II. Badiou’s critique of Hegel

Badiou’s critique of Hegel commences in his 1978 commentary on The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, which is subsequently revised and expanded in his first major philosophical work, Theory of the Subject. He delivers two further critiques in the first two books of his philosophical trilogy (Being and Event and Logics of Worlds), each of which emerge at a critical point in the development of his corpus, enabling him to obtain sufficient distance from ‘our father: the master of the idealist dialectic’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 141). Peter Hallward suggests that Badiou’s core issue with Hegel is that he ‘writes himself into much the same impasse as Spinoza, that is, into the substantial identity of being and truth’, in so far as he deduces the infinite out of the immanent structure of being, and thereby asserts a dialectical continuity between subject and object. Badiou’s project, Hallward claims, depends upon exposing the failure of this logic and demonstrating that the subject ‘comes to be as an abrupt break with the regime of continuity and in the radical absence of an object’ (Hallward Reference Hallward2003: 170). In other words, it is the Hegelian prohibition of absolute disjunction with which Badiou takes issue. In his earliest works, Badiou criticizes Hegel for privileging iteratively generated contradiction over real contradiction, the latter of which Badiou considers to be an irreconcilable disjunction. Given Badiou’s insistence on materialism, which he believes necessarily begins with a Two—the immanent Two of a caesura, not the Two composed of two discrete ones, about which I will explain more below—he must disavow the beginning of Hegel’s system which he finds biased toward the One. One could criticize Badiou for insisting on a foundational presupposition which externally determines his project’s commencement, compromising its immanent self-deployment; however, Badiou himself overtly denies philosophy the radical autonomy which Hegel accords it, arguing instead that it is ‘conditioned’ (by art, mathematics, politics and love) and thus has already taken this critique into account, even if only by axiomatically dismissing it. Despite the merits of the earlier iterations, Badiou’s most comprehensive critique of Hegel appears in Logics of Worlds. Although not in contradiction with his previous critiques, this text most clearly exposes Badiou’s divergence from Hegel. Before rehearsing Badiou’s argument, some preliminary details regarding the contours of his project are in order, though I must lay them out rather axiomatically rather than via an in-depth description of the project given spatial constraints.Footnote ⁴ In his ontology, Being and Event, Badiou axiomatically claims that being is infinite, inconsistent multiplicity, of which there exists no unifying concept.Footnote ⁵ This he calls his ‘axiomatic decision’ in which ‘his entire discourse originates’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Feltham2005: 23). Given this thesis, Badiou claims that mathematics (Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, to be exact) is the only discourse capable of adequately dealing with being qua infinite multiplicity, as it can ‘discern the multiple without having to make a one out of it’ (2005: 29). In other words, it can deal with being on its own terms, rather than by re-presenting it (an invariably hermeneutical endeavour, according to Badiou) as something other than what it is. Badiou proceeds to conclude that mathematics is ontology. Following from this, everything that is must be a set—that is, when given a property, a set is just all those elements which possess it—made up of other infinitely decomposable sets whose sole stopping point is the sense-less void, or empty set. The void is ‘the being of nothing, as the form of the unpresentable’ which sutures all situations to their being but is impossible to locate structurally (2005: 54). Badiou solicits Russell’s paradox to demonstrate the impossibility of totalizing all sets into a One-Whole (i.e. it is impossible that the set of all non-reflexive sets itself be reflexive or non-reflexive, thereby annulling the equation at its foundation), or of deducing them all from an initially given One-term. He makes the consequent claim that being is non-All, and that the Whole, or the One, is not. Being can thus never be thought in toto, but rather only as making up particular situations, or worlds. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou claims that the way being appears—and for Badiou, like Hegel, being must appear—depends on logic, rather than set theory.Footnote ⁶ It is only at the level of appearance that relations (and thus the illusion of an all-encompassing unity) emerge, for being qua indifferent multiplicity is utterly non-relational. To assume a fundamental relationality is not only to assume that being is composed of discrete units (which, according to Badiou, it is not; being qua pure multiplicity is not a multiplicity of ones, for this would imply that we have a unifying concept of being, but rather multiplicity as such), but also to assume that there is a true, original mode of relationality to which humans might become adequate. Appearance consists of an infinity of worlds, some of which contingently overlap but all of which are disjunct and cannot compose a totality, for the same reason that being cannot be totalized. As there is no underlying structure of being, each world is founded upon its own particular, albeit asubjective, transcendental regime (although exactly why this is this case is left somewhat vague) which Badiou defines as ‘the operational set which allows us to make sense of the “more or less” of identities and differences in a determinate world’, although, he denies that this is tantamount to the Kantian transcendental, as there is no singular-universal transcendental subject to whom these worlds appear (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 73).Footnote ⁷ Given that the transcendental pronounces on what can appear and at what intensity, it also pronounces on, and indeed depends upon for its consistency and self-identity, what cannot. A world depends upon a founding exclusion which determines its realm of consistency and possibility. Thus, no world can be genuinely universal in the sense of all-inclusive. It is the transcendental’s consistency which has the given relations in a world appear as real and necessarily interconnected, despite that in terms of their being they bear no relation to one another. Since what appears in a world is relative to everything else that appears therein, absolute disjunction cannot exist within a world. An Event, which exposes the illusion of a world’s transcendental by introducing into it non-existence, or the impossible—that is, not the ‘not-possible’, but that which cannot be immanently derived within the world’s seemingly immutable realm of possibility—makes the truth of disjunction and reveals the un-truth, or the arbitrary particularity, of a world. I will return to the notion of the Event below, but here it is crucial to emphasize that Badiou’s insistence on disjunction is his clearest point of divergence from Hegel. For Hegel, as Badiou fairly summarizes,

• - The only truth is that of the Whole.

