{"id":5036,"date":"2016-07-07T13:40:15","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T17:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=5036"},"modified":"2019-06-30T15:44:19","modified_gmt":"2019-06-30T19:44:19","slug":"matthew-r-mclennan-philosophy-sophistry-antiphilosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2016\/07\/07\/matthew-r-mclennan-philosophy-sophistry-antiphilosophy","title":{"rendered":"Matthew R. McLennan, Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew R. McLennan, Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy<\/em>: Badiou\u2019s Dispute with Lyotard<\/em>. London: Bloomsbury, 2015; 150 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4725-7416-9.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Devin Zane Shaw, Carleton University and University of Ottawa<\/em><\/p>\n

Matthew McLennan\u2019s Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy<\/em> is a remarkable book. While providing a succinct and incisive account of the philosophical differences between Alain Badiou and Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, it also presents a sustained meditation upon the definition of philosophy itself. Beginning with a broad, working definition\u2014that \u201cphilosophy is an activity of higher-order questioning, a search after truth\u201d (1)\u2014McLennan shows that defining what we do when we do philosophy is a complex problem. Badiou and Lyotard prove to be worthy interlocutors on this point, as they both uphold, for different reasons, an \u201cobstinate\u201d and \u201cmilitant\u201d vision of philosophy opposed to the \u201clevelling and domesticating pressures of economic reason.\u201d (121) While McLennan focuses on the dispute between Badiou and Lyotard, and the different ways that they inflect the basic definition of philosophy as a search<\/em> for truth<\/em>, there are three conflicts to which he is attentive. First, he argues that in the present conjuncture philosophy is caught in a \u201cdouble bind: if unable to plead its utility, philosophy is existentially threated; pleading its utility, it is threatened no less.\u201d (1) On the one hand, by appealing to the intrinsic value of its pursuit of truth, philosophy falls afoul of the metrics of economic efficiency. On the other hand, by appealing to its utility as either a discipline that inculcates innovative and creative thinking or a therapeutic that cultivates contentment or wisdom, philosophy risks legitimating \u201cinstitutions and the individuals who populate them.\u201d (1) Second, this conflict between appealing to philosophy\u2019s intrinsic value or its practical, ethical utility also risks transforming philosophy into sophistry\u2014the instrumentalization of persuasion without the concern for truth. McLennan shows, however, that the relationship between sophistry and philosophy, in the ways that Badiou and Lyotard confront it, is much more complicated.<\/p>\n

The central dispute, however, that drives McLennan\u2019s investigation, is the conflict between Badiou and Lyotard, which provides \u201ca good deal of insight into their concepts, arguments and systems.\u201d (4) Although both figures uphold a militant vision of philosophy, their respective definitions of what philosophy does are profoundly different. Lyotard, especially in The Differend<\/em> (the central focus of McLennan\u2019s analysis), practices philosophy as a \u201cgenre in search of its rule.\u201d (122) If philosophy is the search for truth, in Lyotard\u2019s parlance, it would be an interminable search<\/em>. For Badiou, philosophy thinks the compossibility of the truths of four heterogeneous conditions: science, politics, art, and love. Thus, for Badiou, philosophy is the search for truth<\/em>, the search for an ontology that can carve out a place for truths (necessarily in the plural) and the subjectivation of militant fidelity to truths. McLennan, while \u201ctaking pains to do justice to both thinkers,\u201d admits to \u201cgiving a slight edge to Badiou in the conclusion\u201d\u2014a conclusion that I will challenge below. (5) Though in many ways McLennan follows Badiou in framing their dispute, he practices philosophy much like Lyotard, interrogating their respective ontologies, concepts of philosophy and sophistry, and accounts of ethics and politics, withholding his ultimate verdict until the closing pages of the book.<\/p>\n

From the outset McLennan rejects the idea that philosophy ought to justify itself according to its utility, restricting its scope to a liberal democratic framework and applying itself to problems therein. Restricting its scope would render philosophy oblivious, in Lyotard\u2019s terms, to the possibility of a differend or a wrong\u2014such as the wrong that occurs in the many formulations of the self-evident intelligibility of the Western philosophical tradition that rely, in part, on excluding other philosophical traditions. (While this point is implied by McLennan\u2019s militant idea of philosophy, it is not explicitly explored). McLennan focuses, then, on the other conflicts: between philosophy and sophistry and between Badiou and Lyotard.<\/p>\n

