarize Deleuze’s attitude about reality: “For what is, is nothing other than the grace of the All” (2000a: 97).27 But, here again, Stoicism is not far off, since Badiou continues like this:
This wager governed Deleuze’s creative Stoicism throughout the inhuman experience of the loss of breath [an allusion to Deleuze’s illness], of immobilized life (“all is grace,” even to die). But it was already apparent in his oblique, although concentrated, way of participating in institutional or collective peripeteias with what I would like to call an indifferent cheerfulness (“What does it matter?”). This shows the power of Deleuze’s philosophical choice. (200aa: 97)
While Spinoza and Stoicism are often referred to by Badiou to support the same aspects of his interpretation of Deleuze, they are not always aligned. Stoicism is sometimes used by Badiou to contrast Deleuze with Spinoza in The Clamor of Being. This is explicit in the ascription of a philosophy of death to Deleuze previously quoted. Badiou opposes this purportedly Stoic inspiration to Spinoza’s famous and probably anti-Senecan claim that “a free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life” (Ethics 4, prop. 67).
I would like to suggest that this contrast is operating implicitly in other ascriptions by Badiou. The best example is the conclusion of his close analysis of Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual. According to Badiou, Deleuze’s claim that the virtual is real is inspired by Bergson but leads to a problem because Deleuze wants to maintain the univocity of being. He must consequently hold that the virtual and the actual are distinct but impossible to distinguish: the reality of the virtual, according to Badiou, leads to the unreality of the actual, which is another way of saying that only the One is real.28 Badiou comments:
The more Deleuze attempts to wrest the virtual from irreality, indetermination, and nonobjectivity, the more irreal, undetermined, and finally nonobjective the actual (or beings) becomes, because it is the Two and not the One that is instated. And when the only way of saving—despite everything—the One, is by the reconciling and obscure metaphor of the “mutual image,” one says to oneself that, most decidedly, the virtual is no better than the finality of which it is the inversion (it determines the destiny of everything, instead of being that to which everything is destined). Let us be particularly harsh and invoke Spinoza against his major, and indeed sole, truly modern disciple: just like finality, the virtual is ignorantiae asylum [the refuge of ignorance]. (2000a: 53)
The description of virtuality as what “determines the destiny of everything” (il destine tout) is a transparent allusion to fate (le destin), which is well captured by the English translation. The Stoics were one of the main philosophical targets of Spinoza’s famous refutation of theological finalism in the Appendix of the first part of his Ethics. These two elements suggest that Badiou is here implicitly blaming Deleuze for following the Stoics rather than Spinoza, as he did explicitly with regard to the status of death.29
The same strategy might also be implicit in Badiou’s description of Deleuze’s method as resisting the temptation to turn the distinction between activity and passivity (which is central to Spinoza, as emphasized by Deleuze himself) into a categorical dualism:
One must never distribute or divide Being according to these two paths [activity and passivity]. One must never lose sight of the fact that, if, as we have shown, two names are always necessary to do univocity justice, these two names never operate any ontological division. (2000a: 34)
On some readings, Stoicism is based precisely on such a dualism, since it posits two independent principles for what exists, one active and one passive, matter and reason;30 whereas Spinoza has only one Substance and uses activity and passivity as an immanent opposition.
Badiou seems therefore to picture Deleuze as oscillating between two versions of the univocity of being or monism, Stoicism and Spinozism, failing to achieve a non-dualistic version of this position and falling on the Stoic vitalist side. The use of this strategy can be confirmed and explained by the fact that Spinoza is acknowledged by Badiou in the first page of his book as the only philosophical reference he shares with Deleuze: “His canonical references (the Stoics, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson . . .) were the opposite of my own (Plato, Hegel, Husserl) [. . .]. Spinoza was a point of intersection but ‘his’ Spinoza was (and still is) for me an un recognizable creature” (2000a: 1). As shown by Laerke (1999: 90–1), Badiou’s approval of Spinoza is very different from Deleuze’s and is based on the more geometrico exposition, and, one should add, the claim that “we feel and know by experience that we are eternal” (Ethics 5, prop. 23, scol., quoted in the conclusion of Logics of Worlds, 2009: 510). It is, so to speak, a Platonist Spinoza, who takes mathematics as the guide to ontology31 and who claims to show how we can live as immortal beings.