• - The Whole is a self-unfolding, and not an absolute-unity external to the subject.

• - The Whole is the immanent arrival of its own concept (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 142).

In a system the truth of which is the Whole, there cannot be an irreducible disjunction between two existents, or between an existent and a non-existent. As Badiou puts it, ‘[t]he question of a minimum of identity between two beings, or between a being and itself, is meaningless for a thinking that assumes the Whole, for if there is a Whole there is no non-apparent as such’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 147; italics mine). A being can fail to appear in a given world, but it nevertheless must appear within the Whole, according to Hegelian criteria. Appearing can never measure zero in Hegel’s system, whereas it can in Badiou’s as there is no necessity that any of ‘all’ the existing worlds account for something that is but is not transcendentally authorized to appear. Badiou acknowledges Hegel’s explication of the impossibility of disjunction in the Logic’s treatment of diversity (Verschiedenheit), but writes it off as a Hegelian attempt to subordinate difference to identity, without, as we will come to see by this paper’s conclusion, properly grasping what Hegel really means by identity. In Badiou’s reading of the Logic, purportedly diverse things are only so by differentiating themselves from others, making them at bottom the same (or at least, to put it crudely, made of the same ‘stuff’ such that they can eventually be reconciled within a single determination). For Hegel, the diverse are only so ‘through a determination’ and this determination is simply the Whole’s self-unfolding which enables differences to be intelligible at all (SL: 422/53).Footnote ⁸ This is different from Badiou who jettisons the Whole entirely. As Riera puts it, ‘a [Badiouian] world is, like the Hegelian Absolute, the unfolding of its own infinity’ (i.e. a Hegelian ‘determination’), but ‘unlike Hegel’s Absolute, a world cannot construct the concept or measure of its infinity from within’ (2015: 87). This is because individual worlds are transcendentally guaranteed and therefore rely on an exclusion, making them anything but universal or self-grounding. Such an exclusion is not merely the exclusion of a single element, but rather of an antagonism, which leaves the world apparently unified and non-contradictory. The introduction of such a fundamental exclusion into a world (i.e. the reintroduction of class struggle as the antagonistic-ground upon which a capitalist world is founded) would cause the collapse of the very logic it uses to measure relations given its heterogeneity viz-à-viz what is authorized to appear. To be clear, Badiou adopts the law of diversity no more than Hegel, as he acknowledges the possibility that two beings might indeed appear absolutely equal, but neither does he claim, contra Hegel, that it is possible to exhibit any two things as one and the same (though, Hegel never actually claims this either). There can be, for Badiou, ‘Twos-without-One’, which happens to be the focal point of his conception of love (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 149). Such a Two, ‘the divided effect of a decision’, is not derived from within a determination and hence is without common ground; it is that which splits any such determination from itself (Badiou Reference Badiou and Feltham2005: 207). Here it is worth noting that the Two is historically significant for Badiou. In his assessment of the twentieth century, he claims that the ‘shared law of the world is [or rather, has become] neither the One nor the Multiple: it is the Two […] [T]he world represented by the modality of the Two excludes the possibility of both unanimous submission and combinatory equilibrium. One simply must decide’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2007: 37). Badiou’s wager that the Two is the fundamental principle of ‘the world’ is a consequence of his belief that dialectical thinking is no longer adequate to think the present (hence why his project is founded on an axiomatic decision) and that reconciliation in the Hegelian sense is not possible. One can fault Badiou for taking Hegel’s treatment of the determinations of reflection to be his final word on co-existing, related beings. Hegel indeed denies the existence of irreducible otherness which cannot be taken into account by the system, but he will later expose the necessity of the concept’s self-differentiation which enables its self-maintenance. It is only by virtue of the concept’s immanent striation, as it were, that the type of identity and unity Hegel privileges will be able to emerge. Although Badiou does not directly engage with it, my view is that it is the transition from substance to the concept, or rather to subject, which he ultimately finds most troubling in the Hegelian project. Whereas the Hegelian subject is the immanent result of substance’s self-overcoming, the Badiouian subject, which is always an exception to the world on the edge of which it resides, emerges by breaking with the world. The subject is not transcendent to the world but is itself this very immanent break in and of the world. The subject stands in the locus of, or rather is, that very antagonism which the world excludes to found itself. It is for this reason that subjectivization for Badiou is synonymous with emancipation, in so far as it sloughs off the conditioning of the individual by the logic of the world in which it is situated, though not so as to attain a pure, immediate communion with truth or to escape from mediation tout court, but to escape mediation by the transcendental. Without such a break, we are deprived of the possibility of freedom, for Badiou. Prior to elaborating on this, a few more words on the Badiouian equivalent of the transition from substance to subject are in order.

