Apostles of anti-philosophy: Badiou and Lyotard

Abstract

This article explores the impact of the turn in French theological thought in the 1980s by focusing on one of its consequences – the advent of anti-philosophy as act. In his work L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein (2009a), Alain Badiou explored the main aspects of anti-philosophy: the void, non-thought, anti-historicism. Drawing on this work and with specific reference to Badiou’s Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (1997) and Jean-François Lyotard’s La Confession d’Augustin (1998), I argue that, as a category of truth founded in the void, the anti-philosophical act enables Badiou to traverse the divisional effects of religious and cultural relativism and reposition subjectivity and eventiveness outside historicism and sophistry. Lyotard, I maintain, extends anti-philosophy through the idiom of poetic composition as an exercise in elimination, and through confession as a process that reveals the rift between the expression of an event and its immanence. Badiou and Lyotard revise our understanding of belief through anti-philosophy as an act that forgoes the ideology of cultural relativism for the purity of thought.