1

Of a Universal No Longer Indifferent to Difference: Badiou (and Irigaray)

on Woman, Truths and Philosophy.

In a startling inflexion of his core tenet of truths' trans-particularity or the neutrality of

the universal, Badiou's 2011 paper Figures of Femininity in the Contemporary World”1

proclaims that truth processes can no longer be considered as indifferent to sexual difference,

with it now necessary, thereby, to examine how sexuation functions in the domains of political,

scientific, artistic and amorous truths. What is a woman involved in emancipatory politics, a

woman co-responsible for an amorous passion, a woman artist, a woman mathematician or

physicist, or, even, a woman philosopher?—such is the line of inquiry Badiou sets down to be

pursued in this context, making it clear that “woman” qua a category of sexed being or a sexuate

position would now accede to the status of a subjective body-of-truth, notwithstanding its

having been consistently disqualified hitherto by Badiou as an identitarian predicate requiring

subtraction. Such a reversal—or, more strictly, sublation—of status is indeed startling from the

perspective of the tenet of truths' trans-positionality or trans-particularity that has underpinned

Badiou's philosophical undertaking from the 1980s up to, and, indeed, beyond, Logics of Worlds

in 2006, when it was instated as “the maxim of the materialist dialectic”: namely, “To the extent

that it is the subject of a truth, a subject subtracts itself from every community and destroys

every individuation” (Badiou 2009 [2006], 8-9).2 Nowhere is this tenet more expressly

operative, moreover, than in Badiou's unequivocal refutation in “What is Love?” (1992) of any

possibility of truths being sexuated—despite such a stance being qualified as "paradoxical"

given that a feminine science, a feminine political vision, and so on, would seem logically called

on to coexist with their masculine counterparts once sexual difference is defined—as is the case

for Badiou—in terms of a disjunction so radical that each of the two positions, “man” and
 2

“woman,” can know nothing of the experience of the other. Of course, the whole purport of

Badiou's conception of the truth procedure of love was precisely that this would “deal with” the

problem, or paradox, so posed: i.e., given the radicality of the sexual disjunction as regards

experience, “how can a truth come to be for all, or trans-positional?” (Badiou 2008 [1992],

185). Love itself would provide, that is, the proof that, however radical the sexual disjunction

may be, there is at least one term—namely, the undefinable “something” at the basis of this

love—with which the two sexes are both in relation, thus guaranteeing truths' universality. Yet,

love was, in fact, to reveal itself insufficient to secure universality's neutrality, as is attested to

by Badiou's very inflexion on truths' sexuation some twenty years later. Indeed, far from

proving the occurrence of truth to be “generic”, love would be the place in which a sexuate

specificity within, or with respect to, the universal first finds expression—“woman” being

defined, in “What is Love?” itself, as “singularly charged” with upholding love as the guarantee

of a universality to humanity—with Badiou needing subsequently but to recognize love's

“paradox” as an “aporia” for his reorientation on sexuation to follow.

Now, one way of unravelling, or “teasing out”, the conceptual complications of both

Badiou's reorientation on truths' sexuation and, more generally, the nexus or “knotting” of love,

sexual difference and the status of “woman” vis-à-vis the universal that is, as just implied, a

constant of Badiou's thought however divergent the tenets or inflexions it may give form to over

time, is to set these in the context of the French philosophical sequence of which Badiou has

intimated he would be “the last representative”. Such a contextualization is, in a sense, solicited

by Badiou himself—albeit by way of elision—when, in his 2011 paper, he contends that the

question of a sexuately-differentiated relation to the universal has never before been raised: that

only now, for the first time in history, would the feminine be “linked to a philosophical gesture”

(Badiou 2011, 15-16). This contention—at least if we are, effectively, to understand its “only

now” and “never before” to deictically refer to a contemporaneity that would, as it were, be
 3

given a new articulation through Badiou's very proclamation of truths' “inevitable” sexuation—

quite simply either overlooks or, perhaps more pointedly, disqualifies what is surely one of the

defining intellectual operations of the philosophy elaborated in France from the 1960s on. For

it is indeed remarkable that, for a period of at least two decades, a dazzling array of French

philosophical texts had a common recourse to the category of “the feminine” (understood as

encompassing philosophemes, concepts and conceptual personae such as Deleuze and Guattari's

“becoming-woman” or “the girl”, Serres's personages of Penelope and Ariadne, the figures of

“woman” in Derrida, Kofman, Lyotard, or Irigaray, as well, of course, as Kristeva's and Levinas'

acceptations of “the feminine”), with this collective conceptual deployment attesting both to

this category's playing a specific philosophical role in the texts involved and to the latter being

linked by a shared philosophical project. While the function performed by “the feminine” in

these texts can in no way be collapsed onto the referent “woman”—it serving, rather, as a

paradigm or, more strictly, schema, of the crowning concepts of difference/differance,

heterogeneity or multiplicity that this contemporary philosophical configuration sought to

elaborate—it is nonetheless the case that, in each and every one of its instances, the deployment

of this category entailed a formalization of women's different relation, or “access”, to “the

symbolic” (with this latter designation being at least inclusive of art, science, politics and love,

as is indeed shown by Badiou's use of the term in his 2011 paper to encompass his four truth

procedures and philosophy, or, more broadly, any creation of the order of signification, if not

“thought” tout court). In sum, when set in the context of this collective mobilization of the

feminine in the late twentieth-century philosophical sequence Badiou claims to close,3 his

contention in “Figures of Femininity” that never before would the question of women's specific

relation to the universal have been posed does at least prompt one to query whether there is not

here an underlying polemic with his contemporaries. Or put more precisely: would Badiou's

hailing, in this way, the feminine to be linked for the first time to a philosophical gesture not
 4

indicate—regardless, all in all, of Badiou's “intentions” here—that his radical reorientation in

respect of “woman” and the universal remains nonetheless inscribed in an ongoing polemic

with contemporary philosophy on the point of sexuation?

Let us venture that it is not insignificant that the one place in his oeuvre where Badiou

does refer to contemporary philosophy's collective concern with “the feminine” is in his

deliberations at the outset of “What is Love?”—a text that, as already indicated, is Badiou's

most systematic exposition of the tenet of truths' trans-positionality, or universality, in terms of

the procedure of love. Not that this reference in any way explicitly conveys a polemical purport;

it passes rather as a quasi-rhetorical gesture, with Badiou somewhat playfully declaring his own

endeavour to share with this contemporary configuration “addressed to women” the risk of

seeming to engage in strategies of seduction (Badiou 2008 [1992], 179). Possible misprision as

to a shared seductive enterprise aside, however, Badiou's referring to the contemporary attention

to the feminine in this 1992 text is obviously not to be construed as a profession of any form of

philosophical affinity. The period of the 1980s and 1990s—in which “What is Love?” duly

holds a central position in more ways than one—is, it should be recalled, that of Badiou's battle

against contemporary philosophies of “difference” and “ethics of the other” that, through their

identitarian and communitarian categories, sought, as Badiou puts it, to “undo the rights of the

universal” (Badiou 2011 [2008], 4). As such, these contemporary claims for a critical

recognition of difference/s—-including, most pertinently, those championing a feminine

specificity or women's particular identity—were castigated by Badiou for the “sophistic error”

of promulgating that, far from there being any neutral transpositional value asserting the truth

of that which is necessarily the Same for all, the “only genuinely universal prescription consists

in respecting particularities” (2004 [2000], 144). Badiou's response was, of course, to uphold

the necessary subtraction, or “absencing” (2003 [1997], 11), of identitarian predicates entailed

in every process of universalizing scope; which is to say, in more procedural terms, to counter
 5

the sophistic denial of truths' existence with the assertion “there are truths.” That this assertion

no less structures the entire enterprise of Logics of Worlds, being the objection Badiou makes

to the axiom of democratic materialism “there are only bodies and languages”, serves to

underline, moreover, not only its status as that by which philosophy is defined for Badiou—viz.

