Deleuze

The Clamor of Being

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by Alain Badiou,

Translated by Louise Burchill

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published December 1999, 160 pages, paper

ISBN 0816631409

Not only a powerful reappraisal of Deleuze's thought, but also the first major work by Alain Badiou available in English. Badiou compellingly redefines "Deleuzian," joining the battle over the meaning of Deleuze's legacy.

For those who view Deleuze as the apostle of desire, flux, and multiplicity, Badiou's book is a deliberate provocation. Through a deep philosophical engagement with his writings, Badiou contends that Deleuze is not the Dionysian thinker of becoming he took himself to be; on the contrary, he is an ascetic philosopher of Being and Oneness. Deleuze's self-declared anti-Platonism fails--and that, in Badiou's view, may ultimately be to his credit. "Perhaps it is not Platonism that has to be overturned," Badiou writes, "but the anti-Platonism taken as evident throughout this entire century."

This volume draws on a five-year correspondence undertaken by Badiou and Deleuze near the end of Deleuze's life, when the two put aside long-standing political and philosophical differences to exchange ideas about similar problems in their work. Badiou's incomparably attentive readings of key Deleuzian concepts radically revise reigning interpretations, offering new insights to even the veteran Deleuze reader and serving as an entrŽe to the controversial notion of a "restoration" of Plato advocated by Badiou--in his own right one of the most original figures in postwar French philosophy.

Series: Theory Out of Bounds

Review

If you were thinking of publishing this book thirty years ago, Alain Badiou would be probably have been your last choice to write a study of Deleuze. In the aftermath of 1968, Badiou, at that time a Maoist, thought of Deleuze as a fasicst, and Deleuze refered to Badiou as an “intellectual suicide.” However, with time the two began to soften their views towards one another and their philosophical differences, rather than political, became a source of dialogue between the two. In the eighties, Badiou and Deleuze began a lenghty correspondence on a variety of philosophical and mathematical issues (the latter is a speciality of Badiou’s and a longtime interest of Deleuze’s). This exchange became the basis for Badiou’s study, one that has generated its fair share of controversy in France for its new approach to Deleuze’s work. More specifically, Badiou’s critiques and interpretation of Deleuze show him to be a far more systematic and metaphysical philosopher than his reputation makes him out to be. In the preface Burchill writes, “Contrary to such received ideas, Badiou affirms Deleuze to propose a metaphysics (which, in fact, concurs with Deleuze’s own repeated claim that he felt himself to be ‘a pure metaphysicist’) and one of the great merit of his book undoubtedly lies in its insistence that a comprehension of Deleuze’s work must necessarily address the question of the complex nature of the metaphysical system elaborated therein.”

• Also from the Theory out of Bounds series is The New Spinoza edited by Warren Montag and Ted Stolze.
• And there is Charles Stivale's excellent The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations