In the Handbook of Inaesthetics , Badiou identifies the poem as that which âmakes truth,â by approaching the generic through the specific and naming the result of that encounter (22). As such, the poem holds a special place within Badiouâs thought as an engine toward truth; indeed the naming of truth itself would seem for Badiou to be a poetic act.
This act is accomplished in poetry by breaking discursive language into what Badiou calls a âsongâ that is capable of not only identifying and diagnosing that which is already known, but succeeds in transcending knowledge in a manner that cannot immediately be grasped (Handbook of Inaesthetics 22). In this sense, the poem both posits and exceeds that which is known, and does so in a manner that opens the known, for however brief an instant, upon the unknown. The poem engenders, in Badiouâs words, the âfragmented anticipation of a universe without completion.â The poem is only able to do this, however, through the acknowledgement of its own limit, a limit that the poem both recognizes and challenges. There is a boundary, in other words, between sense and nonsense that imbues language that approaches it with the power to gesture toward that which lies beyond it. That limit, the unspeakable boundary between the poem itself and the âuniverse without completionâ that it suggests, can be understood as the void of poetry.
In âWhat is a Poem: Or Philosophy and Poetry at the Point of the Unnameable,â Badiou follows MallarmĂ© in asserting that syntax is that which guarantees poetryâs link to the intelligible. Syntax keeps poetry whole, and yet it is through the manipulation of syntax that poetry is able to achieve its unique effect. For Badiou, to remove syntax is to undo poetry, and yet within poetry itself syntax cannot be said; it âoperates without presenting itself,â silent and yet everywhere, providing the anchor against which the poem strains and in that straining, brings about the essential tension between what the poem says and what the poem seems to know (Handbook of Inaesthetics 25). Syntax is not, strictly speaking, the void of poetry, but it is through the operations of syntax that the void is revealed between what language can and cannot do; syntax indicates precisely how far the poem can bring itself, and demarcates the line past which thought may be able to move without language, slung, as it were, by the poem itself. The void dwells at the limit of syntax, or perhaps better, is the limit of syntax, what Badiou refers to as the âsutureâ between the operations of poetry in which syntax is contained, and a larger being which contains it all. 1
This is but one manifestation of the void, the key component of Badiouâs philosophical apparatus that is by necessity present in every given situation, every established world to which he bends his thought. As described in Being and Event , this void enables ontological discourse, but in more strictly aesthetic discussionsâthose bearing on poetry, novelistic prose, visual and performative art formsâBadiou seems to oppose the subtractive process of the void, which he oftentimes anchors in mathematics, to the more traditionally Heideggerian understanding of poetry as the chief vehicle for the metaphysics of presence. Readings of Badiou that address what he refers to as his inaesthetics generally focus on this Heideggerian legacy. 2
While Heidegger is without question an enormous influence on Badiouâs thought, to follow a more Lacanian thread through Badiouâs writings is to appreciate the remarkable pressure Badiou puts upon his own language, a pressure that seeks to apply structural restraints upon discussions regarding those very restraints. In fact, Badiouâs engagement with mathematics is driven by a belief in number to be a superior formalization to the letter, superior insofar as, in language, the truth can ever only be âhalf-said,â at least within philosophy. 3
I read much of Badiouâs work as an attempt to fashion, after Lacan, a location in which something may in fact be said that could touch on truth. That which may be said, however, is only sayable within strictly defined limits, and those limits are the points of contact with what Badiou identifies as the void. Much of Badiouâs writing adheres to his own framework, circulating within a structure of his own creation and diligent maintenance. Badiouâs relationship to a self-imposed control, a relationship I believe he shares with Eliot, Stevens and Pound, animates my investigations here.
But that relationship has begun to change in Badiouâs writing. I aim to illustrate that change here principally through a consideration of the evolving role and function of the void in Badiouâs work. In Theory of the Subject , the void is of relatively minimal importance in comparison to the destructive force and torque of dialectics. Central to Being and Event and Badiouâs work of the same period, the void becomes less prominent in Logics of Worlds , the emphasis there returning to the dialectical process, but less in the interest of destruction than of creation, less of turning away from the void than of turning to it, and opening thought upon it. 4 I would suggest that Badiouâs thinking, obsessively limited by his own imposed constraints, seeks to move from the rigorous application of its concepts within their own ontology to a looser, more enigmatic mode in which Badiou seems willing, if not anxious, to leave his thought undone, open, and unresolved.
Perhaps the most profound impact of Badiouâs thought in general is that it has worked as a corrective to what is generally understood as âpostmodernism,â if by postmodernism we understand an approach that cloaks an authoritarian system of thought in appeals to a celebration of difference. 5 Here his proponents and detractors agree: Badiou is a modern thinker. A thinker not of the postmodern but of a continuance of or return to modernity. Badiou would understand modernity to be a deadlock in thought not yet overcome, and the extended meditations throughout his oeuvre upon artists from Duchamp to Beckett isolate and refine modern themes of dissolution, upheaval, destruction, perseverance, and transcendence. And yet Badiou has neither read nor been read in terms of the American writers whose work is most commonly understood to represent modernism. Of the figures examined herein, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (via Ernesto Fenollosa), Badiou has only touched on the poetry of Stevens, but in a manner so oblique as to demand further investigation. I begin that investigation here, and find remarkable similarity in the progress of Badiouâs thought and the aesthetic theories less of Stevens than those of Eliot and Pound, especially those propounded in âTradition and the Individual Talentâ and âThe Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.â Those theories and the intentions that drove them, the structural milieu in which Eliot and Pound and Stevens wrote, is one shared to a remarkable degree by Badiou himself, even to the extent that his work seems in some ways an outgrowth of or clarification upon the notions put forward by those writers over a century ago.
These notions are grounded for Badiou in his conception of the void. As the backstop and guarantee of Badiouâs thought, much of that thought has seemed at times bent towards repeatedly marking limits, restrictions, and differences in relation to the void. I believe, however, that in more recent years Badiou has sought to release the nigh-unbearable tension of the investigations associated with the mathematical ontology of Being and Event . Instead of marking the limits of the void, Badiou seems ready to move progressively into it. Instead of using the void to shelter his own thought, Badiou seems increasingly willing to allow himself to be used by itâto allow his (in)famous rigor to be, in some ways, undone.
The heart of this book lies in its treatment of Badiouâs essay on Stevens, âDrawing: On Wallace Stevens,â in which Badiou sketches out two different understandings of modern art, eventually siding not with the discursive Stevensian thesis but with a faint antithesis that coalesces around the obscure term âdrawing.â This antithesis seeks to dissolve not only the limits Badiou has hitherto placed upon his thought, but to perhaps dissolve that thought altogether. It is a gesture away from the confines of âwesternâ thinking that echoes the modernist writers addressed here in both aspiration and structure. As I hope to show in the course of this work, where Badiou desires to go, the modernists have in some sense already been.
The second chapter outlines the stakes of Badiouâs thought in relation to the void, particularly as they tie to Badiouâs conception of modernity. In âA Poetic Dialectic,â Badiou defines modernity through the triplet ...