“philosophy is the place of thought where the 'there is' of […] truths, and their compossibility,

is stated” (2008 [1992], 23)—but equally the fact that, as so defined, philosophy necessarily

entails confrontation with an adversary designated, according to the specific conjuncture of the

time, as the contemporary representative of sophistry.

While the conceptual deployment of the feminine is certainly not, in “What is Love?,”

designated as philosophy's sophistic adversary on the terrain of amorous truths—with this place

accredited rather to erroneous (fusional, oblative and superstructural) conceptions of love per

se—, there is no doubt that Badiou's indicting contemporary philosophy in the 1980s and '90s

as a “Great Modern Sophistry” in view of its claims for difference, ethical recognition of alterity

and would-be sublation of particularities (to which can be added: “deconstruction”,

“irremediable heterogeneity” and “the ruin of Reason” (Badiou 2008 [1992], 135-136)) equally

encompasses this particular conceptual constellation. The very fact that the latter instates (or

draws on, as the case may be) a sexuately specific relation to symbolic fields such as love,

politics, art or philosophy is reason alone for it to be so indicted, of course: for although Badiou

declares in 2011 such a sexuation of symbolic and philosophical thought to be that which must

now be elaborated, this was, for him, at the time of writing “What is Love?,” on the contrary

complete anathema. That said, from the precise point of Badiou's endeavour of establishing love

to yield the truth of sexual difference, the conceptual claim concerning the feminine that

particularly demarcates this contemporary deployment as sophistic is undoubtedly that of a

specificity of feminine desire, even if this was, in most instances, destined to be dissolved—

qua a specificity too resonant with binary opposition—within a prolific plurality of sexes. For
 6

Badiou, no significant differentiation between men and women exists in relation to desire; it is

precisely against such a contention that he sets down his tenet that sexual difference exists solely

in the field of love since the latter is alone capable of functioning as a universal ground on

which the two sexes can be distributed or defined—with this thereby rendered possible on the

basis of the sexes relating to something in common that attests, as Badiou puts it, a “single

humanity.” Desire, for its part, far from being in any way pertinent for the demarcation of sexual

difference, is stated by Badiou to strictly imprison individuals in their animal particularity, such

that the very bodies engaged in a desiring act are in themselves sexually insignificant, as it were,

unless they are taken up within an amorous construction. Of course, in his key texts on love in

the 1990s, Badiou takes as adversary on the ground of “feminine desire”—as, indeed, desire

per se—Jacques Lacan, whose claims for an “infinite feminine jouissance” constitute, on

Badiou's diagnosis, the salient symptom of an irremediable flaw in the latter's formulae of

sexuation. To accredit women with an infinite jouissance beyond or “in excess” of the order of

desire to which both sexes would be subjected is, indeed, sufficient proof in itself for Badiou

that the “intrinsic finitude of desire”—or, more strictly, the signifying function that governs

this—cannot qualify as a universal ground (necessarily applicable to all equally) for the

determination of sexual difference. It is, as such, absolutely imperative for Badiou, if he is

indeed to demonstrate that sexual difference is alone determined on the basis of men and

women's having a reciprocal (albeit disjunct) relation to something in common, that he

strenuously disprove any and all such contention of a feminine exceptionality.

We shall return to this differend between Badiou and Lacan later on, in the context of

comparing Badiou's theses on sexual difference, love and desire to those of Luce Irigaray—

who is incontestably, of all the contemporary philosophers deploying the category of the

feminine, the one whose stance on a specificity of feminine desire/jouissance most

comprehensively demarcates a philosophical position opposed to Badiou's, with this pre-

 7

eminently the case insofar as Irigaray accredits the relation of women to desire with exactly the

same signification as that Badiou grants to women's relation to love. What should first be noted

here, though, is that Badiou's objection to Lacan strictly conforms to the generalized

disqualification of desire that is, in fact, a hallmark trait of his thought overall. “Desire is not,

and cannot be, a central category of philosophy,” Badiou was to state in 2004, adding here the

stipulation that neither it nor jouissance has any bearing for philosophy other than to the extent

that desiring bodies are seized by love (2004, 148). This quasi-axiomatic sentence resounds as

much throughout Logics of Worlds—where the contemporary sophistry of democratic

materialism is attested to by its “doxa of the body, desire, affect … and enjoyment [jouissance]”

(2009 [2006], 35)—as it does in “What is Love?”, or, indeed, any text in Badiou's corpus

dealing, variously, with love as a generic condition of philosophy or, on the contrary, this

condition's denial by a contemporaneity instating sex and desire, bodies and pleasures, in its

stead. That granted, it is perhaps more than apposite that a particularly condensed version of

this stipulation that love alone, not desire, has any philosophical purport should be set down in

“What is Love?” in the sentence immediately after Badiou evokes the attention to the feminine

characteristic of contemporary philosophers—many of whom, it should be recalled, were (and

are) often grouped together as “philosophers of desire.” The trenchant concision of Badiou's

formulation should be noted: “All things considered, philosophy seizes the sexes by means of

love” (2008 [1992], 180).

In 2011, Badiou no doubt still upholds this axiom, which is sufficient reason in itself,

moreover—to refer back to our query as to an underlying polemic—that the deployment of the

category of the feminine in French philosophy would be disqualified on his terms from

constituting a philosophical predecessor on the question of a sexuately specific relation to the

universal. Yet, one might have thought that Badiou's proclaiming in 2011 “woman” and “man”

to hold a differential relation to the universal, such that sexuation would be operatively marked
 8

within all truth procedures, somewhat complicates or calls into question this manner of defining

sexual difference—i.e., as determined within the sole field of love—no less, say, than it

obviously does this definition's corollary stipulating sexual difference to strictly exist within this

field alone. There is, however, no indication in Badiou's recent output or expositions—notably,

with respect to the points of his philosophy he is to focus on in The Immanence of Truths, the

book bringing his philosophical system to its completion—that he comprehends his inflection

on truths' sexuation to in any way countermand either the privilege accorded to love as the sole

universal ground on which sexual difference can be thought, or, correlatively, the emphatic

distinction between love and desire from which this privilege follows.

The interest of turning here to a comparison of Badiou's tenets on love, desire, and the

sexes—both before- and after his inflexion in 2011—with the “philosophy of sexual difference”

his contemporary Luce Irigaray has elaborated over the past forty years, in strict chronological

synchrony, is all the more manifest. Like Badiou in 2011, Irigaray upholds the necessity for

philosophy to examine how sexuation functions in symbolic thought—this being, indeed, the

principle purport of her entire philosophical undertaking. She moreover conceives of this

sexuation—again, as does Badiou in 2011—in terms of a sexuately specific relation to the

universal, with her position contrasting in this respect with that of the majority of her

philosophical peers deploying, like her, the category of the feminine. Further yet—and in

accordance this time with Badiou both before and after his inflexion on sexuation—Irigaray

thinks sexual difference in terms of an irreducible Two, such that this shared conviction of a

“binary distinction” joins the two thinkers in opposition not only, again, to the majority of the

contemporary philosophers of “the feminine” but equally to the majoritarian stance in

contemporary gender studies. Notwithstanding this joint postulate of a radical sexual duality,

however, Irigaray's “sharing” the tenet of a sexuately specific relation to the symbolic/universal

with the Badiou of “Figures of Femininity” obviously sets her in diametrical opposition to the
 9

transpositionality of truths defended by Badiou prior to his inflexion in 2011; Irigaray's thought

of sexual difference fully falling, in this respect, under Badiou's condemnation of philosophies

of difference, identitarian predicates and the respect of otherness. Nor, all in all, is Irigaray's

conception of sexuate differentiation any less opposed substantively to Badiou's position in

2011, as is shown most saliently by her claim that an experience of sexuate difference is possible

for the two sexes by means of “the cultivation of desiring exchange”—a claim directly

countering Badiou's core assertion that love is the sole field in which an “indefinable element”

common to the two sexes assures their sharing a single humanity. As such, when set in the

context of a comparison with Irigaray, Badiou's theses on love, desire and sexual difference are

not only brought into clearer focus by way of “polemical” contrast but are, as it were, confronted

with the systematic counterproposition of alternative conceptual constellations constitutive of

a philosophy espousing a sexuately-specific relation to the universal. For this reason, might it

not, then, be possible that comparing Badiou and Irigaray ultimately entails something of the

order of a demonstration of thought's sexuation?

Badiou and Irigaray

Of diametrical oppositions and complementary convictions

Let us provisionally make abstraction of the ramifications of Badiou's inflexion in 2011

and consider first of all the terms in which the opposition of Badiou's and Irigaray's concepts in

respect of sexual difference has, in fact, become somewhat of a commonplace amongst

commentators of Badiou, who overwhelmingly discern in Irigaray's claims for a recognition of

difference the perfect foil to Badiou’s affirmation of a “transparticular” universality. The

impetus for this was undoubtedly given by Peter Hallward, one of Badiou's most astute

interlocutors, who, in both the preface to his translation of Badiou's Ethics and the chapter of

his authoritative Badiou: A Subject to Truth dealing with love and sexual difference, sets down
 10

a point-by-point comparison of the “diametrically opposed” tenets of the two protagonists. As

regards the points of particular pertinence here, Badiou is said, on the one hand, to assign “the

truth of sexual difference to an exclusively subjective realm of thought,” while “Irigaray

anchors it in an ultimately specified physical frame of reference, the 'body as primary home'”;

and, on the other, to stress “the absence and impossibility of a sexual relationship,” whereas

“Irigaray specifies a vague notion of 'relation' as an essentially feminine disposition and the

'natural' starting point for an eventual reconciliation of the sexes, as guided by woman's

primordial experience of maternity” (Hallward 2003, 189-190). That said, the overarching

opposition in which Badiou and Irigaray are taken up, according to Hallward, is that between

philosophy and antiphilosophy; the latter being characterized by a distrust of both concepts and

philosophy's pretensions to truth and system, and the affirmation of a kind of transcendent,

ineffable meaning, lying beyond the logical structures to which cognitive propositions are

confined. Badiou has himself concurred with the qualification of Irigaray as an antiphilosopher,

stipulating her to be “even the anti-philosopher par excellence,” in that she operates “a violent

determination of philosophy on the basis of the category of 'woman.'”4 Irigaray would, in other

words, make of “woman”—who, in the terms of Logics of Worlds, thus “over-exists” (2009

[2006], 532)—a sort of super-cognitive category on the basis of which philosophy, if it is not

to be indicted as a source of illusion and will-to-mastery, must admit a feminine specificity in

the realm of symbolic initiatives or truths. Such a requisite is, as we know, for Badiou prior to

2011, complete anathema: given that no truth—no universal—can be premised upon the

existing state of things, any position seeking to promote a particularism, such as sexuate

identity, as the bearer of innovation in the fields of art, science, love, or politics is quite simply

doomed to insignificance. Claims for a “philosophy in the feminine”, much less a feminist

philosophy, are equally, on these terms, without any consequence whatsoever, as would again

be—in all logic, at least—Irigaray's postulation that the cultivation of sexual difference is the
 11

only path of a true accomplishment of humanity, qua humanity. There is, for Badiou (pre-

inflexion at least): “no possible universal sublation of particularity” (2004 [2000]).

This profusion of diametrical oppositions should not, however, obnubilate a cardinal

point of intersection or, as it were, “fixed star” as regards the two thinkers’ work—one that sets

them, as already stated, in joint opposition to the majoritarian stance in both contemporary

French philosophies of “the feminine” and contemporary gender studies. For Badiou and

Irigaray alike, sexual difference is a matter of an irreducible disjunction, a “constitutive Two”:

“there are two sexes, not one, not three, or an infinite number,” in Badiou’s words (2008 [1992],

226); “across the whole world, there are, there are only, men and women,” in Irigaray's (1996

[1990], 47). Attempts to deconstruct the man/woman polarity in favour of a multiplicity of sexes

and/or gender indistinction are, as a result, dismissed by both Badiou and Irigaray as a form of

postmodernist sophistry, fully consonant with the Capitalist ideology of a generalized

equivalence of values. Badiou makes this particularly clear in Logics of Worlds when he

denounces “the postmodernist paradigm” of a “quasi-continuous multiple of gender

constructions” as doing nothing “but uphold, in the element of sex, the founding axiom of

democratic materialism: there are only bodies and language, there is no truth” (2009 [2006],

421). Irigaray, for her part, queries whether at stake in the “dream of the dissolution of material,

corporal, and social identity” is nothing but money, qualifying those who seek to efface sexual

difference “by resorting to monosexuality, to the unisex, or to what is called [gender]

identification” as “rich” or “naïve” (1996 [1990], 61-62). For both, such a dream or fantasy of

a proliferation of genders is illusory as much in substance as intent. This “new opium of the

people,” as Irigaray puts it, “annihilates the other in the illusion of a reduction to identity,

equality, and sameness” that ultimately leads to “a whole set of delusions” (Ibid. 61-62).

Echoing this insistence on a reductive sameness and monosexuality, intrinsically illusion-

bound, Badiou decries the multiple gender positions promulgated by “Anglo-American gender
 12

studies” as “infinitely more coded and monotonous” than its proponents suppose. The latter’s

“world of sex” is, he states, “an entirely atonic world” (Badiou 2009 [2006], 421)—one in which

individuals remain enclosed in their particularism or singularity, without there being the

conditions, or the choice, of an experience of difference. That, for Badiou, such an experience

entails (both produces and is predicated upon) the re-marking of sexual duality in a manner

independent of biological sex, whereas Irigaray conceives of sexual difference as at once

“biological, morphological, and relational,” in no way prevents them from fundamentally

concurring—beyond their divergences and respective conceptual lexicons—that the disjunction

between woman and man is “the ultimate anchorage of real alterity” (Irigaray 1996 [1990], 62),

“the support” that makes possible a “subjective experience of absolute difference” (Badiou 2004

[2000], §3). Indeed, one might well say of Irigaray and Badiou what Badiou once said of

Deleuze and himself by way of underlining that their “direct opposition” was crucially framed

by a shared philosophical conviction (viz. the immanence of the multiple): namely, within the

landscape of contemporary thought, Irigaray and Badiou’s joint conviction of an irreducibly

dyadic disjunction of the sexes makes of them “a sort of paradoxical tandem” (Badiou 2000

[1997], 4).