III. Badiou: human animal to subject of truth

For Badiou, the transition from substance to subject—or, in his terminology, given that the term substance itself almost never appears in his enterprise, save for a few critical comments, the subjectivization of the human animal—involves the aleatoric, ephemeral irruption of inexistence into a world.Footnote ⁹ This is what Badiou terms an Event, which reveals the truth of the world in which it takes place. That is, it reveals the world’s generic ground, which is precisely the infinite, inconsistent, non-relational multiplicity from which its consistency is drawn. An Event destabilizes this consistency by disclosing something which exceeds it from within, thereby exposing its essential incompleteness. This excess is what Badiou terms ‘the truth of the world’. The truth ‘presents the multiple-being of the previous [world], stripped bare of any predicates, of any identity’, as well as of any relations (Clemens and Feltham Reference Clemens, Feltham, Clemens and Feltham2005: 21). Truth for Badiou is not something objectively comprehensible and immutable, but an interminable subjective process in which its implications are ‘forced’ into existence and about which one can only say ‘it will have been true’. However, truth is also the condition which enables this process to unfold as what will have been true. The Event, being ephemeral and indiscernible according to the world’s transcendental, and thus incapable of being submitted to established criteria of judgement, must be groundlessly decided upon, first by giving it a name. The existence of the element which hitherto has not appeared in the world but erupts in the Event is induced by the decision by which it occurs as Two, ‘as itself absent and as supernumerary name’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Feltham2005: 205).Footnote ¹⁰ Only a subject may decide upon an Event by giving it this name; however, a subject is only created, in a sort of short circuit, at the moment of deciding upon the Event’s existence. This decision confers the status of subject on those who decide. Subjects, linked to the generic being of the world in so far as they are insistent on its universal, groundless ground, maintain their subjectivity by embarking on a truth-procedure—an organized, disciplined series of enquiries which unfolds the implications of the Event’s revelation in the world on the edge of which it has taken place. Such a procedure, which can effect modifications of the world but can never become reconciled with it, is what Badiou terms a ‘fidelity’. Subjects accomplish this not by denying the heterogeneity disclosed in the Event, but by taking it as the basis for the truth-procedure. That is, they affirm the existence of something undecidable and simultaneously insist on its belonging to the world. Whereas a world cannot be self-determining, non-foundational or universal, a truth-procedure can, but only to the extent that it is not totalized. The closure of the truth would amount to reintroducing an exclusion, as well as foreclosing on the necessity that the subjects continuously unfold its consequences without any transcendental guarantee. Subjects find themselves in a state diametrically opposed to their pre-subjective existences and discover that they ‘are more than [their] individual bodies are (able to)’ (Ruda Reference Ruda2015: 111). In so far as they are agents of an infinite, immanent work, they are emancipated from their status as desirous, narcissistic human animals (a falsely-immediate state conditioned by the logic of the world in which they exist). Badiouian subjectivity unsettles the stability of the self-sovereign ego and renders subjects ‘un-completed’, and unable to become complete as long as their subjectivity endures. As Badiou writes, ‘the individual, truth be told, is nothing. The subject is the new man, emerging at the point of self-lack. The individual is thus, in its very essence, the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-subject’, though as we will see below, this ‘we’ is not necessarily a relational ‘we’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2007: 101). The transition to subject—for example, falling in love and declaring this love in the form of a statement (simply ‘I love you’)—is the point at which absolute disjunction (between the givenness of the situation and its generic truth; between one’s pre-subjective state and one’s state as subject; between knowledge and truth; etc.) is experienced as truth, in so far as it is also the very enabling condition of truth. The non-dialectical logic of the Two is revealed as the fundamental principle underlying genuine subjectivity. Were an absolute break with the world not possible, as Badiou accuses the Hegelian project of prohibiting, subjectivity itself could not emerge.

IV. Hegel: substance to subject

The passage from substance to subject for Hegel also involves, in logical terms, the overcoming of the illusorily bound-up individuality of ‘free actualities’, or apparently self-identical substances standing over and against one another externally, but not to avow the finality of un-completed individuals incorporated into a subject as is the case in Badiou’s project. The Hegelian ‘relation of substantiality’ begins with ‘free actualities’ which are not reflected into one another.Footnote ¹¹ A free actuality does not ‘let any trace of its relation to the other show in it; grounded in itself, [it] is the necessary in its own self’ (SL: 552/216). The relation of causality—necessary in so far as substance must act—which follows the indifferent externality of free actualities is one in which ‘substance determines itself to being-for-self over and against an other’ (SL: 554/218). Substance is conceived as cause to the extent that it reflects into itself as against the passage into accidentality; however, it just as much suspends its reflection into itself and makes itself the negative of itself in so far as it produces an effect (i.e. another actuality). Substance, to be the active causal power that it is, engenders an effect; however, in so doing, it renders itself dependent on the presupposed passive substance upon which it acts, thereby licensing the negation of its atomistic independence. In other words, substance derives its purported power and independence from an other. Substance does not remain unaffected originary negativity because it only is in the process of engendering effects which enable its ostensible self-identity. Its primariness is suspended in the effect. However, cause does not wholly vanish in the effect; it is in the effect that cause first becomes actual as cause. With this revelation, the relation of substantiality transforms itself into a relation of reciprocity. As Zambrana articulates it, this section of the Logic ‘takes the form of a reductio, where the logic of reciprocal relation is established as implicit in the notion of causality and substance’, and it is this which enables us to understand substance as subject, as will become apparent below (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 81). In contrast to Badiou, reciprocity (the first glimpse of the Hegelian subject) is implicit in the determinacies which precede it rather than emerging as a decisive break with what precedes. Substance presupposes a passive substance external to it on which it can act, but because this is another substance, it must in fact be active and not the sheer passive immediacy that the first substance presupposed it to be. This is revealed by the reaction of the second substance to the activity of the first, which amounts to suspending the latter’s being as active and independent, rendering it dependent on the effect to become the cause that it is. Both substances are equally cause and effect of one another qua cause and effect, and it is only their interdependence that enables them to be what they are as distinct and self-related. As Hegel summarizes, the passage of substance through causality and reciprocity makes explicit that

