Badiou & The Charterhouse of Parma

The question of what a Badiouian reading of a novel might be is a complicated one, Badiou's own account of Beckett notwithstanding. Quite unexpectedly then, while reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) it occurred to me that this is indeed a Badiouian novel. The story, of course, is set in Parma after Napolean's defeat, in a small absolutist state whose sovereign (Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV) is irrationally fearful of—paranoid about—liberals. Its hero is the naive and dashing young aristocrat, Fabrizio del Dongo, who aged seventeen flees from his reactionary family to fight for Napoleon, ending up, confused, at what turns out to be the battle of Waterloo.
Fabrizio is a hero because he has complete personal integrity: he is consumately and thoughtlessly brave; he follows his passions, know no hesitations, is committed to aristocratic honour. Both the novel's main women characters fall in love with him, first his aunt Gina, a beautiful and savvy woman in her thirties, and then, after he is jailed by a court faction opposed to his aunt, by Clelia, his jailor's young and innocent daughter.
The novel is finally about absolutism it seems to me: it describes absolutism's impact on life at court: the way in which politics become minaturised; the ways in which courtly intrigue requires skills of concealment, in which fear dominates. But also the way in which courtly life under the rule of an unpredictable despot is strangely liberating, since one is not able to participate in, or be responsible for, society at all. One is free to luxuriate in one's private integrity and intelligence, and in one's passions. It's a terrible political condition, but not as bad as America as Stendhal explicitly says. At the same time, the novel's real meaning appears only when the utter boredom of court society stands revealed: the characters' passions; their ability to reject worldly goods suddenly makes full sense: its not just worth having to put up with this. So if absolutism liberates by stripping subjects of all social responsibility; it also invigorates by the sheer weight of its censorship of everyday life excitements.
In this situation the characters live for love, which happens to them as if by chance. Gina, her lover and Parma's prime minister, Count Mosca, Fabrizio and Clelia will sacrifice almost everything for love. They live in the true because they are faithful to love, to put this in Badiouean terms. They have no commitment to society, to progress, to history, to justice: in an arbitrary absolutist regime, barely hanging on against liberalism, no such committment makes any sense at all. And that's the condition of their being able to live in the true (if not the true of science, art or politics to name Badiou's other "truth procedures")

There's a historical reason for this conjuncture. At a meta-level, both Badiou and Stendhal belong to post-revolutionary moments. Badiou's work only makes sense when read against the defeats of 1968; Stendhal's when read against the defeats of 1789, 1815 and 1830. It is this that turns them from history, from rational progressivity towards an honour economy set in a world where contingency reigns. But they also share an enmity to what they believe America stands for: shop-keeping morality and justice, or, in a word, utilitarianism.

Are politics grounded on metaphysics?

The answer to this seems to me: no. Or at best, hardly ever.

Here at the SCT at Cornell when I asked Leela Gandhi why she chose the ethical position of what she calls philophusikia (i.e. (renouncing the self and celebrating the world) over phusikaphobia (i.e. renouncing the world and celebrating the self) she said it was because she preferred the former's metaphysics. (This in a paper in which she argues (somewhat problematically?) that the choice between these ethico-political positions is important to (almost definitive of) early 20thc English non-state socialism.)

Leela's followed a paper by Brian Massumi in which he claimed that a radical pragmatic/Deleuzian ontology presupposes a certain kind of radically democratic and localist politics.

Bill Connolly and many others also believe there's an essential link between metaphysical beliefs and political orientation. (In private conversation, Bill has said to me recently that he doesn't actually believe this, but that metaphysics and political thought constantly act as figures of each other, so I may be misreading him). And so it comes about that a Deleuzian ontology can ground a politics (and the same is true for Nancy, for Badiou etc). At the end of this line of thought stand Aristotle and Plato, each with their metaphysics, each with their related politics. With Aristotle being pointed towards immanentism, pragmatism and process; and Plato towards transcendence and authority.

In this account liberalism becomes that politics which refuses metaphysical commitment of either kind.

But just think about Nietzsche, to think otherwise.....In the end, for him, becoming is ontologically prior to being (as it is for the radical pragmatists and Deleuze), but his politics head us to the right, surely.

Disraeli, Burke and the novel

Could it be that after Burke it becomes possible to insert an individual's life into a history which is no longer to be thought of as constituted in discrete traditions (a la Alasdair Macintyre for instance) but as political in the sense that two fundamentally opposed parties have two interpretations of it? And that individuals can make a choice between enlightened modernity, on the one side, and inherited culture on the other?\

That Burke first divides history politically in this way is clear enough. But how does he conceive of the individual's relation to history? Not explicitly at all. But still: his thickening of tradition into a concept of prejudice which can stand against rationalist disordering does move in the direction I'm suggesting With it, Burke begins to treat society as a historically-given scene in which ethical choices are also political choices.

Walter Scott takes advantage of this imagining characters who choose between historical forces, and thereby grants the novel genre the weight that will make it the 19thc's priveged form. And in the 1840s, Disraeli and others (notably Charlotte Bronte) will imagine the present as a historical moment in these terms.