As framed by this shared postulate of radical duality, Badiou’s and Irigaray’s respective

conceptions of sexual difference, while certainly divergent, prove to be more complex, more

convoluted and, in certain respects, paradoxically more complementary—in their very

opposition—than commentators have hitherto countenanced. In order to elaborate this claim,

and thereby explore the consequences for the two thinkers' conception of a sexuation of the

universal, we must first review the broad lines of what each of the two understands by sexual

difference, beginning with the question of the relation that this would, or would not, hold to

biology.
 13

Irigaray's analytics of sexual difference and the desiring relation between the sexes

Accusations of biologism have, of course, been directed at Irigaray’s work from its

inception, with Hallward’s claim that she anchors sexual difference in “the body as primary

home” situated, thereby, in a long-established current of critical commentary. Yet, while

certainly upholding sexual difference as “an immediate natural given” and “a real and

irreducible component of the universal” (1996 [1990], 47), Irigaray has unfailingly stipulated

that this is in no way a matter of simple biological or natural destiny (Irigaray 2002 [1999], 128-

129). Situating sexual difference, rather, at the juncture of nature and culture, qua the threefold

articulation of biological, morphological, and relational components, Irigaray specifies the

defining features or “irreducible givens” (Ibid.129) of sexuation that follow from this tripartite

determination to be equally three in number. First, the relation to the mother as engenderer or

the first other: given that it is not the same to be born from someone of the same sex as from

someone of a sex that is different, there ensue distinct relational identities for women and men.

Second, the possibility of giving life: women are able to engender like the mother, with their

bodies being able to nourish others directly, men are not. More broadly, procreation takes place

within the body for women, and outside the body for men. Third, the relation of corporeal

morphology and the sexual act: the fact that women have an internal sexual organ and, in this

sense, “make love within themselves,” while men have an external sexual organ and “make

love outside of themselves,” entails that they relate in different ways to the other and to the self

(Irigaray 2004, x; 2008, 3, 102-104, 107-108). Taken as a whole, the complex configuration of

biological, morphological and relational components that informs all these features corresponds

to a radically different construction of subjectivity for the two sexes. Subjectivity being neither

universal nor neutral, but sexuately specific, “man and woman are culturally different” and “do

not live in the same world” (Irigaray 2002 [1999], 129; 2008, 70).
 14

That non-recognition of this sexuate specificity has yielded a “humanity” that is the

reflection of male subjectivity alone is, of course, the tenet which underpins Irigaray's entire

project, broadly designatable as a dialecticized and psychoanalytically-informed existential

analytics in terms of which the question for our era is that of recognizing the sexuate other.

Constitutively founded on the exclusion or, more strictly, the foreclusion, of the maternal-

feminine, our entire culture—philosophy and symbolic thought, along with all other forms of

“existential dwelling,” language per se included—has been cast in masculine terms (albeit these

assert themselves as “universal norm”) and serves, as such, as a substitute of sorts for the

relation with the mother, qua “first dwelling.” Indeed, this non-recognition of the other—

“beginning with woman in the mother”—not only leads to woman’s body, subjectivity, and

sexuality being conceptualized or calibrated in terms isomorphic to the male sexual imaginary

but it equally subtends, for Irigaray, our tradition’s dissociation of desire and love, with its

attendant devalorization of the sexual act as degrading or animalistic and the projection of

spiritual transcendence onto “a higher sphere.” Were desire and love to be cultivated, on the

contrary, as a relation between two differently sexuated identities whose distinct subjectivities

or self-affections are respected, not only would man be able to “leave a horizon built without a

real differing from the mother's world” but the creation of “a shared world” would bring about

the realization of humanity as such (Irigaray 2010, 270; 2008, 75).

Insofar, then, as the desiring relation between the two sexes is—if properly cultivated—

nothing less, for Irigaray, than the path to a new form of human existence, we might do well to

return here to Hallward’s claim that this possibility derives for Irigaray (in difference to

Badiou’s strict adherence to the Lacanian maxim: there is no sexual relation) from the “‘natural’

starting point” of an “essentially feminine disposition” towards relationality, as “guided by

woman's primordial experience of maternity.” Both Hallward’s (rather oxymoronic) assertion

that “Irigaray specifies a vague notion of relation” and the accumulation of terms such as
 15

“natural,” “essential,” and “primordial” render it difficult to read his argument as other than an

accusation of biological reductionism: woman, Hallward’s Irigaray would seem to say, has an

innate disposition to establishing relations with others because of the female body’s capacity to

give birth and/or something akin to a maternal instinct. Such a reading accords, moreover, with

Hallward's immediately preceding claim that Irigaray anchors the truth of sexual difference in

the body (Hallward 2003, 189). The fundamental problem with both sets of claims—biology as

the bedrock of Irigaray's concept of sexual difference as well as the natural starting point for

the reconciliation she advocates between the sexes—is that they disregard the psychoanalytical

underpinning of Irigaray's notion of relation: a notion that, were this psychoanalytic component

recalled along with the literally hundreds of pages Irigaray devotes to the modalities of sexuated

relational identities, might well appear less “vague,” or at least less reducible to a simple

biological given. Put succinctly, that which is in question in claims by Irigaray such as “the

feminine world is, by birth, more relational than that of the boy” (2010, 269; my emphasis) is

not an innate disposition but a particular modality of the primary relationship to the mother.

The first object of love for both the boy and the girl, the mother is also, for the latter, the first

object of identification—a fact that helps structure, according to Irigaray, the girl’s relations to

others. Stressing that this identification comports at the same time a necessary differentiation—

the similarity of the girl’s and mother’s “bodies and psyches” protects them “from merging into

a unique entity”—, Irigaray states that this leads to women's being “familiar with being two. A

girl does not form a dyad with the mother but a real duality” (Ibid. 268). That said, while the

relationship to the other is certainly, for Irigaray, a quasi-natural given of feminine subjectivity

by dint of the girl’s being born to a person of the same sex, she no less maintains that

“safeguarding the two of the intersubjective relation” is the task, or existential trajectory,

women have to actively assume if they are to secure an autonomous sexuate identity or self-

affection (Irigaray 2002 [1999], 87; my emphasis). Far from being a natural immediacy, the
 16

relation between the sexes is, then, a matter of elaboration or of construction strictly inseparable

from a process of becoming on the part of women no less than of men (Irigaray 1996 [1990],

107). Suffice it to add that the cultivation of such a relationship is in no way contingent, as

Hallward would have it, on woman’s purportedly “primordial experience of maternity.” To the

contrary, Irigaray consistently differentiates both reproduction and parenting from the creation

of an authentic intersubjectivity between the sexes: indeed, she decisively concurs here with

Badiou by relegating reproduction to the level of instinct or “the more or less animal” (Irigaray

2002 [1999], 114-115). For there to be the Two of sexual difference, a fecundity other than that

of procreation, an altogether different poesis, is needed: namely, a carnal sharing capable of

going beyond a so-called natural state ignoring all difference and all transcendence (Irigaray

1993 [1984], 5; 2002 [1999], 115).