This transition is ‘the very hardest’, for it proposes ‘that independent actuality shall be thought as having all its substantiality in the passing over and identity with the other independent actuality’ (EL: §159, 221–22/305). Thus, Hegel delivers a non-atomistic, speculative conception of independence, different from that proposed by his other modern philosophical predecessors. It is certainly not the wholesale negation of independent beings which occurs at this point in the Logic, but their immanent diremption is revealed. The truth of substance is reciprocity, which is implicitly the concept. The concept ‘is not the abyss of formless substance, or necessity as the inner identity of things or states distinct from, and limiting, one another’, but is rather ‘free power [Macht]; it is itself and takes its other within its embrace, but without doing violence to it; on the contrary, the universal is, in its other, in peaceful communication with itself’ (SL: 603/277).Footnote ¹² Hegel then proceeds to synonymize ‘free power’ with ‘free love’ and ‘boundless blessedness’ (SL: 603/277). As Zambrana suggests, the appearance of love in the Logic should make us pause, for it offers insight into Hegel’s concept of unity, an understanding of which is integral to the comprehension of the stakes of Hegelian love. ‘Division’, she claims, is for Hegel ‘intrinsic to unity. Yet division does not secure the seamless unfolding of an all-powerful concept. To think of division as internal to unity is rather to thematize structural constraints that must be reckoned with, namely, precariousness and ambivalence’ (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 96). While I am not of the opinion that these constraints must be designated precariousness or ambivalence (for they still imply a distinctly, even if not wholly determinate, normative way of relating to them, or rather, of reconciling with them), I do share Zambrana’s view that such constraints reveal that no path for an ‘all-powerful’ concept to subsequently unfold is paved here. It is thanks to its intrinsic vulnerability—that is, the necessity of being mediated by the negativity of the other—that it can unfold at all. It is the comprehension of the other as other and as self (a self which can only maintain itself by being different from itself) which enables the transition from substance to subject (or, in the terms of Geist, to ethical self-consciousness). Here we see how Badiou is wrong to suggest that Hegel denies the fact of a difference between a being and itself. There is a disjunction in the Hegelian concept, as the concept does not negate its other, but freely embraces it as something other; however, this disjunction works to secure the concept’s speculative identity rather than the maintenance of disjunction for its own sake. That is, the disjunction makes the movement toward reconciliation possible. Such identity produced in reconciliation requires the persistence of a difference, but a difference without a distinction—that is, difference within a determination, a difference enabled by a common ground. With this difference, wholesale intelligibility or attainability of otherness are foreclosed upon; there remains a degree of opacity of each in relation to the other which is the condition of their ability to ‘freely embrace’ one another and in the other, find themselves. At this point, we ought to take a closer look at Badiou and Hegel’s respective conceptions of love.

