The denial of (Greek) thought

Alain Badiou

pp. 186-211

in: Shane Weller, Literature, philosophy, nihilism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

For a number of seemingly very cogent reasons, one might have assumed that an analysis of that philosophical and literary-theoretical tradition in which a variously defined literature is privileged above all other modes of discourse for what is taken to be its powers of resistance to a variously defined nihilism would not include Alain Badiou other than as the most patent of counter-examples; that is to say, as a philosopher whose entire project may be summed up as the attempt to break completely with, and indeed to refute, the philosophical tradition stemming from Nietzsche and passing by way of Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Deleuze, among others. As Badiou observes in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), this Nietzschean tradition relies upon the notion of "Platonism", against which it directs all its force, the "crucial point" of intersection between Deleuze and Heidegger being their "ineluctable devaluation of Plato — which both get from Nietzsche" (Badiou 1999a: 101). At the heart of this Platonism would lie the radical distinction between logos and mythos, or between philosophy and what will come to be thought as literature, and the absolute privilege accorded to the former over the latter. It is on the impossibility of any such watertight distinction between philosophy and literature that this Nietzschean tradition repeatedly insists, and, as we have seen, it does so precisely in the interests of a resistance to nihilism.