Badiou’s axiomatics of love and sexual difference

Let us turn now to Badiou’s conception of sexual difference, setting out here again from

the question of the place it reserves to biology. Prima facie, the latter seems an issue that can

quickly be dispensed with: insofar as, for Badiou, the truth of sexual difference necessarily

displays a universalism of content and address, biology is immediately disqualified from

furnishing a properly differentiating criterion by which sexuate positions can be distributed

since, taking as its object “the simple facticity of the human animal,” this science fails to cross

through the configuration of the infinite diversity of what is given to attain the truth of that

presented in an existing situation. While, then, two sexuated positions can be said to be given

in the field of appearance, this is, for Badiou, something that can only be established

retrospectively within the process of love, qua the sole universal ground on which sexual

difference can be thought. Badiou's designating these two positions “man” and “woman” is, as

such, a purely nominalist gesture, independent of any empirical, social or biological

 17

distribution: as defined strictly internally within the amorous process, they “could just as well

be called something else” (Badiou & Tarby 2013 [2010], 63).

The question of the relation that the sexuate positions hold to biology is not, however,

completely evacuated within Badiou’s thinking on sexual difference, either manifestly or

covertly. “All that can be said”—Badiou was to state in 2010—“is that the masculine position

is fairly often occupied by men”; a fact that “is not, however, of much interest to philosophers,”

being rather the fare of sociologists (Ibid. 62). That there are, however, two sexes, and not one,

three, four or—pace Anne Fausto-Sterling—five or more, is (as seen) an indisputable given for

Badiou, and various passages of “What is Love?” indicate that this sexuate duality is premised,

in the last analysis, on a corporeal differentiation. The Two of the lovers must, Badiou

maintains, be marked materially, with the “differential sexuate marking” of bodies furnishing

the material inscription that is necessary to the process of love if it is to produce the truth of

what it is to be Two and not One (2008 [1992], 190). Biology may well, then, not furnish a

criterion by which the sexuate positions can be distributed universally, but biological bodies, as

distinguished by the “differential trait” that they bear, would seem to correspond—“fairly often”

at least—to the nominal positions love attributes retrospectively to the individuals taken up in

its process. The position “woman” would, in short, be occupied by and large by women, the

position “man” by and large by men. What this correspondence shows up, in fact, is the all-in-

all resolutely dialectical manner in which love, on Badiou’s understanding, subsumes and re-

marks a given sexed or sexuate difference that would otherwise remain insignificant or non-

attestable—which, in Badiou’s vocabulary, is equally to say “in-existent.” This is the reason

Badiou stipulates that nothing on the level of sexed being has any pertinence for the definition

of categories of sexual difference. Bodies outside of love are sexually neutral, as it were,

completely enclosed in their singular narcissistic sphere or “brute animal sexuality.” “It is only
 18

in love that bodies serve to mark the Two.” Love is “the place where it is set down that there

are two sexuated bodies and not only one” (Ibid. 191; trans. modified).

What criteria serve, then, to define sexual difference as this is attested to within the

process of love? As set out in the series of axiomatic definitions Badiou furnishes in “What is

Love?,” woman and man are distinguished in terms of how they function in love, the knowledge

they hold in respect of love, and their relation to humanity, understood as the space of thought

comprised by the four truth procedures but which could also be called “the Symbolic.” 1)

Woman is she (or he) who is concerned with ensuring that love is ongoing and re-affirmed; man

is he (or she) who considers that, once named, love no longer needs to be proved. 2) Woman

professes the Two to endure throughout life’s vicissitudes, such that what “she” knows of love

is ontological in scope, being focused on the existence of the Two, or being as such; man focuses

on the split within the Two that re-marks the void of the disjunction, such that “his” is an

essentially logical knowledge, concerned with the numerical change between One and Two. 3)

Woman requires love to exist for the symbolic configuration of truth procedures to hold and to

have value; man views each type of truth procedure to be in itself a gauge of humanity, such

that each is a metaphor for the others (Ibid. 192-197).

Badiou himself acknowledges these definitions to intersect with “both crass and précieux

clichés” concerning the difference between the sexes: man ostensibly does nothing for and in

the name of love, woman is the being-for-love; man is silent and violent, woman is garrulous

and makes demands; man is always viewed by the woman as in the process of leaving or going

at some time to leave (Ibid. 193, 195; Badiou & Tarby 2013 [2010], 62). Such gender

stereotypes are, he states, the empirical material that love works through in order to establish

the truth of the sexual disjunction. Not that gender is an expression of the disjunction per se; it

is but an “obscure mediation” or “mediating display” (Badiou 2008 [1992], 186). Yet this

“staging of sexual roles” within a dyadic gender system has the merit, Badiou specifies, of
 19

rendering sexual disjunction visible as a “law” of the situation—a precision that finds an echo

in Logics of Worlds when Badiou denounces the “Anglo-American gender studies” that would

replace the woman/man polarity with an infinite gradation of constructions of gender. “What is

at stake is simply the fact that sexual duality, making the multiple appear before the Two of a

choice, authorizes that amorous truths be accorded the treatment of some points” (2009 [2006],

421). Which is to say, far better even a mediation by “crass clichés” of the Two of sexual

difference than a sexual indifferentiation that, by obnubliating the disjunction, allows this to

operate all the more forcefully such that individuals are simply abandoned to a solipsistic and,

all in all, purely animal, sexual regime. In this sense, dyadic gender roles’ rendering sexual

disjunction visible aids love not only to show that this disjunction is precisely a law of the

situation but, more crucially yet, that it is nothing more than this—namely, not a substantial

division in being itself.

The intersection of Badiou's axiomatic definitions of sexual difference with social

stereotypes singularly poses, though, a problem of circularity. It is clear that, for Badiou, his

definitions concur with gender clichés because the latter would themselves concur (however

“obscurely”) with what has been revealed of the truth of sexual disjunction by amorous

relationships throughout history—especially as portrayed in literature (2008 [1992], 181;

Badiou & Tarby 2013 [2010], 62). But, this being the case, the intertwining of gender

stereotypes and Badiou’s definitions of the sexual disjunction would suggest, in the final

analysis, that the “real” of sexual difference resides in (axiomatically consecrated) socio-

historically determined, subjective positions alone. What, then, of the universality Badiou

claims for the truths revealed by love—would this prove to be simply synonymous with a

consistent determination of the form taken by sexed relations in different socio-historical

configurations? Queries such as this, putting into doubt love's universality, are, that said,

expressly dismissed in Logics of Worlds, where Badiou again adduces the “proof” provided by
 20

literature: Ancient Greek and Roman, but also medieval Japanese, authors—from Sappho to

Lady Murasaki—all provide ample indication, he states, that “love is an experience of truth and

as such is always identifiable whatever the historical context may be” (2009 [2006], 28). But

even so, doesn’t such a claim for love’s production of a universal truth pertaining to the sexes

then squarely come up against the objection (as would follow from Irigaray's perspective) that

all such socially consecrated sexual roles identifiable throughout history ultimately reflect the

imaginary of one sexuate position alone: the masculine? Or, put another way, wouldn’t the truth

of sexual difference produced by working through the empirical material comprised of sexual

clichés turn out to be, qua an assertion emanating from the point of view of man alone, a “truth”

still firmly held within the sexual disjunction?