Both Badiou and Lyotard draw on sophistry to subvert philosophical pretentions to totalizing knowledge, acting as the master discourse or science of all sciences that organizes and delimits the other sciences in order to proclaim the Truth of the whole. The operant question, especially in chapters 3 and 4, is whether Lyotard\u2019s philosophy, in maintaining its vigilance toward the interminable search for the rule, lapses into sophistry. Lyotard, from the 1970s through the composition of The Differend<\/em>, draws on sophistry in order to distinguish between philosophy as a practice and what McLennan calls its \u201ctheoreticist deviation,\u201d which presumes that philosophy is a master discourse: \u201cLyotard the philosopher fights alongside the sophists, using sophistical tools, against philosophy\u2019s reification into Platonic, Hegelian and other systems.\u201d (71) Lyotard neither opposes philosophy to sophistry, nor on his terms does he side with sophistry; instead, he opposes pragmatics of genres to the philosophical architectonic. In this approach, which is similar to deconstruction, Lyotard shows how the rules, protocols, and axioms for establishing proof or truth within an architectonic system or master discourse undermine themselves when faced with what he calls \u201cretorsion.\u201d McLennan glosses retorsion<\/em> in the terms of Hans Albert\u2019s M\u00fcnchhausen trilemma: Lyotard shows how the master discourse\u2019s appeal to first principles falls afoul of either<\/p>\n

(a) infinite regress (on what other principles do your principles rest?); (b) circularity (on what ground other than your principles can you defend the claim that your principles are self-evident?); or (c) arbitrariness (on what grounds have you broken off the search for first principles here?). (73)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When, however, Lyotard turns the protocols of Plato\u2019s philosophy (see 75\u201378) or Kant\u2019s critical architectonic (see, for example, his analysis of the Kantian sublime) against themselves, he does not assert a new master discourse; he aims to undermine the pretentions to philosophical mastery in favor of a militant vigilance toward witnessing the differend.<\/p>\n

Badiou, by contrast, may be the contemporary epitome of philosophy\u2019s theoreticist deviation. In the preface to the English translation to Being and Event<\/em>, Badiou claims Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hegel as his philosophical company. Indeed, Badiou characterizes his project as a \u201cPlatonism of the multiple\u201d that defines philosophy in relation to the truths of its four conditions. This Platonism, though, refers not only to the idea of truth\u2014since one could lay claim to truth by virtue of a fidelity to the ways that emancipatory political struggle has laid claim to truth in opposition to political oppression\u2014but also to Badiou\u2019s claim that only set theory can think the pure or inconsistent multiple, which is to say an ontology attentive to the event, truth, and subjectivation.<\/p>\n

However, despite the Platonic program, Badiou sets out, like Lyotard, to detotalize philosophy. In the Manifesto for Philosophy<\/em> and the first chapter of Conditions<\/em>, \u201cThe Re(Turn) of Philosophy Itself,\u201d Badiou \u201creckon[s] with the inherently sophistical character of much post-Heideggerian thinking,\u201d Lyotard included. (81) Rather than conceding the \u201cend\u201d of philosophy, in the wake of the totalitarian and terroristic disasters of the 20th<\/sup> century, Badiou argues that a philosophy of truth, the event, and subjectivation is necessary if philosophy desires to think its contemporary situation. He maintains, in the wake of, and (in some sense) in fidelity to, post-structuralism, that philosophy must constitute its task through its rivalry with sophistry. Sophistry, broadly defined, deposes of truth in favor of genealogical critique reducing philosophy to a discursive genre. Badiou contends that by engaging with the sophistry of post-structuralist French thought philosophy can reinvigorate its fidelity to truth without lapsing into the disastrous consequences of believing to possess the <\/em>Truth. When philosophy claims to possess the<\/em> Truth, it treats Truth as what Badiou characterizes as ecstasy (an initiation to Truth), the sacred (the sacralization of the<\/em> name of Truth), and terror (exclusive possession of Truth). Thus when philosophy treats truth as ecstasy, the sacred, or terror, it \u201ccedes ground with respect to multiplicity, heterogeneity and moderation.\u201d (110) The sophist, for Badiou, is correct to argue against Truth. However, philosophy must insist, against the sophist, that there are truths<\/em> (multiplicity), that there are multiple names\u2014such as May \u201968 or the Paris Commune\u2014of truth \u201cseized\u201d from philosophy\u2019s four conditions (heterogeneity), and that philosophy constructs an open place for truth without claiming possession of the Truth (moderation).<\/p>\n

McLennan argues that, in examining the dispute between Lyotard and Badiou and the rivalry between philosophy and sophistry, \u201cthe very dispute over who is doing philosophy is philosophical.\u201d (122) Thus I will conclude by examining what we might extract as McLennan\u2019s concept of a militant philosophical vocation. The first two features of this militant philosophy, common to both Lyotard and Badiou, are: first, a principled resistance to reducing philosophy to socio-economic utility; and second, an openness to the event, in its multiplicity and heterogeneity. When McLennan argues that Badiou\u2019s philosophy has the \u201cslight edge\u201d over Lyotard\u2019s, his verdict turns on their respective political and ethical characterizations of this openness to the event. Lyotard\u2019s philosophy is marked by an openness to singularity, experimentation, and alterity, but it is increasingly marked, especially after The Differend<\/em>, by melancholia. Just as Lyotard practices philosophy as an interminable search for its rule, he practices ethics as what McLennan calls an \u201canthro-paralogy,\u201d which seeks to \u201cmultiply testimonies to the effect that the individual human being and perhaps the human as such, if there is such, is constitutively resistant to totalizing genres.\u201d (103) While he evinces some sympathy toward this \u201crigorous vigilance,\u201d McLennan notes that Lyotard\u2019s ethics is itself vulnerable to retorsion: either ethics is one genre among others and holds \u201cno pre-eminent place, or ethics is a kind of meta-genre and therefore one which, paradoxically, commits wrongs.\u201d (102)<\/p>\n