V. Badiouian love: the two of disjunction

As already mentioned, love functions similarly in both Badiou’s and Hegel’s corpora. For both, love is one vehicle through which the passage from substance/human animal to subject is effected. While the passage to subject for both philosophers involves exposing as a ruse the apparent self-enclosure of pre-subjective individuality, for Badiou it amounts to exposing an irreparable split in the individual such that it finds its truth not in itself nor in others, but in its subtraction from relatedness (i.e. as subtracted from all culturally imposed relations), thereby enabling the construction of universal modes of ‘being-together’. Rather than finding itself directly in a truthful mode of relation to the other, it participates in a truth-procedure in which others also participate. Conversely, for Hegel it amounts to exposing that independence is only found in and through reconciliation with otherness. This does not amount to negating otherness to preserve one’s status as an autarkic ‘free actuality’; on the contrary, it involves demonstrating that the negativity of the other, to which one is internally related, enables self-relation and self-determination, albeit with recognition of the limits of individuality as such. For Badiou, love begins with a contingent encounter between two apparently monadic individuals and is affirmed as a truth—a truth because it ruptures the lovers’ atomic worlds—with the first declaration of love (the first naming of the Event). The truth of the encounter is not predicated on a pre-established difference, but rather founds a true, non-identitarian disjunction which was not previously present. That is, sexual difference in the Lacanian sense, which designates two positions of experience, rather than an objective biological or culturally-mediated domain. It is to this disjunction, composed of two positions for whom ‘no coincidence can be attested’ regarding what affects one and what affects the other, that the lovers must remain faithful (Badiou Reference Badiou and Corcoran2008: 183). The process of fidelity which ensues involves a re-examination of everything in the lovers’ previous worlds from the perspective of difference rather than identity which puts into question all the previously operative assumptions, habits and accepted truths by which they uncritically abided. The individual lovers become incorporated into a Two-subject which exceeds them both and in which they participate. This Two is an immanently counted, non-dialectical Two, which is to say it is not composed of two discrete ones, counted as such from a third position (which would imply that the Two is dialectical), but is the fracture of the One which is not (Badiou Reference Badiou and Corcoran2008: 187). In other words, it is the antagonism which was excluded from the enclosed, totalized self. To experience love, according to Badiou, is not to gain any knowledge of it or of its underlying logic. Love is itself self-identical (in the sense of a Platonic Idea), but as a ‘process that arranges immediate experiences of the like, without the law of these experiences being decipherable from within them’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Corcoran2008: 182). To have access to knowledge of the disjunction itself would not only mean admitting a third position, but it would also imply that the condition for love could be objectively certified, rather than attested to in a process of fidelity. The foremost implication here is that love is not a relationship, but a procedure which treats the non-dialectical paradox of disjunction introduced by the contiguous existence of two positions which emerge in the encounter.Footnote ¹³ Love ‘makes truth of [the positions’] unbinding (dé-liason)’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Corcoran2008: 187; italics original), or the originary nature of their non-relationship, by supplementing it with the construction of a truth, rather than by forcing a fusion or synthesis of the couple, as is the case in the Wagnerian conception of love which Badiou condemns. To momentarily digress, on the point of love as a non-relationship, it is important to note that Badiou problematizes relations entirely, a point to which Hallward dedicated the majority of his book and with which I am in agreement.Footnote ¹⁴ For Badiou, relations are of the order of a world, and the latter is by definition ‘affected by an inaccessible closure’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 256). He defines a relation between objects as ‘a function that conserves the atomic logic of these objects, and in particular the real synthesis which affects their being on the basis of their appearing’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Toscano2009: 258). As such, relations serve to maintain the transcendental regime to which they are indexed. A truth subtracts humans from the givenness of a world and reveals the break within its ‘inaccessible closure’. In so doing, it subtracts humans from atomic logic and thus also from relations. In this subtraction, ‘the truth of humanity’, as Badiou puts it, is revealed.Footnote ¹⁵ For Hegel, too, immediate relations in the realm of Spirit are problematic in so far as they are not products of self-determination. Instead, they are traditional or customary and hence inhibit the development of free, self-conscious subjectivity. In the dialectic, considered broadly as a method, the analytic power of the Understanding enters first to destabilize the immediacy of a given relational unity by tearing it into disjunct parts. Despite being the first stage, it is of great significance for Hegel ‘that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it […] should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I”’ (PhG: §32, 19/36). However, the Understanding does not have the last word; the Understanding (arguably commensurate with the Badiouian subtractive gesture) is only the first moment of Hegelian thought—it is followed by the dialectical and speculative moments of thinking, respectively, which, in the end, re-introduce relationality in a more sophisticated, decompressed form, mediated by negativity.Footnote ¹⁶ This final mode of relationality only emerges in the subject’s return-to-self out of otherness—albeit a self which does not precede its initial alienation from itself at the stage of the Understanding, but is rather an achievement. Such relationality is not a return to arbitrary givenness, but is a reflexive actualization of human freedom which ‘only really exists in an achieved community of minds’ (PhG: §69, 43/65). While there may be relations at the end which, to the ordinary mind, resemble those which precede dialectical treatment, they are nonetheless now to be apprehended as products of self-determination rather mere perpetuations of tradition. These relations are the concrete actualizations of ontological truths (i.e. the identity of identity and difference). In contrast, Badiou cannot acknowledge such a distinction between arbitrary and truthful relations. For Badiou, there can be modes of being together developed in a truth-procedure which are ‘of truth’, but they are not to be considered relations. In his analysis of Badiou’s relation to Hegel, Bosteels points to the Understanding as an element upon which Badiou dwells. For Badiou, the Hegelian ‘I’ (as described in the Phenomenology quotation above) is not a ‘schoolbook example of synthesis and sublation but the power to split reality into the real and the unreal’ (Bosteels Reference Bosteels, Bartlett