It is all the more appropriate to return at this juncture to Badiou’s “differend” with Lacan

since not only does this constitute the very core of his axiomatics of love and sexual difference

but Badiou precisely disqualifies Lacan's “truth claims” in respect to sexual difference on the

same grounds as those just put forward: namely, that these claims proceed from one sexuate

position alone and therefore fall short of their pretention to universality. Crucially moreover,

Badiou’s objections to Lacan apply—on one particular point, at least—no less to Irigaray. That

this particular point of critical extension concerns feminine jouissance and the relation it holds

to the universal will, as we shall see, prove to be the veritable crux of Badiou’s and Irigaray’s

confrontation on the question of sexual difference and the sexual relationship.

Badiou's objections to Lacan: feminine jouissance and the universal

Badiou deems it a fundamental error on Lacan’s part to define sexual difference in terms

of the phallic function, understood as having a universal application insofar as it distributes all

speaking beings on either side of a unary trait: having or being the phallus. Relegating this

function, for his part, to the strict register of desire or jouissance alone—“jouissance, as sexual,
 21

is phallic, which is to say that it does not relate to the Other [to a sex as Other] as such” (Lacan

1998 [1975], 102)—, Badiou stipulates, as already indicated, that sexual difference does not,

strictly speaking, exist on this level. Women and men alike, in the pure disjunction of their

respective experience, are wholly subject to the intrinsic finitude accruing to desire and its

economy of the object: there is, in other words, no specifically feminine jouissance opening

onto the infinite that women would have access to by virtue of being “not-all” under the phallic

order. Indeed for Badiou, as we know, Lacan’s very claims for such a jouissance reveal his

formulae of sexuation to be flawed from the start: they underline that the phallic function—

which does effectively hold universally, or “wholly” in respect of the masculine position alone,

according to Lacan—is always-already situated within the disjunction of the sexes and is, as

such, unsuitable as a support for the universal. Only from the standpoint of the masculine

position could one even conceive of an infinite, inaccessible, feminine jouissance according to

Badiou, for whom Lacan’s formulae thereby uphold a “segregative thesis of sexual difference”

(Badiou 2003 [1999], 47). If the disjunction of the sexes is presumed to be such that there is no

element whatsoever in common to the two, and accordingly no knowledge whatsoever on the

side of one sex of the space occupied by the other, then it follows, Badiou argues, that the

masculine position is fantasmatically predisposed to imagining a mysterious and potentially

infinite dilation of the feminine.

While this begs the question of what mechanisms might, then, underlie (some) women’s

own claims of a pantheistic, infinite enjoyment—a question Badiou never raises, unless his

reference to women’s “silently making an axiomatic decision” of this type is to be taken

seriously (2008 [1992], 216-217, 221)—, the overarching disqualification of feminine

jouissance is clear: for Badiou, woman's “infinitude” is both the necessary correlate of any

stance supposing a complete segregation of the sexes and sufficient proof in itself that such a

stance errs in its conception of the sexual disjunction (2003 [1999], 50). There has, Badiou
 22

stipulates, to be at least one term with which both sexuate positions entertain a relation, which

is, of course, what love brings into play: the indefinable “something” at the basis of a love that,

by showing the sexuate positions’ disjunction not to be a substantial, or ontological, one,

establishes men and women as belonging to a single humanity.

“Love’s truth” is then, for Badiou, that a common humanity is shared by the two sexes.

Yet, it must be recalled that the latter relate differentially to this shared symbolic: namely, man

views the symbolic sphere as a composite of the different truth procedures, with each type of

truth able to stand for all the others, whereas woman privileges love as the truth procedure that

would knot all the others together and without which the symbolic sphere as a whole simply

does not exist. Defining woman therefore as the position that upholds love as the guarantee of

a universality to humanity—as what ensures that this is indeed shared—Badiou’s axiomatics

of love end up assigning “the universal quantifier” to the feminine position and not, pace

Lacan’s formulae premised upon the universality of the phallic function, to man (Badiou 2008

[1992], 198). Would, though, Badiou not thereby commit (once again?) the same error he

detects in Lacan: namely, that of treating the problem of sexual difference from within the

sexual disjunction itself? Whatever his claims that the “humanity function,” assured by the

common term introduced by love, is of transparticular scope and relative to men and women

equally, it nonetheless remains the case that woman's being defined as singularly upholding

love as a guarantee of universality is a definition already situated within the disjunction of the

sexes as determined on the universal ground of love—which is to say that woman is, as it were,

“all-under” the universal sway of love, whereas man, not according love such universalizing

scope, might be said the sexuate position for which love is “not-all.” Not only, then, does the

humanity function have strict universality relative to the feminine position alone but a “feminine

exceptionality” still haunts Badiou’s revision of Lacan: an exceptionality displaced from the

field of jouissance to that of love.

 23

A chiasmatic masculine-feminine take on philosophy?

From the perspective of this comparison of Irigaray’s and Badiou’s theses on sexual

difference and the sexual relation, the latter's situating a feminine singularity in relation to love

rather than desire is not a mere point of localized disagreement. For the critical point of

divergence punctuating this paradoxical tandem’s shared conviction of an irreducibly dyadic

sexual disjunction is thereby revealed as far less the question of biology, qua an ultimate

anchorage or not, than the configuration of love and desire-jouissance arrayed within each of

the two philosophers’ thought. When viewed in this light, Badiou’s and Irigaray’s diametrical

oppositions take on, in fact, a greater systematicity, with each of their respective positions

proving not simply unacceptable in terms of the other’s but always already accounted for and

subject, as such, to a pre-determined disqualification predicated on the series of consequences

it is presumed to entail. So, for example, Irigaray’s maintaining there to be an infinite feminine

jouissance, as irreducible to a dichotomy between love and desire as it is to the “economy of

the object” (1993 [1984], 63), obviously condemns her conception of sexual difference, from

Badiou’s perspective, as flawed in the same way as Lacan’s on the basis of its implication of a

complete segregation of the sexes. Her core tenet that “man and woman do not live in the same

world” (2008, 70) becomes, as such, an assertion of the impossibility of a single, or shared,

humanity—despite Irigaray's own proclamations to the contrary. Conversely, Badiou’s

trenchant distinction between love and desire, with carnal exchange relegated to a resolutely

animal realm of being, commits the error, from Irigaray’s point of view, of “forgetting the

function of sexuality as a relationship-to” (Irigaray 2001 [1994], 22)—the fact, in other words,

that desiring exchange is an “awakening to intersubjectivity”: a means of acceding to the other

qua other, of respecting her or him as an incarnate subject (Ibid. 25 & 22). Indeed, Badiou

proves to be an exemplary representative of what Irigaray characterizes as “male philosophers’

 24

conception of carnal love.” Casting the corporeal as pure facticity, the sexual act (outside of

love) as the simple quest of solipsistic, and all in all animal, pleasure, Badiou’s philosophy

would qualify, alongside the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas (amongst others),

as an expression of “masculine Being and speaking” (Ibid. 17), in terms of which love’s

differentiation from desire and the silencing of feminine jouissance ensure the eschewal (or

transcendence) of the sensible deemed requisite to attain the realm of the intelligible or “a higher

sphere” of subjectivity. Sensible/intelligible, body/mind, facticity/truth, desire/love,

animal/human: all these canonical dichotomies are indeed vigorously mobilized in Badiou’s

metaphysics, with this discursive logic attesting in itself, for Irigaray, to the non-recognition of

sexual difference through its rendering impossible “‘self-representation’ for the feminine”

(Irigaray 1985 [1977], 161).