4 Deleuze as a Platonist malgré lui
This Platonic inspiration, pervasive in Badiou’s oeuvre, turns out to be crucial to understanding Badiou’s use of Stoicism. His attempts to oppose Deleuze’s Stoic perspective to his Spinozist inspiration is only part of a more general and more explicit argument to the effect that Deleuze did not succeed in “overturning Platonism,” as he claimed (Deleuze, 1966),32 and should have taken leave of Modernity’s anti-Platonism. Badiou argues that Deleuze ends up accepting Plato’s principles while claiming to overturn Platonism. Explaining this line of argument in Badiou’s thought would require another paper, but one good instance of it can be highlighted here, since it concerns a topic already mentioned above: the relationship of multiple beings to the One.33
After showing that, for Deleuze, “the world of beings is the theater of the simulacra of being,” Badiou notes:
Strangely, this consequence has a Platonic, or even Neoplatonic, air to it. It is as though the paradoxical or supereminent One immanently engenders a procession of beings whose univocal sense it distributes, while they refer to its power and have only a semblance of being. But, in this case, what meaning is to be given to the Nietzchean program that Deleuze constantly validates: the overturning of Platonism? (2000a: 26)34
Then, after explaining Deleuze’s understanding of Nietzsche’s program, Badiou notes that Plato’s view is actually not very far from Deleuze’s view of sensible simulacra as not opposed to intelligible Ideas but differentiating them. He refers briefly to famous and problematic texts about the Good and the One in the Republic and the Parmenides and to his own ontological solution to these problems, which grants the One “a status of pure event.” He then quotes The Logic of Sense about the free man capable of comprehending “every mortal event into one single Event” (1990a: 152) and comments: “One wonders whether this Event with a capital ‘E’ might not be Deleuze’s Good. In light of the way it requires and founds the temperament of ‘the free man,’ this would seem probable” (2000a: 27). Thus, according to Badiou, Deleuze turns out to be a Platonist in spite of himself, subscribing not only to the status of the One as a principle but also unwittingly to the identity between the Good and the One.
I have explained above how Badiou reconstructs Deleuze’s ontology by equating the All, Being, and the One (which belong to different levels according to the Stoics and to Deleuze). For someone familiar with ancient philosophy, this conflation is puzzling because ancient Platonists are adamant to distinguish the One from the All and even from Being. It is as if Badiou offered a pre-Platonic or Parmenidean notion of the One as the undifferentiated totality of Being. But, in fact, this is not his conception but the conception he ascribes to Deleuze and to Stoicism. It is, according to Badiou, the way in which they acknowledge that the One is required by any philosophical system, without being able to account consistently for it. As Badiou notes in the last page of his book, Deleuze was a pre-Socratic philosopher, a physicist, a “thinker of the All,” and Plato “conducted a trial against philosophy construed as a Great Physics” (2000a: 102) by showing that only mathematics can lead us to a true conception of the One.
Accordingly, Badiou’s own position, based on set-theory and Russell’s paradox, is that there is no existing All but only multiplicities of multiplicities. As for the One, we have just seen that it is not part of being and cannot be identified with the All, which is an inconsistent notion. Badiou holds that all metaphysicians who do not subscribe to this Platonist view can neither posit the multiple nor the novelty of events in any serious sense. This is the ultimate reason why Badiou does not see any substantial difference between the Stoic coherent cosmos (governed by fate) and Deleuze’s chaosmos: as long as there is a totality of being, the structure of this unity does not matter to him. To a Platonist, Lucretius’s infinite universe (which is probably closer to Deleuze’s than the Stoics’s) is not that different from the Stoic unified world, since they are both corporeal throughout and lack any real unity (which can only be an incorporeal principle).
