From Structure To History - A Study Of Alan Badiou 's Subject Thought

As the greatest living philosopher and leftist in France, Alain Badiou has been heard and read by more and more. Among many concepts involved in his politicized systematic philosophy, the concept of subject plays a key role. It is the material support or local status of truths that is compatible with being. And for the sake of such a relation to being, the truth is indifferent and egalitarian to everyone. Or in other word, besides in agreement with classical philosophers who accept the being of truths, Badiou insists that truths appear in the only world in which we live all together. But it should be acceded that such a procedure depends on the becoming of the subject. As a conclusion, this thesis is formed gradually in the process of Badiouean philosophical thinking. Badiou explores the question of the subject by taking advantage of different disciplines, diverse philosophers, as well as distinct historical events. Though inventing a singular and militant theory of the subject in the last instance, Badiouean attitude to the concept of subject is disparate in the three different stages of his self-proclaimed classical philosophy.We can investigate Badiouean attitudes to subject in the framework of the tense between the concept of the structure and that of the history. Following one of the outstanding researchers and translators of his works, I divide the process of his thought into three stages. Precisely speaking, the first is the time of materialist epistemology influenced by the structuralism and for the sake of this, he rejected the notion of subject. Second, in the seventies of the last century, after encountering the Maoism from the east, Badiou chose to equate subject to the proletariat, who is destined to undertake the task of the Marxian macro-history. And on the third stage, he puts forward his most creating and surprising mathematical ontology and considers the subjectivity as a kind of singular temporality, that is, historicity. In the last instance, subjectivity, historicity, as well as temporality, means a kind of global change of some structure. Throughout the three stages, we can find that the subject inclines to manifest in keeping with the retreat of the structure and the emergence of the history, and finally becomes the finite support and fragment of the truths which surpass the structure and the space it describes. In this way, it counts among the central concepts of Badiou. But what should be added is that, the subject is not only the result of the procedure mentioned above, it is the latter’s necessary dynamic.The first chapter attempts to portray a fundamental context for Badiouean theory of the subject in the aspect of the French Leftist, the change in its relation to the intellectual, the structuralism, the anti-philosophy as well as the modern mathematics. And it tries to prescribe the basic orientation and scope for the following inquiries of the subject. We discuss the concept of the structure in detail in the second chapter. Defined as the negative prescription of the subject or the given reality in which the latter has always been thrown since it was born, the structure is crucial to it. We also compare Badiouean analyses of the concept in his three stages and tell the how the subject, deemed as a bourgeoisie ideological notion and incompatible with the formalization, which is an indifferent structure desired by Badiou, changes into the necessary as well as the lacking origin and cause.Following the second chapter, the third chapter grasps the genesis and transition of the structure, its breaching or taking placing of another strata by means of the study of the structuralists’construction of the concept of structure. And finally I will show that there have been some limitations in the space established by the structure, and we can consider them as the symptom for the becoming of the subject. The chapter deals with a disparate question, that of the history. Heterogeneous to the structure which means non-temporality, non-historicity, non-dynamism and non-novelty, the concept of history is equal to the invention of dynamism, novelty and truths which surpass the limitations of the structure. And the invention itself can be thought as the demand that the structure face the question of its origin and transition. Chapter Four will explore Badiouean view of history in the three stages of his theory of the subject, in order to show the dialectical tense between the structure and the history, and the folding of the subject and the history.Based on the works in the previous four chapters, we begin to treat the question of the becoming of the subject, especially the concrete moments of such process and its singular reinvention of the genetic truth, such as the communist invariant in the field of politics. But inspired by a pure theorized mathematical ontology, this process focuses more on the possibility of the becoming of the subject and the mechanism involved in it. Because of this, it tells us little about the other types of truth procedure, or in other word, it does not deal with the truth procedure in other fields, such as love, art and so on. In order to solve problem mentioned above, Chapter Six will introduce another concept linked to the subject, that is, the body. The latter was none other that the material support of the subject, and it is the question of a new organization of the subject of the truth. In order to demonstrate the necessary of a new body of the subject of politics, I also introduce Badiouean concern about some striking political problems in France, such as that of the sans-papier.