Irigaray's conception of sexuate specificity underlies, of course, her counterposing “the

feminine character” of her account of desiring relations and sexual difference to male

philosophers' comprehension of carnal love (Irigaray 2001 [1994], 17; our emphasis). Critically,

however, the “new phenomenology of the caress” that she duly elaborates in consonance with

feminine desire and intention—and which accords, thereby, “a greater attention to

intersubjectivity” than does the masculine tradition—no less corresponds to that which Badiou

qualifies, in his turn, as the feminine position vis-à-vis the symbolic qua “humanity.” Irigaray's

insistence on “the relationship between two” pre-eminently resonates, for instance, with the

definition Badiou gives of “woman” as she (or he) who “focuses on the existence of the Two,

or being as such,” even if Badiou restricts this focus to the field of love. Yet more significantly

again, her declaring the cultivation of desire(-love) between the sexes to be the sole means of

accomplishing humanity strongly accords, mutatis mutandis, with Badiou’s definition of the

feminine position as that for which the universality of truths—qua the configuration of symbolic

procedures within which human animals accede to their humanity—would be unassured or

 25

without value were love not to exist. Moreover, just as woman is, for Badiou, “the guardian” of

love in its status as the protocol guaranteeing a universality for humanity, so too for Irigaray—

for whom this guarantee of universality is given through desire—it is women who pre-

eminently “safeguard” the desiring exchange between Two. This being the case, might one not

then conclude that, just as Badiou proves to be an exemplary representative, from Irigaray's

perspective, of a male philosopher’s conception of carnal love and sexual difference, so too,

were Badiou to accredit the notion of a philosophy in the feminine, Irigaray’s theses on sexuate

difference and the sexual relation seem amply to correspond to just what such a philosophy

could, or should, within a Badiouian framework, espouse?

Of course, such a “conclusion”—with its claims for what we might term a chiasmatic

masculine-feminine take on philosophy—would have been strictly inconceivable prior to

Badiou's inflexion on the tenet of truths' trans-positionality. For even though Badiou's texts

through the '90s define woman by the particularity of making truth, or universality, dependent

upon the operation of love—ostensibly marking, thereby, a sexuate specificity within, or with

respect to, the universal that borders on a sexuation of thought itself—, Badiou was to firmly

deny in the texts proffering this definition any possibility of truths being sexuated. Indeed, the

operation of love was stipulated, let us recall, to “deal with” this very paradox: namely, sexual

disjunction is radical, yet truth is subtracted from every positional disjunction (Badiou 2008

[1992], 186)—which points, of course, to love’s role of attesting to a single humanity despite

the two sexes living, all in all, in “different worlds” given the radically non-transitive nature of

their respective experience. As such, any attempt at situating Irigaray’s work as exemplary of

that which, from Badiou’s own perspective, a “female philosopher” would pronounce

indubitably constitutes, with respect to the position he defends from the 1980s to the mid/late

2000s, a contradictio in terminis in more ways than one.

 26

In 2010 Badiou was to implicitly acknowledge, however, that attributing the feminine

position to be “singularly charged with the relation of love to humanity” constitutes, by virtue

of its testifying to a sexuately-differentiated relation to the universal, something of an aporia in

his work. When stipulating, in Philosophy and the Event, the points of his philosophy he is to

focus on in The Immanence of Truths, Badiou refers, in fact, to the problem of “the disruption

of a truth's unity” that the coexistence of a feminine position and a masculine position poses at

the core of his theorization of love. Given that it is impossible to admit that a “duality internal”

to the experience of incorporation disrupts the unity of the subject, one has to account, he states,

for “how individual difference function[s] within the protocol of truth” without this

difference—or indeed, in the case of love, “complete separation”—calling into cause universal

applicability (Badiou & Tarby 2013 [2010], 117-118).

Whatever the resolution The Immanence of Truths proposes to this problem, this

“disruption of love's unity”—wrought most notably by the two sexes' differential relation to the

humanity function—is indubitably a core reason for Badiou's inflexion of his tenet of truths'

trans-positionality in 2011. And with his proclamation of the inevitability of a sexuation of

symbolic and philosophical thought, Badiou's relation to Irigaray in its turn takes on, as it were,

a quite different topology, whereby their diametrical oppositions, and even their critical

divergence on the point of love/desire, can be seen to display an intricately convoluted,

differentially staggered and, all in all, paradoxical complementarity. Indeed, once their joint

conviction of an irreducibly dyadic disjunction becomes that of a sexuately-differentiated

relation to the universal, Badiou’s and Irigaray’s respective conceptions can effectively—to

reprise here the conclusion tentatively put forward above—be seen to constitute, from their own

perspective, a chiasmatic masculine-feminine take on the philosophy of sexual difference.

A doubt persists, nonetheless, as to Badiou's accrediting—even post-inflexion—the

notion of a specifically “feminine” philosophy: for, although Badiou, in 2011, does indeed set
 27

down, among the questions on the sexuation of truths requisite to pursue today, those of “what

is a woman philosopher?” and “what becomes of philosophy once the word 'woman' resounds

there according to the creative equality of symbols?” (2011, 16), it is clear that the relation of

women to philosophy (the locus, let us recall, of the articulation of universalities) is of a more

problematic nature for him than is their engagement in the four truth procedures. In order to

fully conclude, then, both our comparison of Badiou and Irigaray and, more overarchingly, our

“unravelling” of the conceptual complications of Badiou's intertwinements of sexuation, love

and truths, let us follow Badiou's line of inquiry and ask—with a parting nod, as it were, to

Irigaray—what (for Badiou) might well be women's relation to philosophy?

Philosophy in the feminine?

In a 2013 interview touching on the points raised in “Figures of Femininity,” Badiou

queries whether the lack of women in philosophy—a lack which he has, moreover, stated to be

total: i.e., not a single woman philosopher in the whole history of Western thought—can

possibly be explained simply by women's longstanding situation of ideologically-proclaimed

inferiority or whether, rather, women's specific way of relating to the universal might not render

them less compatible than men, as it were, with philosophical endeavour (Badiou and Adler

2013). Now, even were this “incompatibility” between women and philosophy to be construed

as adducing less a feminine inaptitude for systematic conceptual construction than philosophy's

indebtedness to a (masculine) logic of the One—as certain remarks in Badiou's 2011 paper

could suggest5—, this is still a statement on Badiou's behalf that somewhat contradicts the

“complicity” his thought otherwise insinuates between the feminine position as defined in the

field of love and philosophy as establishing the compossibility of truths. Indeed, just as

philosophy has the task, within Badiou's system, of knotting the four truth procedures together,

so too woman is charged with the same task by means of the specific operation of love. Further,
 28

like women—distinguished, within Badiou's axiomatics of sexual difference, by their

ontological focus on “the existence of the Two, or being as such”—, philosophy accredits love

with “taking being in its totality” or, in other terms, the power of passing from the sensible to

something of the order of the Idea (Badiou and Tarby 2013, 52 & 64). Why, then, should women

be incompatible with a discipline that seeks in so “feminine” a manner to guarantee a

universality for humanity?

