Alain Badiou on the Relation Between Poetry and Philosophy || Azfar Hussain

Alain Badiou's "Philosophical Status of the Poem" is one helluva brilliant piece. A "Platonist of the Multiple," as he himself claims, Badiou here moves in the direction of "de-Platonizing" the relationship between mathematics and poetry, dispensing with the procedure of interrupting the poem with a matheme (which, of course, is applicable elsewhere), while holding that poetry is the thought of the presence of the present, "a presence, which far from contradicting the matheme, implies 'the one and only Number that cannot be any other.'"

In the piece in question, Badiou brilliantly meditates on the three possible relations of philosophy (as thought) to the poem. He takes up Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle. According to Badiou, then, philosophy envies the poem, as in the case of Parmenides; philosophy excludes the poem, as in the case of Plato; and philosophy classifies the poem, as in the case of Aristotle. In other words, the three possible links between poetry and philosophy are "identifying rivalry" (Parmenides), "argumentative distance " (Plato), and "aesthetic regionality" (Aristotle).

Badiou also takes up Heidegger, maintaining that he has "very legitimately re-established the autonomous function of the thought of the poem;" but, in Badiou's reckoning, Heidegger in the final instance "has only been able to revert to the judgement of interruption, and to restore, under subtle and varied names, the sacral authority of poetic profferring--and the idea that the authentic lies in the flesh of words." For Badiou, to the extent that poetry is the thought of the presence of the present, poetry ain't no rival for philosophy. Invoking the poet Celan, Badiou speaks of the liberation of the poem from philosophical poeticizing, and ends the piece thus: "The poem liberated from philosophical poeticizing, no doubt, will always have been both of these thoughts, or both of these gifts: the presence of the present in the traversing of realities, and the name of the event in the leap outside of calculable interests." To use Celan's words:

Discus, with

Forseeings starred,

Throw yourself

Out of yourself.