5 Overturning Stoicism as a Failed Platonism
At first sight, the use of Stoicism to make Badiou’s three ascriptions stick and this platonization of Deleuze might seem wholly incompatible, but they in fact go hand in hand. As recent research on the ancient debate between Stoicism and imperial or late Platonists has shown, it is typical of Platonism to refute Stoicism by showing that it cannot succeed in grounding truth and science, justice and the good, or divine existence and providence (as it claims to do) on the basis of its materialist ontology, its empiricist epistemology, and its naturalistic ethics. From this perspective, Stoicism appears as an unstable or hypocritical, and ultimately impossible, compromise between incompatible positions. Consequently, it must renounce either its specific tenets (and choose the side of Platonism) or its philosophical aims (and choose the side of relativism).35 This is why it can and must be characterized both as a naturalism (or vitalism, in Badiou’s vocabulary), from the point of view of its basic tenets, and as a failed or awkward version of Platonism, from the point of view of the goals it claims to achieve. This whole argumentative strategy is hence based on at least two assumptions: (1) that Stoicism shares its fundamental philosophical orientations with Platonism (for instance, the distinction between opinion and knowledge, the identity between the good and the virtue, and the existence of a providential order of the world) and (2) that these orientations cannot be explained and defended without going beyond corporeal reality and the structure of language, that is to say, without positing eternal, intelligible entities.
Badiou describes the aim of philosophy in different terms, but his argument is entirely analogous. We have seen how he sometimes uses Spinoza to have Deleuze at least partly subscribe to these aims. Similarly, the ancient Platonists referred to Socrates, since he was a crucial authority for the Stoics as well, and could thus be used as a common ground to challenge the ability of Stoicism to satisfy Socratic philosophical standards. This is also why Badiou must base his ascriptions on notions which he shares with Deleuze, such as the One, asceticism, and the notion of system.36 Moreover, Badiou stresses how Deleuze and he shared similar adversaries, both from a philosophical and a political point of view. While he briefly said that he and Deleuze belonged to different factions of the Left during Mai 68 and that he wrote very polemical pieces about Deleuze and Guattari during these years (2000a: 2–3), Badiou nevertheless considers Deleuze to be more or less on the same side as himself, namely against phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and “the parliamentary moral doctrine of rights” (2000a: 98).37
Badiou’s Platonism is based on a specific concept of events (and the One) as breaking from continuous becoming (and multiplicities, equated with beings) and as eternal truths, and he claims that Deleuze’s Stoic notions of the One as the Virtual All and of events as superficial singularities cannot ground his Spinozist drive toward eternity or his political orientations. This is the meaning of Badiou’s ambivalent praise of Deleuze’s “unwavering love of the world” and refusal to judge it (2000a: 44). It is admirable, but it also prevents Deleuze from accounting for events (as absolute creations defining new and eternal truths) and for subjects (defined by Badiou through their faithfulness to these created truths). As a consequence, Deleuze’s staunch resistance to “what threatens us” (according to Badiou), namely ordinary language, logic, and democratic ethics, turns out to be a weak resistance,38 which cannot defend the eternal truths of events against the reign of capitalism and democratic opinion. The only true resistance is the one based on logic and mathematics and, hence, must “have recourse to the other tradition that . . . goes back, not to Nietzsche and the Stoics, but to Descartes and Plato” (2000a: 99). To a Platonist, a coherent Stoic either turns into a sophist or defects.
6 Conclusion
If my account of Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze and its underlying strategy is correct, three types of objection can be (and have indeed been) leveled against Badiou on this score. First, one can challenge the characterization of Deleuze as a neo-Stoic on the grounds that Badiou overlooks the fact that Deleuze distances himself from Stoicism in various ways (explicitly or implicitly, in the works where he draws on Stoicism or in other later works where he changed his positions). Still, it will always remain an open question whether Deleuze can ultimately be considered to be Stoic, as Badiou and others think, or not. But, even conceding the portrait of Deleuze as a Stoic, one can also try and refute Badiou’s claims that Deleuze did not succeed in elaborating (on his Stoic principles) as consistent and radical a democratic materialism as he (and Badiou alike) claimed to offer. Such a counterattack would be similar to the arguments offered by some ancient Stoics to the effect that Zeno’s doctrine is a far more consistent and efficient defense of Socrates’s central positions about virtue, dialectic or gods and the world than Plato’s doctrine. Finally, one could challenge this common ground itself and deny that Deleuze shares crucial philosophical goals and concepts with Badiou. One would thus argue that their “images of thought,” to borrow an important Deleuzian notion, are hardly similar. Just as, according to Deleuze, the Megarics, the Cynics, and the Stoics offered “a reorientation of all thought and what it means to think” directed against Plato’s notion of philosophy as a conversion to a higher sphere of reality (Deleuze 1990a: 148–51), Deleuze is hardly interested in fidelity to truths or in political revolutions, and sketches with Guattari a politics centered on flight, minority, and resistance.
