Badiou against the Angles, the Saxons, and the Vikings too

Wow Badiou says some weird things about analytic philosophy in the Introduction to Being and Event.

The 'analytic' current of English-language philosophy discounts most of classical philosophy's propositions as senseless, or as limited to the exercise of a language game (1).

. . .for Kant, the transcendental subject, after which the question [of the utility of mathematics] was no longer seriously practised, save by Bachelard in a vision which remained constitutive, and by the American partisans of the stratification of languages) (7). . .

From that point onwards, with the exception of Husserl-who is a great classic, if a little late-modern (let's say post-Kantian) philosophy was no longer haunted by a paradigm, except that of history, and, apart form some heralded but repressed exceptions, Cavailles and Lautman, it abandoned mathematics to Anglo-Saxon linguistic sophistry (7).

Poor Saxons! As if it isn't bad enough that they got destroyed by the Normans mere days after finally winning a hundreds years struggle against the Vikings. As if it isn't bad enough that the 80s metal band of the same name was so indifferently talented. No. Badiou must compound the injuries with insult. In addition to military annihilation and no copy-write recourse with respect to crap bands, all Saxon philosophers are sophists, just sitting around stratifying languages, declaring all philosophy senseless and language games and whatnot.

Seriously, reading these passages is like being next to the loudest drunk at the bar, but instead of boring you with his extensive knowledge of trivia related to whatever musician he's obsessed with (in my experience, either Stevie Ray Vaughn, Wings era Paul McCartney, or Frank Zappa) he's inveighing about analytic philosophy. Unlike fans, loudest-drunk-at-the-bar critics never know that much about the object of their scorn. In this case, the guy excitedly read Ernest Gellner's Words and Things when he was an undergraduate, thought it was great, and left it at that. Which is pretty unfortunate because most analytic philosophers would find Badiou's thoughts about Russell's Paradox as a worthy addition to the dialectical map we've constructed around it.*

So as not to commit the opposite sin of misrepresenting contemporary French philosophy, see Mark Ohm's translation of this letter by Jacques Bouveresse schooling Badiou (and others) on their freedom-fries** chauvinism.***

[*A good place to start is the discussion of Badiou in Paul Livingston's The Politics of Logic. I gather that Livingston is going to do some new work on Badiou, since he's going to be teaching it at the Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy.

**I don't know what a French equivalent would be. The problem is that no French person would eat so-called "American cheese," so there'd be no reason to call it existential misery cheese or whatever.

***The weird thing about the Claudine Tiercelin affair was that the chauvinst sexists who embarassed themselves attacking her did so via an essentialist reading of French philosophy which itself centered on the handful of soixante-huitards who got famous in the United States! I suspect that this is not that uncommon among chauvinists. Consider that the "Hinduism" of the BJP owes more to British orientalist projection (and Victorian mores) than anything that has actually ever existed in India.

I'm not saying that Badiou and and the BJP are getting the actual essences wrong. This game of essences is a mug's one. Ravi Shankar was happy to jam with George Harrison. When he's not angry at the Angles and the Saxons (and surely some of the Viking's decendents as well), Badiou surely gets this. After all, he firmly puts Foucault near the center of the French tradition that he has constructed. See the letter I linked to above for what Bouveresse thinks of that.]