‘’(you'll remember, Paul, you and I recently agreed the first volume of Being and Event is a bit boring, and I'm increasingly interested in what we agreed about).’’
I just wanted to add some words since I really do feel like I have not been blogging here enough.
I suppose in the same way that Latour is both entertaining and a good thinker Badiou is both a bad writer and a good thinker. I guess the real problem would be to encounter a bad thinker who writes well. Philosophy, I think, tends to operate somewhere around the limits of boredom. Sometimes philosophers buck the trend. I suspect very few people are bored when reading Harman’s books (except when he has to talk about Heidegger but we can safely blame Heidegger for this). I do suspect that many people find reading through Being and Event a kind of chore – that is many readers will feel that they must read Badiou to keep up [one read’s Badiou after all…] even if, and here philosophy is a rather odd discipline, one finds the entire process terribly mundane. And all this for a discipline where you might not even get a proper grasp on what is happening in a text until you re-read it [that is re-read something you already know is boring!]. And then there is the math. Math! So what I think we agreed on was something more than that it is ‘merely’ boring, to link us up with Heidegger, since to call a book of philosophy boring is never enough to dismiss it - which is why Harman does not end PoN once he has convinced us that Latour is entertaining and the heavy lifting comes in showing Latour's metaphysical bona fides.
I remember coming across Hegel’s section on death and the negative (in the PofS) for the first time [the famous tarrying with the negative section]. I will never be able to articulate just how intense that moment of reading was for me, but not 3 minutes before coming across this section I was probably yawning and thinking about my next cup of coffee.
1 comments:
One of my absolute most favorite remarks ever is this one of Zizek on boredom (he's replying to Laclau in this essay on populism):
Is there not something slightly surprising in this obviously excessive subjective animosity? [That is, Laclau's vis-a-vis Zizek.] In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleague's intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say, "It was interesting." So if, instead, we tell a colleague, "It was boring and stupid," he would be fully justified to be surprised and ask, "But if you found it boring and stupid, why did you not simply say that it was interesting?" This unfortunate colleague would be right to take the direct statement as involving something more, not only as a comment about the quality of his paper but as an attack on his very person. So the difference between Laclau and me is that while Laclau tells me that my text is boring and stupid, I am telling him politely that his is interesting.
I don't know what that does to everything here. I do know that Badiou is a really great and weird thinker--sometimes insane, but sometimes really brilliant, and all the time sort of fascinating in his commitments and passions. Just for the record. Maybe you're right--what I find weird is just that he's a bad writer. On that note, I just want to add to my Derrida remark: I don't see why we salivate over his great writing only, though it is great. What's great about the writing is insofar as it interacts with the thinking. And therefore I still believe it might be a good way to write, though I don't salivate.
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