and Clemens2010: 141)—in other words, in the Understanding, Badiou detects a theory of the Event. Badiou focuses on the Understanding because it reveals a locus in which one might ‘restore Hegel in his division’ and turn him into the materialist that he ostensibly could be. That is, a thinker who decides between truth and untruth, rather than coming to truth purely via conceptual mediation. However, the Understanding is only the first moment of Hegelian thought and to dwell on that is to deny the dialectical and speculative moments which necessarily follow the Understanding’s ‘splitting’ of reality and lead us out of the realm of one-sided abstractions.Footnote ¹⁷ To return to Badiou, the love-Event subtracts individuals from the immediacy of their worlds and discloses to them the impossibility of a relationship, or rather, how their culturally mediated relations were always already underpinned by a more fundamental non-relationship. In this sense, the (love-)Event indeed serves a similar function as the Hegelian Understanding. The Hegelian Understanding thinks of its abstractions as independent, self-identical entities (one might argue that the Hegelian Understanding introduces the ‘atomic logic’ Badiou condemns, rather than being the first movement away from it), whereas the Badiouian Event’s subtractive power reveals a lack of self-identity and completeness, thereby destabilizing a world’s atomic logic; however, this stage of lack cannot be dialectically overcome in Badiou, but only ‘supplemented’. Supplementation does not serve the same function as the dialectical or speculative moments in Hegel; however, in fairness to Badiou, it does enable subjects to move beyond the initial ‘splitting’ produced in the Event, despite its prohibition of a return to relations as such. It will not enable individuals to find themselves ‘at home’ in one another, like the Hegelian couple, but it will enable them to co-construct a world from the standpoint of the Two. If the individuals incorporated into the Two-subject are not engaged in a relationship with one another per se, what enables or enjoins their fidelity to the love? Their participation in (or rather, free consent to being subjected to) a truth which enables them to maintain their status as subjects, as disjunct viz-à-viz the world in which they continue to reside. Put explicitly, love is, for Badiou, ‘a thought’ (Badiou and Truong Reference Badiou, Truong and Bush2012: 87). It is because love is thought, and not a merely ecstatic affective experience, that the One (of the lovers’ self-enclosed egos) can be ‘fractured’ or from which a subtraction can be effected. This fracture is not a mystical ‘between’ in which the lovers convene, but the generic void of pure thought, wherein all predication fails, in which the subject both participates and constructs simultaneously.Footnote ¹⁸ This void is not an object to which an individual relates. For this reason, love is not an object-relation and thus is emancipated from the terrain of desire. Participation in this realm of thought attests to the existence of a generic humanity. The latter, which is the void itself (qua the support for truths), is what both sustains love as its localization and what is revealed by love as its support.Footnote ¹⁹ In a way, the implication of this is that the individuals incorporated into the Two-subject do not find themselves at home in one another; they find the condition of their truthful being-together to be the disjunction around which they are both oriented, in so far as it subtracts them from any seemingly ‘worldly’ relations both to others and to themselves, but in which they participate. If the incompleteness of the self is revealed through an amorous encounter with an other, but not by an encounter with the other as such (in so far as it activates one’s [non-]relation to the void rather than to the other qua other) one might infer that such love is actually somewhat isolating. In as much as it reveals my incompleteness and prevents me from ever being able to find myself in genuine communion with my lover (since love is not an object-relation)—in as much as the aim of love is to ‘experience the world from the point of view of difference [rather than identity]’—love is an experience which, in the wake of the initial encounter, does not necessitate the other afterwards (Badiou and Truong Reference Badiou, Truong and Bush2012: 56). As Vernon perspicuously claims, love, ‘can thus presumably exist in only one lover, who remains convinced that s/he continues to experience the world from the position of the Two’ (Vernon Reference Vernon, Vernon and Calcagno2015: 163). Badiouian love ‘is less a scene of Two, than it is an experiencing of the world as two by one, in whatever form they explicitly intend it at any time’ (Vernon Reference Vernon, Vernon and Calcagno2015: 163; italics original). This is because the lovers experience themselves to be straddling not the boundary between self and other, but rather the boundary between worldly existence and participation in thought. Before proceeding to Hegel, a provisional evaluation of Badiouian love from a Hegelian perspective can now be delivered. In so far as Badiou’s lovers, in Hegelian terms, ‘cling to thought as thought, to universality as such’ (that is, abstract universality which does not necessitate its own particularization), they in fact remain ‘unmoved substantiality’ (PhG: §17, 10/23; italics original). Put otherwise, while Badiou claims that the passage to subject is an absolute break with the world in which the subject resides, he in fact remains within the logic of substance given that his conception of universality cannot account for or prescribe particularization (though this immunity to particularity is precisely what he lauds about his impersonal conception of universality). Badiou claims that his subject is neither ‘substance [nor] consciousness’ but ‘objectless’; however, given that it is without object, does not find itself in communion with real otherness and remains shut up within itself (Badiou Reference Badiou and Feltham2005: 432).Footnote ²⁰ However, is communion with real otherness really the only way to dispense with isolated individuality? Badiou’s reply to Hegel (and Vernon) would be that the lover indeed does not find itself in communion with the beloved qua object, but this in fact attests to the emancipatory value of love—that it does away with the object-relation entirely and allows the heterogeneity of the lovers to be preserved, without insisting upon a reconciliation which would make them formally the same (i.e. of the same determination). The fact that the lover is not faced with the negativity of the other, but straddles a boundary between worldly existence and the universality of thought implies an emancipation from isolated individuality (and the atomic logic of a world which paints isolated individuality as the pinnacle of existence) far greater than would be the case if he/she were simply in communion with another individual. While the individual may continue to regard its own incompleteness as its own, it is precisely this absolute disjunction which enables it to participate in a truth-procedure. In the latter, there is not simply fidelity to the other contingent person, but to the signifier itself, to the name of this truth which was declared at the procedure’s outset. This rebuke does not, however, in line with Vernon’s claim, address why the lover needs the beloved beyond realizing itself to be part of a Two-subject. At this point, we must turn to Hegelian love.