McLennan, therefore, grants Badiou a slight edge over Lyotard for maintaining the category of truth. He writes: \u201cthe category of truth is essential to the element of revolt, i.e. it is essential to interrupting the interminable economic circulation of codes;\u201d a truth functions as an \u201cabsolute fulcrum<\/em> from which to demonstrate capital\u2019s injustice or its inessential being.\u201d (124, my emphasis on that quasi-Cartesian metaphor) He draws from Badiou a concept of truths that is by definition subtracted from the status quo or state of the situation. That truth is subtracted from the state of a situation means: first, that it cannot be reduced to the knowledge accepted within the consensus of the status quo, and second, that it is by definition opposed to the State (given that Badiou plays upon the equivocal meaning of state<\/em>) of the situation. Then, given that truth is subtracted from the state of the situation, that it is the \u201cabsolute fulcrum\u201d of militancy, subjecting it to retorsion would be incoherent.<\/p>\n

Here, I agree with McLennan, although I would phrase such a claim to truth through Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s egalitarianism. That said, I would like to challenge\u2014from within the framework immanent to McLennan\u2019s analyses\u2014the synecdoche, established by Badiou, that links truths, militancy, and ontology. While in the conclusion McLennan opposes Lyotard\u2019s ethics and politics to Badiou\u2019s, when he first formulates his verdict in Chapter 4 he appeals to ontological grounds: he argues, following Badiou, that Lyotard\u2019s melancholy politics is a consequence of the fact that Lyotard was not \u201centirely faithful to the pure multiple,\u201d that there is, in Lyotard, nostalgia or desire for the One, the Moment or Event for which the historical moment has passed. (119) I think this appeal to a fidelity to the pure multiple must be challenged by retorsion. Badiou is, as a reader of Lyotard, cognizant of this problem; as McLennan notes, Badiou \u201ctries to evade the ruse of retorsion with the help of the matheme, more particularly set theory.\u201d (78) However, even if we grant that Badiou\u2019s set-theoretical ontology evades retorsion (and this is by no means settled) Badiou\u2019s use of the \u201cpure multiple\u201d as a synecdoche for a philosophy of subjectivation, truth, and event does not.<\/p>\n

As McLennan notes, for Badiou, the recourse to ontology is an attempt to evade retorsion via set theory. But to judge politics or ethics on the basis of ontology, one must make what I will call an ontosectarian<\/em> assumption: that ontology is \u201cfirst philosophy,\u201d that politics or ethics follow from ontology, and that insufficient politics or ethics follow from insufficient ontology. But then the question is: how do we judge the sufficiency of ontology across philosophical traditions\u2014be they European, creolized, or non-European, canonical or non-canonical\u2014when translating across traditions, especially when the Western tradition is treated as the norm, risks a differend? This opens a question that cannot be answered within the protocols of Badiou\u2019s ontology: why is the pure multiple a desideratum? Badiou dehistoricizes this particular question when he treats the relationship between philosophy and sophistry as a perennial rivalry rather than a problem that arises in a specific historical conjuncture. Even if we grant Badiou that the pure multiple is, in the wake of French post-structuralism, the conceptual basis of a rigorous definition of militancy, truth, and subjectivation, it does not follow that in a different philosophical tradition that militancy, truth, and subjectivation must be faithful to the pure multiple. Moreover, as I have noted, it is equally possible to derive a fidelity to truth or militancy from emancipatory political struggle itself, to test politics with and against politics, ethics with and against ethics as well. Indeed, we find\u2014despite his acceptance of Badiou\u2019s ontosectarian verdict\u2014that McLennan tests these other avenues in his investigation. Therefore, we can accept that truth is, as McLennan writes, the \u201cabsolute fulcrum\u201d of militant philosophy while drawing from Lyotard the tools for constructing frameworks for thinking and reinforcing the common political goals of emancipatory struggles across potentially incommensurable philosophical and cultural principles. Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy<\/em> as a whole is a robust demonstration of philosophical openness, patience, and generosity through agonism, and of an attentiveness to the idea that to speak truth to power requires a self-reflexive capacity to ask to, for, and with whom one speaks about truths.<\/p>\n

Read Matthew McLennan\u2019s review of Shaw\u2019s <\/em>Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Ranci\u00e8re here<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew R. McLennan, Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou\u2019s Dispute with Lyotard. London: Bloomsbury, 2015; 150 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4725-7416-9. Reviewed by Devin Zane Shaw, Carleton University and University of Ottawa Matthew McLennan\u2019s Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is a remarkable book. While providing a succinct and incisive account of the philosophical differences between Alain Badiou and Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[34,25,129,13],"class_list":["post-5036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-badiou","tag-ethics","tag-lyotard","tag-politics","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-14 03:32:18","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5036"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6968,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions\/6968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}