Andreas Kirchner proposes some guidlines concerning the hermeneutic problems raised by Alain Badiou’s philosophical procedures. He has a suggestive way to describe what a (supposed) inconsistency found in a given text does: it triggers a plan B on part of the reader who supposedly wanted to “consume” the text “as is”. Now, there can be a great number of reactions to being faced with (partial) incomprehensibility. One can be confused, angry or overwhelmed. Hermeneutics is a plan B inasmuch it is a rule-governed enterprise, following an established methodology. One of its main rules is the “principle of charity” we have been discussing as applied to Badiou.
I want to make two points: (1) on the charitable view of Badiou’s use of mathematics and (2) on Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” as an additional hermeneutical principle.
Formal milieu
Badiou, as quoted by Andreas, abandons a position that is explicitly antagonistic towards hermeneutics, namely rational reconstruction. Starting from a formal setting and proceeding by carefully regimented steps reconstruction tries to get to the analytic core of the phenomenon. It is on the side of Methode, not Wahrheit in Gadamer’s terminology. Putting a concept into a “formal milieu” is somewhere in between. It could be likened to Wittgenstein’s attempts to start with simply language games in order to capture some of the complexity of a given language use. (Alas, Badiou abhors Wittgenstein.) It is a strong point that this procedures matches the view that philosophy is in the business of arranging concepts.
Fusion
I never liked Gadamer’s “Horizontverschmelzung”. Take a sophisticated philosophical text like the opening of Hegel’s “Phänomenologie des Geistes”. These sentences are incredibly powerful, suggestive – and enigmatic. Hundreds of scholars have written about them, drawing dramatically diverse conclusions. Does it help to describe an individual’s understanding of these lines as “Horizontverschmelzung”? Some arrangement between preconditions of the reading of the text and (stipulated) preconditions of its writing has to be found. But does the term do anything else but suggest a feel-good attitude, disregarding the fruitful challenge remaining after an attempt of understanding has been made?
… but the possibility of expanding one’s horizon by looking beyond “the close and all-too-close, not to look away from it, but to see it from a greater whole” seems reasonable. (Andreas Kirchner)
In order to open up a narrowly confined situation I sometimes prefer a molotov cocktail from Badiou’s workshop.
Meta-comment:
I find it tragically funny to observe ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy referring to each other. It sometimes reminds me of the cartoon Tom & Cherry. They need and at the same time counteract each other. On the one hand, the feisty cat that raises energy and tools in order to displace a parasite and to protect the fridge. One the other hand, the clever mouse that usually finds a way to reflect the energy, make the cat tap into their own traps and escape with a smile – and a piece of cheese. One difference in philosophy is that the roles change (e.g. Sokal hoax and Searle-Derrida debate).
On throwing Molotov cocktails:
I can imagine situations where I indeed prefer throwing a Molotov cocktail over taking a step back from the obvious (now, at the latest, search engines will forward one or the other bomb builder to quatsch blog ;-))
Throwing a Molotov cocktail into a situation causes destruction. In economical terms: Something happens that makes it harder if not impossible to do “business as usual”. On the side of agents that maintain the structure of the situation, one plausible reaction of a hazard is to enforce business continuity, i.e., “continuing operations under adverse conditions”. For Badiou in Being and Event, such agents become a reactive subject.
How the situation changes after destruction took place is uncontrollable:
* In a stucked, heated up, and unsatisfying struggle between two parties, it is likely that one party instruments the bomb (a bad example: Sarkozy benefits from the Toulouse shootings and the opposition has a disadvantage).
* On the other hand, a rigid, driveless, and unsatisfying situation might more likely benefit from disturbance since it gets new impulses that enable change.
When we remember the starting point: the word war between Badiou and the Nirenbergs, this situation can hardly be described as driveless. Badiou and his Australian friends form the reactive subject, shouting out to the reader that the Nirenbergs arguments do not even touch the core of Badiou’s undertaking. In this context, I suspect that another bomb – ad hoc or built at home – is hardly fruitful.
On Fusion:
Think of the fusion of two companies, like Facebook and Instagram nowadays. The purpose of a fusion is not just to grow in size, but to rearrange the structure of the old companies according to a longer-term perspective in a way that it means a benefit for the business. For example, Facebook gets a novel service for photo sharing. One might ask, if the fusion is worth the effort (and money). Looking at the picture of this post: There is a risk, that restructuring raises problems because a unifying high-level perspective conflicts with low-level processes, suggesting a unit where loosely coupled or even isolated fragments can be found.
The above paragraph is not straight Gadamer. It describes a kind of fusion that is coupled with restructuring. It can be applied to horizons as well, again with the risk that integration of two formerly independent perspectives require extensive restructuring work that turn out to even complicate the situation and slow-down innovative movements. Indeed, the german word “Verschmelzung” raises other associations and pretends that melting together is a smooth and harmonic undertaking. It also suggests that in the end there can not be any reasonable resistance for unification into one horizon.
On the other hand, a Molotov cocktail does not only point to unsatisfying conditions but already starts blasting away parts of the rigid order. That does not mean that the order will get more generous. So here we have the risk that blasting away is not sustainable and cause collateral damage.