The answer to this question might arguably be found by turning to Badiou's remarks on

women's singular expertise in the art of the novel—an expertise notably underlined in "What is

Love?" but most elaborately detailed in Rhapsody for the Theatre. Badiou maintains in the latter

text that the reason why the "novel is a women's affair" is because the novel itself, in its very

compactness and self-sufficiency, is "masculine." The same “dialectic” characterizes theatre,

moreover, but in reverse: theatre, being “of the order of the not-all,” is essentially feminine,

which is why—as shown, for Badiou, by the fact that playwrights are almost exclusively men—

it is “no less essentially a men's affair” (Badiou 2013, 213). Admittedly, given that this

“dialectic of sexuate specificity” is heavily indebted to Lacan's formulae of sexuation (which

Badiou elsewhere, of course, subjects to revision), one should view Badiou's qualifying the

novel and theatre as, respectively, masculine and feminine with circumspection. These remarks

do suggest, though, that Badiou considers philosophy—somewhat in spite of its being a

discipline that aims, like the novel, at setting up something of the order of a “compact and self-

sufficient whole”—as essentially feminine, and that it is for this reason, then, that philosophy

shows itself, as Badiou's “there has not been a single woman philosopher” underlines, to be

strictly a “men's affair”. That said, a more nuanced extrapolation may equally be made here,

one that is more consistent, furthermore, both with Badiou's qualifying philosophy as

“masculine” in a text co-signed with Barbara Cassin (Badiou and Cassin 2010, 9) and with what

several commentators have characterized as the “masculinist” tonality of his conceptualization

 29

of truths (viz. “post-evental forcing,” the “rigour of the subtractive,” the “hard novelty of the

matheme,” etcetera).6 For it is perhaps not strictly philosophy per se that Badiou would view as

feminine but, rather, that which philosophy, as a singular locus of thinking, has “the duty to

seize” (1999, 126): the (indiscernible, indeterminate) generic truth of the four conditions. This

is, after all, one possible determination of Badiou's expressly unexplicated choice, in Being and

Event, to designate the “generic multiple” by the symbol ♀—the “woman's symbol” (1998,

356).

The conclusion to which our exegesis, or unravelling, of Badiou's inflexion on the

“inevitable” sexuation of symbolic thought and the complexities of his intertwinements of love,

woman and the universal has led us, then, is one with which the French contemporary

philosophers of the feminine, and Irigaray above all, could but concur: there is, and always has

been, a sexuation already operative in Badiou's thought.

Louise Burchill

Presented at the Institut français d'Athènes (French Institute in Athens) on 27 January 2011,
Badiou's paper "Figures de la féminité dans le monde contemporain" remains both
unpublished and untranslated.

3
It should be noted, though, that in “The Adventure of French Philosophy” Badiou explicitly
acknowledges only Deleuze and Derrida as fellow protagonists in the sequence of “contemporary French
philosophy” he situates between Sartre's Being and Nothingness and the last works of Deleuze or,
indeed, his own corpus. (Badiou 2012, lii).
4
Personal communication, December 2011.
5
In “Figures of Femininity in the Contemporary World,” Badiou characterizes, in fact, symbolic thought
as having been governed throughout the Western tradition by the “One of masculine logic”—thus
marking another point of agreement with Irigaray's analyses. For further discussion of Badiou's remarks
 30

in this regard—including his defining sexuation in terms of a “formalism dialectizing the One and the
Two”: see: Burchill 2017.
6
We are referring here specifically to Peter Hallward (2003, 19-20) and Adrian Johnston (2005) but
both of these authors refer to other commentators who have remarked this masculinist resonance. Thanks
to Eon Yorck on this point.
 31

REFERENCES

Badiou, Alain. 1999 [1989]. Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated by Norman Madarasz.
Albany: State University New York Press.

———. 2000 [1997]. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

———. 2003 [1999]. “The Scene of Two.” In Lacanian Ink 21, 42-55. Translated by Barbara
Fulks.

———. 2003 [1997]. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier.
Stanford: Stanford University.

———. 2004 [2000]. “Eight Theses on the Universal.” In Alain Badiou. Theoretical Writings.
Edited by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum.

———. 2004. “L'Aveu du philosophe.” In La Vocation philosophique, 133-157. Edited by

Marianne Alphant. Paris: Bayard Editions. English translation: “Philosophy as
Biography”, The Symptom, n° 9.
http://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html.

———. 2005 [1998]. Being and Event. Translated by Olivier Feltham. London: Continuum.

———. 2008 [1992]. Conditions. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum.

———. 2009 [2006]. Logics of Worlds. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum.

———. 2011. “Figures de la féminité dans le monde contemporain” [Figures of Femininity in

the Contemporary World]. Unpublished paper. (Page references are to the photocopy
provided by the author). A copy of Badiou's paper can be consulted at http://le-voyage-
a-geneve.over-blog.com/article-badiou-sur-les-fils-et-les-filles-70312383.html.

———. 2011 [1998]. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated by Louise Burchill.
London: Polity.

———. 2012. “The Adventure of French Philosophy.” In The Adventure of French Philosophy,
lii-lxiii. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso.

———. 2013 [1990]. Rhapsody for the Theatre. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso.

Badiou, Alain and Barbara Cassin. 2010. Il n'y pas de rapport sexuel. Paris: Fayard.

Badiou, Alain, and Fabien Tarby. 2013 [2010]. Philosophy and the Event. Translated by Louise
Burchill. London: Polity Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2013. Interview with Laure Adler. “Alain Badiou : Un parcours philosophique.”
Hors-champs. [Radio broadcast.] Produced by Laure Adler. France Culture: 14 Nov.
2013.

Burchill, Louise. 2017. “Woman's Adventures With/in the Universal.” In Badiou and his
 32

Interlocutors: Lectures, Interviews and Responses. Edited by Adam J. Bartlett.

Forthcoming, London: Bloomsbury.

Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Irigaray, Luce. 1985 [1977]. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca:
Cornell University.

———. 1993 [1984]. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian
C. Gill. New York: Cornell University.

———. 1996 [1990]. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Translated by
Alison Martin. New York: Routledge.

———. 2001 [1984]. “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and
Infinity, 'Phenomenology of Eros.'” In Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas,
119-144. Edited by Tina Chanter. University Park: Pennsylvania State University.

———. 2001 [1994]. To Be Two, Translated by Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-
Monoc. New York: Routledge.

———. 2002 [1999]. Between East and West: from Singularity to Community. Translated by
Stephen Pluháček. New York: Colombia.

———. 2004. Key Writings. London: Continuum.

———. 2008. Sharing the World. London: Continuum.

———. 2010. “The Return.” In Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and “the Greeks.” Edited
by Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis. Albany: State University New York.

Johnston, Adrian. 2005. “There is Truth, and then there are truths—or, Slavoj Žižek as a
Reader of Alain Badiou.” (Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies 2 (Spring 2005):
85–141.

Lacan, Jacques. 1998 [1975]. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York:
Norton.