Notes
1 I thank Kurt Lampe, Clifford Robinson, and Janae Sholtz for their comments on this paper and bibliographical suggestions during the Bristol Conference and afterward.
2 See Alliez (1998), Gil (1998), and Villani (1998) which were all published in the same issue of Futur antérieur.
3 See previous note and Laerke (1999), Toscano (2000) which is a review of Badiou (2000a), Smith (2003: 431–8), Crockett (2013: 11–26) and Roffe (2012).
4 See Roffe (2012: 1–6) for a brief study of all these texts, which rightly emphasizes the differences between them, and Laerke (1999) about the chapter in Court traité d'ontologie transitoire (Badiou 2006b: 63–72) .
5 References to Stoicism can be found in Deleuze (1968: 106), (1977: 77–81), and (1988: 71–2), Deleuze and Guattari (1980: 199) and (1992: 120). On Stoicism in Deleuze, see Bénatouïl (2003), Beaulieu (2005), Sellars (2006), Bowden (2005), and (2011: 15–5), Bénatouïl (2015) and several chapters in this volume.
6 This inference is quite problematic, as explained by Brassier (2000: 201), Smith (2003: 431–2), Roffe (2012: 6–23), and Laerke, who notes that “univocity means unity, but not oneness, because univocity is not a numerical determination” (2005: 13, n. 53). See also Laerke (1999).
7 “Being is Voice that is said [. . .] It occurs, therefore, as a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things” (1990a: 179). “Univocity raises and extracts Being, in order to distinguish it better from that in which it occurs and from that of which it is said. It wrests Being from beings [. . .] Univocal Being inheres in language and happens to things [. . .] Neither active, nor passive, univocal Being is neutral. It is extra-Being, that is, the minimum of Being common to the real, the possible, and the impossible” (1990a: 180).
8 Here the English translation does not capture the connection with Stoic ontology: Deleuze writes “une seule insistance pour tout ce qui existe” (1969: 211), where insistance refers back implicitly to the verb insister, which is one possible translation (with subsister) of huphisthanai, the verb Stoics used about incorporeals and distinguished from huparchein, which is usually translated by exister, a distinction which Deleuze mentions when he introduces events in The Logic of Sense: “On ne peut pas dire qu'ils existent, mais plutôt qu'ils subsistent ou insistent, ayant ce minimum d'être qui convient à ce qui n'est pas une chose, entité non existante” (1969: 13). This sentence might be taken to suggest that, for the Stoics, being is the genus of which exis ting things and subsisting entities are species or perhaps degrees/levels. This is not the case (and Deleuze refers more often and more adequately to incorporeals as extra-beings). The criteria of being, for the Stoics, are acting and being acted upon, hence only bodies (i.e., existing things) are beings. This point is crucial in the debate between Plato and the Stoics, as shown by Brunschwig (1988).
9 See Beaulieu (2005: 67–8), Sellars (2006: 167), and Roffe (2012: 114–19).
10 Brassier (2000: 202–3) offers an interesting account of why, from Badiou’s perspective, “the Deleuzian invocation of pure Chance” amounts to affirming “the ineluctability of Fate” or, as Badiou writes in the context of a comparison between Deleuze and Heidegger, “Deleuze does not decipher any destiny, or, rather, for him destiny [le destin] is never anything other than the integral affirmation of chance” (2000a: 100).
11 See also Badiou (2000b: 198) about the many possible names of the One.
12 See Badiou (2000a: 10–11) and (2000b: 197–202), respectively, for an anticipation of and a detailed answer to this objection. Badiou criticizes in particular the opposition between multiplicities and sets, which Deleuze supposedly reduced to numerical multiplicities. For a criticism of Badiou’s counter-objections and a thorough defense of Deleuze from the point of view of the history of mathematics, see Smith (2003).