VI. Hegel on love: the two that makes one

Much of what must be explained viz-à-viz Hegelian love can be found in the above exegesis of the Hegelian passage from substance to the concept. For Hegel, the significance of love lies in both its underlying logic and in how it is experienced. In terms of logic, love reveals the speculative identity of identity and difference, and in terms of experience, it reveals that humans are not just independent persons, but members (PR: §158, 110/140). Put another way, love is the concept’s manifestation as feeling. That is to say, it is the feeling of one’s individual self as ‘defective and incomplete’ and of gaining oneself by finding oneself at home in an other, such that ‘I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me’ (PR: §158A, 261/328). Despite that the mere feeling of the concept is deficient in comparison to the concept’s actualization as the State, as a work of art, and particularly in comparison to its perfect realization as Absolute Idealist philosophy, it is nonetheless the way the concept manifests itself in the realm of feeling which cannot be obviated, for the Hegelian Absolute necessarily exists on earth, in and through human bodies. Hegelian love sanctions no domination or negation of the other; it is not a substantial relation, but rather is a ‘free embrace’ of the other.Footnote ²¹ As such, it is essentially non-contractual: it is not the mutual satisfaction of two individuals who happen to share the same interests, but a transformative experience of ethical import. Hegel regards the marital agreement, for example, as ‘a contract to transcend the standpoint of contract, the standpoint from which persons are regarded in their individuality as self-subsistent units’ (PR: §163R, 112/142). In this sense, love serves as a mode of preparation for participation in Sittlichkeit. While the lovers exist for one another as embodiments of their free subjectivity, they do not do so purely as objects to be devoured (i.e. object-causes of desire), though they are not liberated from the logic of the object-relation tout court. Lovers together form a single personality (i.e. a single determination) wherein their previous disjunction as ‘free actualities’ is dialectically overcome. As such, they produce an identity. Such an identity dispenses with the ‘atomic logic’ of the contexts from which the individuals emerge, but not to remain exceptional viz-à-viz those contexts. Rather, by being an immanent development of those contexts, they make explicit the truth of the latter themselves. Furthermore, this identity is produced in and through the communion of these two lovers, which implies, different from Badiou, that these particular individuals require one another to sustain their love. Love for Hegel is not fidelity to an abstract universality or to a signifier, even though he will acknowledge that the relationship between these two people is contingent. Given this, despite that it will disclose a fundamental truth about geistig existence to the lovers, it remains more private and particular than Badiou’s more impersonal, universal conception. With only this much, one might infer what Badiou’s missing critique of Hegelian love might be: given that Hegelian love has identity, the becoming-identical (or rather, discursively transforming the distinction into a transparent difference) of two initially separate lovers, as its goal, then such love must be thought of as a relic of a bygone era wherein difference ought to be denied, or rather, wherein differences were already seen as minimally identical enough to be sublated and reconciled (that is, differences which always already exist ‘within a determination’). Given that Hegelian love is conceived of as an experience belonging to self-consciousness, it cannot but privilege identity as Badiou would see it, making it effectively indistinguishable from the Wagnerian ‘fusional’ conception of love he criticizes. According to Badiou, true love cannot be ‘consciousness of the other as other, [for] then the other is necessarily identifiable in consciousness as the same […] [as consciousness] is the site of the identification of the self as the same-as-self’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Corcoran2008: 188). What’s more, this may open Hegel up to the charge that he, too, perhaps fails to effectively jettison the narcissism of atomistic individuality, in so far as the experience of the other’s difference cannot be an experience of real heterogeneity which destabilizes the existing coordinates of its self-consciousness. All these critiques, however, obtain their force by understanding the identity to which Hegel refers in a non-speculative sense. It is, again, imperative that one understands Hegelian identity as implying a stubbornly persistent difference which he in truth does not think it possible nor desirable to eliminate. Such a difference is, to confirm Badiou’s reading, not a heterogeneity and thus an ‘absolute disjunction’, but it indeed implies a gap of negativity which cannot be overcome.Frank Ruda claims that, according to Badiou, to break the circularity of identity and of the One, ‘one needs to assert the difference within the same as the only thing which makes the same identical to itself’, and Badiou has indeed made this imperative the basis for his entire project (Ruda Reference Ruda2015: 146); however, Hegel himself has in fact already accounted for this critique, as I have demonstrated here. It is only difference which makes identity possible—or in terms of the concept, it is the concept’s immanent self-differentiation which enables it to produce and maintain its self-identity. On this note, Hegel regards love, as consciousness of oneself in an other, as

