Heft - Institut für Theorie ith

On the first pages of his last big book
Logiques des mondes Alain Badiou has
proposed the term “democratic materialism”
to name the prevailing and spontaneous
set of assumptions which form
the contemporary doxa. According to
him, this democratic materialism can
be summarized with one “ontological”
statement: “There are only bodies and
languages.” / “Il n’y que des corps et des
langages.” 17 There is the firm being of
bodies, their proliferation, their striving
for pleasures and enjoyment, the
increase, growth and expansion of life;
and there is the multiplicity of languages,
the democracy of their plurality and
proliferation, multiculturalism, minoritarian
practices, all of them entitled to
recognition. Democratic materialism is
the spontaneous idealism of our times
– nobody believes any longer in the salvation
of the immortal soul, we firmly
believe in bodies and languages. Ba -
diou’s addition to this axiom is simple:
“There are only bodies and languages,
but apart from that there are truths.” /
“Il n’y a que des corps et des langages,
sinon qu’il y a des vérités.” 18 There are
truths which are of a di≠erent order than
bodies and languages, they engage subjectivity
and raise a claim to universality,
but they do not exist on some separate
location somewhere else. For our
particular purpose we could say that
they emerge precisely with that excess
at the interface of bodies and languages,
something that psychoanalysis
brings together under the names of the
unconscious and of sexuality. They
emerge at the intersection which prevents
the neutral coexistence of bodies
and languages, in a subtraction from
the regime of bodies and languages,
epitomized by the Other. Bodies and
signs can be counted, but the Other
makes for a two which is uncountable.
The axiom of democratic materialism
has a corollary: there are only bodies
and languages, but there is no Other.
The promotion of their expansion and
proliferation precludes the Other. And
this is where our adage that the Other
lacks takes precisely the opposite direction:
it does not mean that, since it
lacks, we are only stuck with bodies and
languages, happily or unhappily stuck,
it means that the very existence of bodies
and languages has to be put into
question. It is the two of the Other that
undermines their multiplicity and proliferation.
The two which is neither one
nor multiple provides a precarious hold
on truth.
The question of the two has a pre-Socratic
air to it, it aims straight at the
first principles, it strives to pinpoint the
minimal conditions of thought, starting
with one and two. So let me finish
with the pre-Socratics and the minimal,
and let me raise the final issue of
materialism (as opposed to its democratic
variety). The first appearance of
materialism in the history of philosophy
is linked to the atomists, and most notably
to the figure of Democritus. What is
atomism, if not a radical attempt to submit
bodies, and the whole matter, to
count. Matter can be counted, and the
atoms are its indivisible elements, the
hard particles that enable counting. Or
so it would seem. The atom would thus
be the pure minimal element of matter
that cannot be reduced any further, and
this is what enables them to be counted
for one. Yet, this is not their su∞cient
definition, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel was quick to point out. The particles
require the empty space, the void
where they move and which surrounds
them, and if we single them out as
units, we have to include the void as
“the other half” of their firm being.
“The atomistic principle, with these first
thinkers, did not remain in exteriority,
but apart from its abstraction contained
a speculative determination, that the
void was recognized as the source of
movement. This implies a completely
di≠erent relation between atoms and
the void than the mere one-beside-theother
[in German: ‘Nebeneinander,’ M.
D.] and mutual indi≠erence of the two.
[…] The view that the cause of movement
lies in the void contains that deeper
thought that the cause of becoming pertains
to the negative.” 19
17 - Alain Badiou, Logiques des
mondes, Paris 2006, p. 9.
18 - Ibid., p. 12.
19 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Wissenschaft der Logik, Eva
Moldenhauer / Karl Markus
Michel (red.), Werke, vol. 6–7,
Frankfurt a. M. 1979, vol. 6,
pp. 185–186.
20 - Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts (note 15), pp. 63–64.
21 - Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente
der Vorsokratiker, 3 vol., Walther
Kranz (ed.), Berlin 1934, vol. 2,
p. 174, fragm. 156.
So the minimal element of matter is not
the atom as the indivisible particle, but
a double entity composed of the particle
and the void, of being and nothing;
of “marque” and “manque.” The most
palpably material seems to behave like
a signifying structure. When matter is
submitted to count one hits upon the
signifier and its dyad. One did not have
to wait for Saussure. However far we
divide, we always get to a split entity,
split into itself and its absence. Yet, the
Hegelian view is not the whole story, for
in this way we would precisely get to the
one of (numerical) count, thus perhaps
catch and spell out the secret of counting
at the dawn of philosophy, but we would
not get to the figure of the (uncountable)
two. But this figure is there in Democritus,
in the very way he conceives the
atom, and Lacan singled it out:
“[…] tuché brings us back to the same
point at which pre-Socratic philosophy
sought to motivate the world itself.
It required a clinamen, an inclination,
at some point. When Democritus
tried to designate it, presenting himself
as already the adversary of a pure function
of negativity in order to introduce
thought into it, he says, It is not the
μηδέν [non-being, M. D.] that is essential
[…] but a δέν, which, in Greek, is a
coined word. He did not say ἕν [one, M.
D.], let alone ὄν [being, M. D.]. What,
then, did he say? He said, answering the
question I asked today, that of idealism,
Nothing, perhaps? – not perhaps nothing,
but not nothing.” 20
Lacan takes up the coinage of a new
Greek word by Democritus, δέν, a strange
entity which escapes the alternative
between being and nothing: it is not a
being but neither is it a nothing, it gives
an existence to negativity, yet not by
being something that one could identify
or lay one’s hands on or count as one.
The word stems from the negation of
ἕν, one, and this condenses our problem.
ἕν can be negated in Greek in two
ways, either as ὀυδέν (objective negation)
or as μηδέν (subjective negation),
and they would both mean “nothing”
(although with a di≠erent shading),
“not one” (or “not even one”). δέν, which
is an improper word formation, means
like “less than one, but still not nothing.”
It is a tricky word that caused a lot
of headache to classical philologists –
they have amply commented on this
famous fragment 156. Hermann Diels
translates this curious word by “das
Ichts” (“Das Nichts existiert ebenso sehr
als das Ichts” 21 – and most curiously,
the German neologism “das Ichts” was
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