13 On this analysis, see also Roffe (2012: 107–9).
14 I am not suggesting this principle is in itself wrong. When one conceives of philosophy as a system and when one recalls that the Stoics did, it is only natural to suspect that borrowing one tenet from Stoicism might not be possible without taking on board other Stoic tenets. Still, before ascribing these other unintended Stoic tenets to the borrower, it is necessary to assess the extent and method of the explicit borrowing and whether the borrower takes care of insulating it from other Stoic doctrines, as Deleuze does when he parts company with the Stoics in The Logic of Sense (1990a: 169–75).
15 Brassier (2000: 203), by contrast, notes correctly that Deleuze’s reference to Stoic ethics and amor fati (1990a: 142–53) might be taken to support Badiou’s reading of Deleuze’s pure Chance as just another name for the necessity of Fate.
16 This text “Immanence: A Life” was published in September 1995 just before Deleuze’s death. Some of its sentences can be read as answers to Badiou and one wonders whether they are echoes of Deleuze’s correspondence with Badiou: see the last page about the One and the last paragraph about the event of the wound in Joe Bousquet, which refers back to Logique du sens.
17 Badiou overlooks that Deleuze’s phrasing emphasizes (much more than Blanchot’s) how death can be turned against itself: see Villani (1998). Still, Deleuze writes in the previous page, commenting upon Blanchot: “It is in this way that death and its wound are not simply events among other events. Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double” (1990a: 152). There is no doubt that death is a paradigm of sort for Deleuze here.
18 I come back below to this contrast drawn by Badiou between Deleuze and Stoicism on the one hand and Spinoza on the other.
19 See for instance Villani (1998).
20 Badiou (2015: 172) takes Aristotle to be the “inventor of the system” in the sense criticized by contemporary thought, and vitalism, from Nietzsche onward, to be one of the trends critical of this notion.
21 See for instance Cicero, ND 1.41.
22 This is a conscious move on the part of Badiou (2000b: 210). Note that the Anti-Œdipus was violently criticized by Badiou in his first texts about Deleuze, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s.
23 Sauvagnargues (2009: 188–94).
24 This is confirmed by Logics of Worlds: as noted above, Deleuze’s philosophy is depicted as a metaphysics centered on the concept of event (2009: 382) and strictly opposed to Badiou’s own ontology centered on the same concept. In fact, the concept of event is quite rare in Deleuze’s later books, except in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in which a short chapter is called “What is an event?” In Deleuze’s middle works written with Guattari, the concept of becoming becomes much more important than the concept of event. See further Roffe (2012: 104–8) about “Deleuze’s intermittent attention” to event, which contrasts with Badiou’s focus on this concept in his own philosophy and in Deleuze’s. For an introduction to Deleuze’s philosophy from the point of view of the concept of event, see Zourabichvili (1994).
25 Hughes 2008 claims that Husserl’s imprint on Deleuze extends way beyond The Logic of Sense. While I doubt this is the case, I am not suggesting that Husserl and other references central to The Logic of Sense become irrelevant in later works, just that they are not direct interlocutors anymore. For a thorough comparison between Sartre’s, Deleuze’s, and Husserl’s approach to the Stoic notion of a sayable, see Majolino 2020.
26 See Badiou (2000b: 197–8), where he argues (against objections to his interpretation of Deleuze’s doctrine as a metaphysics of the One) that, following Spinoza, any real philosophy approaches particular things in order to grasp Substance or the One and that Deleuze (like Stoicism, Spinoza, Bergson or Nietzsche) aims at a “new intuition of the power of the One.”
27 Badiou also praises (somewhat ironically?) Deleuze for “an astonishing undertaking that consisted in integrally secularizing Bergsonism” (2000a: 99). For Badiou, Deleuze is ultimately a “religious” thinker (because of his equating truth with the One, of which we have no experience) and this is as always shown by his lineage: Stoicism, Spinoza, and Bergson.
28 About and against this analysis which takes the virtual as a founding or transcendental principle in Deleuze, see Laerke (1999: 87) and Laerke (2005: section 8).
29 In another chapter (2000a: 85), Badiou criticizes Deleuze’s description of the All as “that which keeps [the set] open somewhere” or “which attaches it to the rest of the universe” as a “theoretical convenience” (solution de facilité), describes this attachment as a “providential marking,” and compares it to the doctrine of the two parts of the object, one virtual the other actual. Providence is again a typically Stoic position (especially in the context of a discussion of the ascetic way to the One justified by the nature of the All) which is criticized by Spinoza (in the same Appendix to Ethics I).