In this sense, love is both reconciliation with the impossibility of overcoming contradiction and its very overcoming. Love is for Hegel an active, vital process. Here, one must recall that contradiction is for him the principle of all vitality and that individuals remain active only in so far as they have ‘not attained [their] end and will to develop [their] potentialities and vindicate [themselves] in struggling to attain it’ (PR: §151A, 261/327). Love cannot be a wholesale overcoming of contradiction if it is meant to remain an active, creative unity. The persistence of a gap to be overcome enables love’s preservation. Wholly overcoming the obstacle (i.e. attainment of undivided unity) would spell the dissolution of love itself, much like ‘completing a truth’ in Badiou would spell the end of its very status as truth. It is thus crucial that one reads Hegel’s formula of love in a way different than his often one-sided portrayals emphasizing unity and identity imply: love is both the propounding and overcoming of contradiction, considered in both a logical-transcendental and a temporal sense. Only in so far as the lovers find themselves continually striving to overcome their separation, while simultaneously propagating it, can love persist. By emphasizing love as the resolving of contradiction—which, thus regarded, makes it ‘unity of an ethical type’—Hegel can progress to the family, civil society and State with ease, neglecting love’s essentially speculative nature (i.e. as both a propounding and a resolving of contradiction). Hegel neglects to explicitly designate what love in the sense of the propounding of contradiction is, if not an ethical unity which moves the dialectic forward, and simply attends to—or rather, decides in favour of—its function as a resolving, leaving the romantic image of love as a peaceful tranquillity intact and betraying his speculative spirit. Given the moment of separation implied, but not explicitly treated, in Hegelian love, the latter, just as much as it must be, phenomenologically speaking, an experience of becoming-unified, must also be the experience of an insurmountable negativity. Hegel does not suggest that there are two disjunct logical positions involved in love, the experiences of which are such that ‘no coincidence can be attested between what affects one position and what affects the other’ (Badiou Reference Badiou and Corcoran2008: 183)—love involves two individuals, but these two undergo the same process of losing oneself and finding oneself in the other.Footnote ²² As Nancy puts it, love is ‘recognition of one put-out-of-itself by one put-out-of-itself’, making it utterly egalitarian and thus also of emancipatory import (Nancy Reference Nancy, Miller and Smith2002: 59). It is not the case that Hegelian lovers are unable to gain any knowledge of the disjunct position the other occupies such as is the case with Badiou, for whom mutual recognition plays no role; however, it may be fair to claim that they are unable to gain wholesale certitude of the other, precisely because the other must remain other.Footnote ²³ Hegel’s proposals of the marriage contract and child as modes for resolving the contradictory aspect of love does not resolve the contradictory status of the loving couple qua couple, but simply defers the contradiction and resolves it outside the sphere of romantic love itself. Thus, Hegel’s own drive toward the Absolute causes him to neglect the essential deadlock of love itself, which is in fact what makes love a properly speculative experience. While the dialectic progresses, there remains behind a couple—a quasi-Badiouian non-dialectical Two, though a Two whose difference enables also the realization of identity—only one side of whose activity is ethical and enables the subsequent development of Sittlichkeit, wherein love (and the family) will be seen as a mere moment. Nevertheless, the admission that Hegelian lovers experience an obstacle which cannot as such be removed is not a condemnation. As Hegel writes, what can appear as a disparity between the I and its otherness is in fact ‘just as much the disparity of the substance with itself’ (PhG: §37, 21/39). In being faced with the disparity of the other, the subject realizes the disparity with itself: the realization, similar to the Badiouian individual’s realization of its own incompleteness, which constitutes the passage from substance to subject (incidentally, contra Badiou, consciousness is revealed not to be a site of identity, wherein the other is perceived as the same as oneself, but rather as inextricable from otherness). Such a disparity revealed in and through communion with the other is not a persistent obstacle the removal of which would be preferable, nor is it, like it is for Badiou, an exception to what exists in a world. On the contrary, it indicates real subjectivity.

VII. Conclusion

Badiou, despite his misunderstanding of Hegel’s conception of identity, illuminates an element of Hegelian love the implications of which Hegel himself does not sufficiently draw out. Love, when analysed after a detour through Badiou, reveals the existence of an irreducible Two in the Hegelian system. In so far as love is on the side of becoming-identical, or cancelling difference, it can progress the dialectic forward, but in so far as love is the propounding of itself qua contradiction, it reveals an impasse immanent to being’s self-deployment. While Badiou sees such an impasse to lie between existence and inexistence, or worlds and truth-procedures, the impasse in Hegel reveals that being and subjectivity are immanently self-dirempted. This diremption is, however, what enables one to acknowledge both identity and difference, whereas any acknowledgement or production of identity in Badiou’s project is off the table. As I have demonstrated, Hegel privileges the aspect of love which is a resolving of itself qua contradiction, whereas Badiou privileges love because it propounds an irreducible opposition—an opposition not produced within a determination, and thus one which can never be reconciled in the Hegelian sense. However, both of these emphases together compose the properly speculative, viz. Hegelian, notion of love. Ultimately, Badiou and Hegel could themselves be said to constitute a Two. One cannot reconcile them—one must decide. I decide in favour of Hegel’s speculative conception of love over Badiou’s one-sided conception, despite the latter’s indubitable merits. However, perhaps the very acknowledgement of such a decision’s necessity indicates that, after Badiou, one cannot simply decide in favour of Hegel and remain entirely Hegelian.