30 About dualism in stoicism, see Gourinat (2015).
31 See also this concluding remark in a later text on Deleuze: “The only thing we ask is how a player of thought, a thrower of dice like Deleuze, can so insistently claim filiation with Spinoza. . . . No doubt, like many interpreters, Deleuze neglects the function mathematics holds in Spinoza’s ontology. . . . It is not an overstatement to say that for Spinoza mathematics only thinks Being, for mathematics alone consists completely of adequate ideas. This is what I sought to ascertain by placing Spinoza at a divide—yet another one—between Deleuze and myself” (Badiou 2006b: 71). For replies to this objection, see Laerke (1999) and Smith (2003, 435).
32 This paper was revised and republished in 1969 as an appendix in Logique du sens.
33 Another good example would be Badiou’s argument over the status and nature of truth (2000a: 55–61), which proceeds exactly like his analysis of the One/beings distinction: Deleuze claims to overturn Platonism by criticizing truth, but what he opposes to truth is in fact similar to Plato’s actual method (which is itself very different from Platonism), so much so that Deleuze turns out again to be “an involuntary Platonist” (2000a: 61).
34 See Ansel-Pearson (2002: 97–114) and Roffe (2012: 19–23) about Badiou’s reading of Deleuze’s ontology as platonist or emanative in this section of his book, which they aptly refute on the basis of Deleuze’s critical analysis of Neoplatonist emanation (1990b: 178–85). Still, the metaphysics of the One Badiou ascribes to Deleuze seems to me to be quite different from neoplatonism, as shown by Badiou’s privileged reference to Stoicism on this topic and by his insistence that Deleuze posits the One-All, which is very different from the Neoplatonist One. This is why I would not endorse Roffe’s conclusion that Badiou “portrait[s] Deleuze as a neo-plotinian” (2012: 6), while agreeing with most other points made by Roffe. However, the fact that Badiou suggests several similarities between Deleuze and neoplatonism is indeed very significant, but it is in my view part of a larger strategy painting the neostoic Deleuze as incapable of constructing a coherent antiplatonist philosophical system, as I will argue in the last section of this chapter.
35 The best examples of this strategy in the field of ethics can be found in Cic. Fin. 4-5 and Plotinus Enneads 1.4. For epistemology, see the examples offered and analyzed in Bonazzi (2015). For cosmology and metaphysics, see Cic. ND 3 (inspired by Carneades’s argument against Stoic theology), Plutarch, The E at Delphi, and Plotinus Enneads 2.4 and 3.1. These authors do not share the same platonist doctrines, but they can be shown to share an overall strategy against Stoicism and some philosophical orientations guiding this strategy.
36 Had Badiou ascribed to Deleuze “a philosophy of nature as a totality” and an “ethics based on amor fati,” instead of “a metaphysics of the One,” as “an ascetic ethics of thought,” he could have pictured Deleuze as a neostoic just as easily. But it would have been much more difficult to show that Deleuze ultimately failed to reach his philosophical aims. Whereas describing him as using concepts and goals seemingly common to him and Badiou (and applicable to Stoicism and Platonism) and prepares the second step in which Deleuze is shown to offer only inconsistent or weak versions of them (see next paragraph).
37 In the preface to Logics of Worlds, Badiou describes Deleuze as having attempted to offer a path against “democratic materialism” (2009: 7), which is today’s common sense and Badiou’s ennemy (2009: 1–2). Badiou and Deleuze’s philosophical orientations are supposed to be the same, while their paths may be “different and even perhaps opposed,” but only one will turn out to be able to reach the intended destination (see next note). There is a similar allusion in the Badiou’s last book, where Deleuze is said to have “come close to the dangers of a positivism of Life or of Totality [positivisme vitaliste, ou de la Totalité],” which is one of the dangers “facing philosophical progressivism” (2018: 35).
38 In other texts, Badiou is less generous and blames Deleuze for sharing various assumptions with phenomenology, linguistic philosophy, and democratic politics (2009: 268, 386). See Brassier (2000: 206–9) for an account of Badiou’s doubts about the political implications of Deleuze’s ontology.
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